What Hooks you? by Eric Beetner

 What hooks you into an idea enough so that you want to write it? Character, setting, plot, genre? Or …?

I have often told other writers not to take anything from my method of working in the early stages of a book. I know it’s silly. You see, I tend not to write down the amazing ideas I get. I’m sure I have lost many certain best sellers to this technique, but I like to let things roll around in my head for a while. If it’s still there weeks or months later, I know I might be on to something.

Let’s say I get to that point – I have what I think is a killer idea. I have that hook, the thing that will be the one-liner on the book jacket or in the press materials that makes people think “I want to read that”. 

I’m still not ready to start.

Any writer worth their ink will have a collection of false starts, dead plots and frustrating close calls with stories. Those happen when someone starts a novel before it is ready to go. A good hook is not enough. A killer plot isn’t even enough, though some have gone ahead and written those books and invariably, they come off as thin and unsatisfying.

It’s the characters. The people involved in your killer plot are what the reader is going to attach on to. They are what moves that plot forward. Once you set your amazing story in motion, if it pushes the characters along then it’s not going to work. But if the protagonist the antagonist and the side characters all contribute to moving the STORY along, then you’ve got something.

When I get a story stuck in my craw long enough that I think it’s going to stay there until I write the book to dislodge it, then I start writing in my head. Again, not putting anything on paper yet. And yes, again, I have probably lost great stuff this way. I never said I was smart. But when the characters start to talk, when I get an insight into how they act and feel and move through the story, that’s when I know it is time to start getting this down on paper.

For my newest book, The Last Few Miles Of Road (out Feb 27th!) I had my hook – an elderly man who gets a life-threatening diagnosis and decides to right a decades old wrong and kill and man who was responsible for the death of our hero’s daughter – but until I started hearing how Carter McCoy would talk and gave him some details like his guitar playing, his favorite restaurant, the kind of truck he drives, then I wasn’t ready to begin.

Once all that came together and I knew who Carter was, I hit the page running and never looked back. 

So don’t do it like me. But if you want a story to really stick I’d say however you do it, the characters are the ones who give the go ahead and tell you when to start typing.