GETTING STARTED A Lesson on Hooks and Openings

GETTING STARTED: A Lesson on Hooks and Openings

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Hooks Defined 2. Types of Hooks 3. Style in Hooks 4. Examples of Hooks

HOOKS: A DEFINITION A HOOK is the opening of anything you write. Provide a juicy idea that will make your reader want to continue reading. As the metaphor suggests, you want to hook the audience into what you are writing

NARRATIVE HOOKS 1. A bit of dialogue 2. An unusual statement 3. An exciting moment from the story (i. e. in medias res) 4. An especially vivid description

EXAMPLE OF DIALOGUE “’You must not tell anyone, ” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. ’”—Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman”

EXAMPLE OF AN UNUSUAL STATEMENT “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being”— Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Ugly Tourist”

EXAMPLE OF IN MEDIAS RES Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) opens with a funny scene in Uncle Bob’s Pancake House. Then Tarantino employs in medias res by skipping past the robbery and to the getaway, when Tim Roth’s (Mr. Orange) character is bleeding in the back of Harvey Keitel’s (Mr. White) car. Keitel, Tarantino, Madsen, Bunker, Buscemi, and Tierney

EXAMPLE OF VIVID DESCRIPTION “A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil’s edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. ”—N. Scott Momaday’s “The Way to Rainy Mountain”

ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE HOOKS The Beach Boys “In the long, tedious hours between soundcheck and showtime, Brian Wilson likes to park himself at the side of the stage, hidden behind the curtains, in an oversize black chair. The chair has traveled with him Tokyo to Tel Aviv and back home to the Pantages Theater in Hollywood tonight. Dressed in a lavender button-down, sweatpants and white Nikes, Wilson sits impassively atop his faux-leather throne, munching sushi rolls as the preshow noise and bustle

TYPES OF HOOKS 1. Interesting or shocking Fact 2. Interesting or shocking Idea 3. Interesting or shocking Statistic 4. Interesting or shocking Quote 5. A Personal Narrative (or personal experience) 6. In Medias Res or “in the middle of things” 7. Vivid Description of a significant event

STYLE IN HOOKS The key to writing a great hook is to artfully, descriptively, and clearly give your audience an interesting idea to think about that reveals a lot about your subject, but not everything (you want to leave them wanting more).

LET US LOOK AT SOME EXAMPLES

EXAMPLE OF A HOOK WITH A STATISTIC “Inadequate sleep causes more than $400 billion in economic losses annually in the United States and results in 1. 23 million lost days of work each year, researchers have found”— The New York Times article “You’re Getting Very Sleepy. (So Is Everyone Else)” by Bilal Choudhry

EXAMPLE OF A HOOK WITH A SHOCKING FACT “On a chilly day in August 2016, more than 300 reindeer, huddled for warmth, dropped dead on a mountain plateau in Norway. They died by lightening. ”—The New York Times article “Hundred of Reindeer Died by Lightening. Their Carcasses Became a Laboratory” by Steph Yin

EXAMPLE OF A HOOK WITH A NARRATIVE “After just a few hours of letting the current comb through his net in the Copper River, Shane Cummings knew that something wasn’t right”— The New York Times article “A Dwindling Catch Has Alaskans Uneasy” by Julia O’Malley

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: LITERATURE “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. ”— the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: LITERATURE Luis Rodriguez opens Always Running in dramatic fashion. “This memory begins with flight. A 1950 s bondo-spackled Dodge surged through a driving rain, veering around the potholes and upturned tracks of the abandoned Red Line trains on Alameda” (Rodriguez 13).

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: LITERATURE Gabriel Garcia Marquez opens his famous novel Love in the Time of Cholera by penning, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love”

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: LITERATURE “First, that face, lengthened by a few vertical lines like scars dug long ago by sleepless nights; a badly shaven face, worked by time. ”— opening of Tahar ben Jelloun’s award-winning novel The Sand Child

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: LITERATURE “Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little…and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me…and now, it was blossoming”—opening of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: LITERATURE “It is Christmas Eve in the year of… 1969. Three hundred Chicanos have gathered in front of St. Basil’s Roman Catholic Church. Three hundred brown-eyed children of the sun have come to drive the money-changers out of the richest temple in Los Angeles”—beginning of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: ESSAYS Author Walter Lew opens with a quote from the rapper Ice Cube, “Or your little chop-suey ass will be a target. ” Then, Lew continues with, “Last summer, four black cops arrested me because I was ‘dat chinese man. ’” You want proof? ” opening of Walter Lew’s essay “Black Korea. ”

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: ESSAYS The Grand Canyon in Arizona “I’ve been around and seen the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon and Marilyn Monroe’s footprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but I’ve never seen my mother wash her own hair. ”—the opening of “Hair” by Marcia Aldrich

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: ESSAYS “I first saw death when I was a small boy in the little village where I was born. It was a cool summer night and the sky was as clear as day and the ripening rice fields were golden in the moonlight, ” the opening of “I Would Remember” by Carlos Bulosan

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: ESSAYS “The night before the world changed completely I was driving back to New York late, after lecturing at Drew University in exurban New Jersey. The sky was relatively clear and I did what I often do on such occasions”—opening of David Halberstam’s “Who We Are”

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: POETRY “Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets” --opening of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: NON-FICTION “Mickey Cohen was not a man used to being shaken down. Threatened with handguns, blasted with shotguns, strafed on occasion by a machine gun, yes. Firebombed and dynamited, sure. But threatened, extorted—hit up for $20, 000—no. ”— beginning of John Buntin’s L. A. Noir

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: NON-FICTION “Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Laotse”—opening of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: SPORTS WRITING “Cecil B. De. Mille would have loved this moment. Here I was sitting in a limo at the ramp leading into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, waiting for my team to arrive, while an ecstatic crowd of ninety-five thousand plus fans, dressed in every possible combination of Lakers purple and gold”— opening of Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings Phil Jackson

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: SPORTS WRITING “Roy Hobbs pawed at the glass before thinking to prick a match with his thumbnail and hold the spurting flame in his cupped palm close to the lower berth window, but by then he had figured it was a tunnel they were passing through and was no longer surprised”—beginning of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural

SOME EXAMPLES OF GREAT HOOKS: PSYCHOLOGY “When I was a young researcher, just starting out, something happened that changed my life. I was obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by watching how students grapple with hard problems” —opening of Mindset by Dr. Carol S. Dweck

WRITING A HOOK EXERCISE Time: 5 -10 minutes Activity: Use one of the 6 types of hooks, use very vivid detail, and (preferably) at least one rhetorical device to construct a hook for your current essay. Some definitions and examples of rhetorical devices can be found in your supplemental handbook.