“What’s a so what?”
Of all the requirements for a good nonfiction essay, the so what can be the most elusive, and not just because it’s not a term that most people have heard before. In fact, one way of describing the “so what” in a more technical way is “the hook” and it’s that hook I want to talk to you about as this month’s nonfiction technique.
A narrative hook is a thing that grabs the reader’s attention, that focuses them on what you want them to get out of the story, and that keeps them coming back for more. In music it’s a guitar lick or phrase that gets stuck in your head, that bit you can’t stop singing.
Often you only have a few words – three sentences at the absolute most – to convince your reader that they want to keep going. So a good solid hook, up front, is the way to command and keep their attention. “Call me maybe” is a hook. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is a hook.
The reason you want a hook in your writing is to, well, hook the reader. Without a hook the reader is often left to guess where you’re leading them. And, I mean, people are great, but they can totally guess wrong. If they do, they may end up being disappointed in your essay even if it’s great, because it has “let them down” by going somewhere unexpected. (Ask me how well that worked out for me in Honors English. ASK ME.)
The hook shows up in fiction and poetry too, obviously. And a microstory is almost entirely hook.
So how do you know if you’ve got a hook in your story and if it’s good? Re-read.
Is there a sentence somewhere that sums up the entire thing, or that you’d feel comfortable using as a pull-quote if your essay were published as an article? That’s your hook.
Is there a recurring image like light, a color, a sound, or even a repeated phrase, that focuses the reader’s attention? That’s your hook (but make sure that you’re focusing attention on something that you’ve helped the reader care about first).
A word of caution: one hook. Really. That’s all you need. Don’t try to make every sentence clever and pithy and quotable; it will just bog your writing down and direct attention away from your real hook.
I know this is a little rough- like pornography, a hook can be “I know it when I see it.” So I’ll leave you with a few examples:
If this guitar riff doesn’t get stuck in your head, I don’t think we can be friends.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Call me Ishmael.
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
