posted
From Robert Ruark's classic, "The Old Man and the Boy":
The old man knows pretty close to everything. And mostly he ain't painful with it. What I mean is that he went to Africa once when he was a kid, and he shot a tiger or two out in India, or so he says, and he was in a whole mess of wars here and yonder. But he can still tell you why the quail sleep at night in a tight circle or why the turkeys always fly uphill.
The old man ain't that much to look at on the hoof. He's got big ears that flap out and a scrubby mustache with light yellow tobacco stains on it. He smokes a crook-stem pipe and he shoots an old pump gun that looks as battered as he does. His pants wrinkle and he spits pretty straight the way people used to spit when most men chewed Apple tobacco.
posted
A "brilliant hook" for me is one that surprises and forces one to read on.
These three lines wonderfully capture the essence of "the old man" for the reader. In fact, they do this so well, they seem to be a complete story in themselves. I could put the story down at this point and feel satisfied.
A "hook" leaves one unsatisfied.
Respectfully, Dr. Bob (in my humble opinion)
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Maybe it's the benefit of hindsight from having read the whole book, but in my opinion, I think this is a great hook because of it's subtlety. It hooks me in because I want to find out more about about this old man, and about the narrator, and about their relationship. It's the absence of a towering cliff from which the reader hangs that makes this brilliant.
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posted
There's room for at least twice as much as you have there.
I would probably keep reading, but I think it would be interesting to see if the next 6 or 7 lines would "set" the hook.
As it is, the only "question" might be why quails and turkeys do that, and I suspect the story doesn't ever say (though I think it would be clever if it did come out somewhere along the way).
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posted
Edited to add the next half dozen lines (and, if I recall correctly the Old Man does explain those things at some point later in the text).
Does a hook have to have an in-your-face sort of question to be a hook? Or is it anything that grabs the reader and pulls them to the second page?
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posted
Should it be "the way people used to spit"?
Questions, in-your-face or not, aren't particularly necessary, and if they are the faith, hope, and clarity kinds of questions (from OSC, "oh, yeah?" and "so what?" and "huh?" respectively), you don't want them.
But to turn the page, a question such as "is this someone I would like to get to know better?" can certainly be pertinent.
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