thoughts on hooks

A number of things occured to me after reading the hooks over at Rachel Vater's blog, and I'm reprinting my ideas here as well. I only read the MG/YA ones because that's mostly what I read, and the only thing I write. Plus, I think they are nearly always better written than most of the adult ones. At least the ones that show up in hook crits on line. Anyhow, this is what I noticed:

Fantasy--save the world, join us or die, stop the horror, etc. seem to be common themes. But what are the personal stakes for the characters?

Beware of The Quest with nothing else happening along the way. Here are the characters, um, there's this long slodge in the middle where the characters wander through lots of landscape to get to the end, and then boom, something finally happens. The end SHOULD happen because the complications the MC causes in the middle cause an even greater problem, the solving of which is the climax. MC wants X, tries to get it by doing Y, only uh oh, it's caused problem Z. Which should be sufficiently enticing to make someone want to find out how the MC gets out of THAT one.

Beware of listing too many events from the book without a logical tie between them. Think simple cause and effect.

Don't overdo it by naming too many characters in your hook. At this point we only need to know who the main actors are, not about all their relatives.

Lose the desperately, urgently, etc. kind of words. Show us what happens, and we'll decide how desperate or urgent the situation is. Don't think of global crises--think of a single detail (decribed with precise words) that reveals the individual. I guess I'm with Rachel on the Unleashing of Great Evil. There's nothing wrong with that particular theme (unleashing problems is kind of what plot is all about), but the story itself has got to be more specific than that. More personal.

All of this, of course, has echoes for plotting as well. It's not enough to get from the begining to the end. There need to be further complications along the way. If done right, there shouldn't be that sagging in the middle. When I heard Markus Zusak speak, he talked about this, too--have the characters think they're solving their problem, only to have the "solution" get them even more in trouble. Take the book Dairy Queen, by Catherine Murdock. For a variety of family reasons, the MC (a high school girl) ends up doing ALL of the heavy farm work on her family's dairy. The first solution she comes across is the rival school's quarterback, sent to help them out (his coach is a family friend) in exchange for some training (her family all play football). The QB accuses her of being a cow because she just does what everyone expects of her. To break out of the cow mode, she chooses to accept the training responsibility. First complication: how can she keep it a secret that she's training her rival? So things go well and she learns she's good at training, and that she also likes the boy. Second complication: playing football and breaking out of cow mode makes her realize one more thing: she wants to play football with her own high school team. How can she keep her relationship with her trainee on the opposite side of the football field, keep her family from flipping out over training him (or even playing football in the first place, since that's what people expect of her brothers, not herself), and yet keep the sense of self and individuality that all of this has brought her?

Hooks, like plots, need to hold together in this complication-squared sort of way.