Writing a Query: The Hook

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." - Mr. Darcy

In vain did I struggle with the hook of my story. I struggled for so long that I began to wonder if my story even had one.

Then I began to wonder if I'd even told a story.

Then I began to fear I'd just wasted the past few years of my life pecking out words, words, words, and none of them were admirable at all.

Then my writing group told me to get a grip and get back to work.

The hook of your story is the inciting incident or the first domino to fall.

After writing and rewriting my story so many times, I'd lost sight of where the quest had begun. But staring at 60K words was not helping. I needed to condense my story to help.

At the SCBWI Midwest conference (5/13), Kendra Levin, an editor at Viking Children's Books, gave us a formula for summarizing our work. It is based, she told us, on the classic Hollywood elevator pitch.

From my notes:

After (inciting incident), a (description of protagonist) must (main action) or risk/while risking (the stakes) (during this setting).

It was like mad-libs for wordy writers.

Later at the conference, I ended up in a picture book session (I still don't know how it happened). I don't write picture books, but I was too embarrassed to get up and leave, so I just hid out in the back corner and practiced one-sentence pitches. Score one point for social awkwardness!

Several sticky notes later, I came up with this.

After agreeing to help a desperate girl with cancer, a driven math geek must put his future at MIT and his heart at risk during the dying girl's last days.

Meh.

When I got home, I dug back in the notes (pages and pages of notes) about queries and stumbled on a reference to Nathan Bransford's formula for writing a one sentence pitch. I went back to his blog (which you should use frequently as a resource because he's seriously awesome at this stuff) and found this.

When OPENING CONFLICT happens to CHARACTER(s), they have OVERCOME CONFLICT to COMPLETE QUEST.

Using that formula, I tweaked my pitch to look like this.

When a driven mathematician falls for a girl with a devastating secret, he must put his future on hold in order to enjoy the time they have left together.

Oh, yeah! That's what my story was about!

Now that I've got my story condensed from 60K words to 30, it's a little easier to find my hook. It's labeled in the formulas I used for heaven's sake.

But neither of these pitches reflect the voice of my piece, so I've got to tweak the hook from "A driven mathematician falls for a girl with a devastating secret," to this.

Charles Mortimer Hanson has his life organized like a multivariate equation—finish his senior year at Brighton School of Mathematics and Science, study at MIT, and win the Nobel Prize before his 30^th birthday. But the equation of his life becomes unsolvable when an unknown variable is introduced: Charlotte Finch.

See! And that only took me two years to write (just kidding -- sort of).

Up Next: Writing a Query: The Heart.