Hello Victoria, My name is Alex, and I’ve been reading your blog “five ways to make your novel inescapable.” First of all, I’d like to thank you for the blog post. It is a very nice piece. My question is concerning a hook climax. Can you please explain what a hook climax is? I believe what you’re saying is that is the hook climax is one of the major elements, the counterpoint. I think the point and the counterpoint are the two main themes that are intertwined throughout the entire story. But I believe you’re also saying that the hook is tied into the climax at the end of the book. Can you please explain this more? Should I be focusing on having my hook tie to the story’s climax? Alex
That’s a really interesting interpretation! What you’re talking about is what I call resonance.
What I’m talking about with the Climax of the HOOK in “5 Ways to Make Your Novel Inescapable” is plot outline.
The key to keeping the reader intrigued is the novel’s CLIMAX, which is the Whole Point of any story. And knowing that climax is the whole point of any story allows us to use it to emphasize the whole point of any aspect of any story.
I use three-act structure to design novels, partly because our brains are hardwired to prefer things that come in threes, and partly because it’s easy:
HOOK
DEVELOPMENT
CLIMAX
I discuss these three acts in-depth in Art & Craft of Writing Fiction, relating them to our classical understanding of story design through Syd Field, Gustav Freytag, and Shakespeare. They’re really important.
And when we use the climax of each act to illuminate the whole point of that act, we get two parts to each one:
ACT I
HOOK
CONFLICT #1 (Act I Climax)
ACT II
CONFLICT #2 (Midpoint)
CONFLICT #3 (Act II Climax)
ACT III
FAUX RESOLUTION
CLIMAX (Act III Climax)
I also use something I call holographic design to give each of the six parts their own six parts. This means that the HOOK has its own Climax. (Three of these six parts I call CONFLICTS, to avoid confusion, and each part has its own Climax.)
Now, of course there’s a lot more to structure than this. But this is the general gist of it.
I outline all of this in detail in Art & Craft of Writing Stories, in which I describe how I’ve analyzed scores of novels to discover how they’re put together so they keep the reader intrigued all the way through, and I walk you step-by-step through six canonical examples of stories that helped originate our biggest-selling modern genres.
I mean, 70-100,000 words is a LOT of words. All too often, we hear someone say, “I started that book but never finished it.” We writers don’t want that book to be ours.
So we must know how to keep the reader intrigued on every page: by shaping the story around its climaxes.