Category: Fiction philosophy

How to write a hook: a lesson from film adaptations

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I love the 2005 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, but I hate the 2002 film adaptation of the same author’s The Time Machine. Here’s why – and here’s how it will help you write a hook and sell your book.

The War of the Worlds is modernized. The characters are warped. There’s more personal drama than there was in the book. And Tom Cruise is in it. So why do I still like it? Because the central point of the story remains intact: Martians invade Earth, no human weapon can stop them, but ultimately they are defeated by disease – which they long ago eliminated from their own planet.

In The Time Machine, they also changed characters and added personal drama, but that wasn’t what bothered me. Once the Time Traveler gets stranded in the future, the story should get back on track. But it doesn’t, because the two futuristic peoples, the Eloi and the Morlocks, are all wrong. The Eloi are smart, strong, tribal people, who fight the Morlocks as best they can. No doubt the screenwriters thought this was much more interesting than the weak, stupid people that the Eloi were in the book. They almost get the Morlocks right – frightening creatures who live underground, know a lot about machinery, and regularly kidnap Eloi – except that the Morlocks occasionally come out in daylight.

These changes collectively ruin Wells’ original concept. In the book, *SPOILER ALERT* the Time Traveler discovers the Eloi and the Morlocks are both evolved from humans. The Eloi were the upper class – rich and lazy. They paid the lower classes to work for them, and over generations gradually became stupid and weak. The Morlocks were the working class. They spent long hours cooped up in dark factories, growing allergic to the sunlight. But the work kept them sharp, and when other meat sources ran out, they began killing and eating the weak upper class. The masters became the food of the servants.

This was a fascinating and thought-provoking concept – a warning to both classes. Not so with the movie. The Time Traveler just ends up hooking up with the Eloi girl, who is a sort of Xena Warrior Princess, instead of the airheaded child she ought to be. The screenwriters cut the heart out of Wells’ story and replaced it with a cliché.

Is there a moral to this rant? Of course! It’s important to be able to recognize the core of the story, the plot twist or character detail that turns a dime-a-dozen time travel or alien invasion story into something unique and brilliant.

What unique feature is at the heart of your story? Can you describe it in one sentence? That sentence is called a “hook” – your number one tool for selling your book to literary agents, publishers and readers alike. Also known as an elevator pitch, the hook beomes your query letter – which is your foot in the door for getting published.

 Just think twice before you sell the movie rights.

More resources:

More about writing a hook

Hook examples

Writing is Mind Control

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these aren't the droids you're looking for

 

As you pass by an alley on your way to the drugstore, a woman with a face like a dried apricot approaches you from the shadows. Her eyes are squinted so tightly, you’re amazed that she can see at all, but she aims a knobby finger directly at you, and a voice like tires on gravel announces that you have magical powers. You can draw little black marks on paper, she says, and when other people see these marks, their minds are filled with new images, feelings, and ideas.

With years of training and practice, you can hone this natural ability into a powerful weapon—so potent, it could change the world.

Minus the creepy old woman, this scenario is 100% true. Language is a form of mind control. In a way, it’s easy; I can write “mouse in overalls,” and the image will automatically pop into your head. But it’s more complicated than that; did you picture a mouse poking its head out of a farmer’s overall pocket, or did you picture a mouse actually wearing a pair of miniature overalls? You must choose the right words, and combine them in just the right way, for the magic to work.

Plus, in order to plant things in people’s minds, you have to get them to read your stuff—which will be difficult if it is boring or badly written. That’s where the training and practice comes in. The more accomplished you are at showing, not telling, through your writing, the more interesting the story, and the more relatable the characters—the more influence you have over your readers. And, like any power, you can use it for good or evil. Will you teach ideas that improve the world, or make it worse? Bring happiness, or pain? Inspire hope, or despair?

It’s your choice, oh powerful one.

Writing: the Sixth Sense

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I see fictional people. And they don't know they're fictional.

 

After reading my novel (old draft, now discarded) for the first time, my brother’s fiancée asked me where I got the idea.

I had no idea what to say.

Of course there were various influences, from Out of the Silent Planet to Stargate, but I can’t rightly say where I got any idea. I can’t say I made it up, either. It’s inspiration. God breathes it at us.

Writing fiction is like discovering a story that is really going on somewhere, but you can’t see or hear it. Writers are simply born with a sort of sixth sense by which they feel the story. Sometimes we are well-attuned to that sense; sometimes the sense lies to us. We know some details of the story automatically, without even thinking about it, while other details we have to feel for in the dark. That’s why there are so many badly-written books. Those authors haven’t fine-tuned their sixth sense.

We don’t control it; we discover it. That’s why our characters rebel and sometimes refuse to do things we want them to. We can turn them into puppets and force them to our will, but that always makes a soulless, wooden story. There are certain restrictions to playing God. If we interfere with free will, we suck the life out of the story. But if we stick to manipulating only certain parts of the story – the weather, or the timing of events – we can move the story forward naturally. We arrange events around our characters’ personal tendencies, like drawing a chalk line around an ant, to urge them in certain directions. 

Finally, they arrive at the end – having walked there on their own two feet – where they will discover, Author-willing, their carefully-planned happily ever after.

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