In Defense of the Hook

It seems like it has become morally suspect to suggest that a book, essay, or story should have a "hook." The implication seems to be that it's a contrivance or a gimmick, and as such, I understand why it has become unfashionable to use the term. Still, I think there is something to be said for thinking in terms of a "hook," and so I'll try to say that something.

Perhaps the problem is the term "hook" itself, which implies the reader is a fish. The reader is not a fish. The reader is an intelligent human being with many demands on his/her time--but in abandoning the term hook, it seems like too many writers also forget this crucial fact of the reader's humanity. Too often, I see writers who seem to feel that the reader owes it to them to slog through pages or attempt to penetrate their word puzzles and mind games just because the writer bothered to write the pages in the first place.

The reader, however, owes the writer nothing. In fact, it's the reverse. If someone has been gracious enough to spend time and money to read our efforts, we owe them.

What I like about the term hook is that the metaphor implies the writer should offer the reader some morsel up front--something we can see and smell and taste just as much as we can see, smell, and taste the barbed hook itself. The writing needs to establish a reason for us readers to willingly sacrifice our time.

Ultimately, the hook should not be a gimmick. If it is, chances are the reader will be disappointed in the work. Readers will rightly feel cheated. Instead, the hook should offer readers a glimpse of what the rest of the piece promises to give: romance, tragedy, mystery, comedy, philosophical questions, etc. The hook establishes the art of the book. It is the offering the writer makes for the reader's time. The best hide hooks themselves because, like well-tied flies, they feel a natural part of the narrative landscape. When those lures are artfully done, I as the reader will bite every time.

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PS. (ten minutes later)
After writing this I stumbled across Julie Ritter's poem "Ravi Shankar Hand Dip" at http://pbq.drexel.edu/pbq/archives/462. Synchronicity?

Quick as a fishhook flared into the water,
the way hip rubs against hip intentionally
unintentional on the dance floor, furtive
as a glance at someone else’s bank
statement, palmed like a cigarette in the rain,
the fingers exploratory, an insect’s antennae,
twitching to capture texture to populate
the hinterlands of a long winter night alone,
a maneuver not catalogued by the Kama Sutra,
but full of nervy frottage, pervy wattage,
a slip of skin on skin thin as a wine glass stem
and more circumspect, harder to unpack
than a tackle box and oft-deployed in subway
cars and murky bars – that’s the hand dip.

Omniscient Point of View: A Re-Understanding

Writing Excuses recently did a podcast on omniscient point of view, and while I agree with much of what they said, I noticed that the show repeated a central understanding of omniscience that I've come to see as flawed. Because it's so prevalent, I thought I'd write on it.

When I first learned about point of view (POV) back in middle school and high school, I learned that there were three kinds: first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient. (Much later, I would learn about that other skipped person, that poetically favored person, the second, but I won't touch on that for this post.) First and third person limited were fairly clear and familiar, but third omniscient was more difficult to grasp. The way I learned it then and over and over in courses since then was much in line with this definition, found at About: "Third person omniscient is a method of storytelling in which the narrator knows the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters in the story." This definition is usually followed with the disclaimer that writers used to use third person omniscient more commonly, but that it has gone out of fashion. The problem was, I couldn't remember ever seeing it used in the works I read.

I've since continued to read widely in Victorian literature, and I can't think of a case of third person omniscient that adheres to this definition. In fact, the only novel I can think of that does attempt this is Peter Carey's 1999 novel Jack Maggs, and though it's been a while since I read it, my memory is that fairly soon after the opening, it adheres to one limited point of view and then another for sustained periods (becoming more like the floating third mentioned below). It strikes me that novels that truly allow simultaneous insight into all characters' minds are exceedingly rare.

And with good reason. After all, if a reader has insight into all minds at once, we lose some of our ability to engage with the text--that is, we don't get to participate by trying to understand characters' motivations from their actions. We're no longer in the position of the characters, trying to figure out each other from outside information (gestures, dialogue) alone. We're no longer in a human position at all. As the word omniscient suggests, we're put in the position of an all-knowing god, and that's not a position that's familiar or comfortable from which to read. It's also almost impossible for even the finest writer to manage. I've come to understand that third person omniscient, as it's typically defined (simultaneous insight into all characters' thoughts and feelings), is even more rare than second person.

If the traditional definition is not valid, I'd like to propose alternatives that are more common, though still more rare than first person or third person limited. I add a disclaimer that I don't think I'm coining any new terminology here.

Floating third person limited: when the writer deliberately and seamlessly moves us from the thoughts of one character into the thoughts of another.

Virginia Woolf was a master at the floating third person. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, we'll move from the thoughts of our title character to war veteran Septimus Smith as she gazes at him across a flower shop. Woolf's point of view shifts are not haphazard or jarring, but methodical and intentional. We get a sense of how each character is isolated from the others by the way they fail to intersect at the very moments their points of view collide.  In this way, it's distinct from the point of view errors one might find in a new writer's work, in which we accidentally see or know something the point of view character cannot. With Woolf, it's never a slip-up. We move to the new mind and stay there for some time before moving on.

Writing Excuses refers to this as "head hopping," which is usually a pejorative term for poorly executed writing when the writer doesn't seem able or willing to commit to a point of view. I'd like to draw the distinction that floating third person is an extremely difficult POV to pull off, and only true craftsman tend to manage it well. (I suspect that Writing Excuses writers would back me up on this.)


Omniscient pronouncement: when the writer makes a grand pronouncement that seems beyond the scope of most human knowledge.

This omniscience that is correctly attributed to nineteenth century writers, who were not shy about making a sweeping statement in their work. Charles Dickens's "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times" in Tale of Two Cities or Leo Tolstoy's "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" in Anna Karenina both fit into this category. More recently, and one of the more common examples given on Internet websites, Douglas Adams's narrator in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has knowledge of world history going back to the primordial ooze. Usually, this kind of omniscience enters the book only for short moments before we attach ourselves to a POV character through which our understanding will be filtered.

And yes, this point of view does put the author in a god-like roll, but not so much that it allows multiple characters' thoughts at once.


The Establishing Shot: when a book starts, like a film, with an establishing "shot," that is, a description that of a large setting that then zooms in on a particular set of characters which we will follow.

John Steinbeck's story "The Chrysanthemums" is a great example of this, starting "The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot." 

(Writing Excuses mentioned Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Those better read in fantasy than I will have to confirm or disavow this one.)


Shifting third person limited: when the point of view character shifts in clearly defined sections, such as chapters

Charles Dickens's Bleak House shifts between an unknown third person narrator to Esther Summerson in different segments of the novel. George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and George Eliot's Middlemarch similarly limit each chapter to one third person POV character, but which character that is shifts from chapter to chapter. Murder mystery novelist P. D. James uses this to great effect in most of her novels, as she shifts us into a new mind from chapter to chapter so that readers discover at her novels' ends that they've been in the mind of a murderer and never suspected them. Like the floating point of view, the shifting third person does not allow sloppiness. For the entirety of the chapter, the POV stays strictly limited to the person its writer has established.


While nineteenth century writers were still inventing the novel and, so, didn't have the wealth of craft texts that their work and subsequent writing has generated, by falsely attributing to them a point of view that allows simultaneous insight into all minds, we do them a disservice. I've come to believe they understood narrative tension better than this. While we can find occasional examples in which their point of view does not attach as rigidly to a single character as is now common, I cannot find so many of those examples as to suggest they are any kind of norm. Nineteenth century novelists allowed their readers more involvement in their books than this credits them for. They allowed readers to draw conclusions from the action and dialogue of non-POV characters without insight into their thinking. This restraint offers the pleasure of dramatic irony, in which we readers better read the dialogue of a character than the POV character him/herself.

Novel writing has changed a great deal in the past two hundred years, but perhaps not so much as our current teaching of point of view suggests.