So, what is a hook?

Was watching the pilot of 11.22.63 and thinking about how it’s the perfect way to describe a hook. Which should give you some idea of how electrifying the script is, but never mind. Here goes…

Chris Cooper has a closet in his diner that takes you back in time. He’s dying. He shows this big secret to James Franco.

So most specs would stop there and the second act would be James Franco going back to the past and rummaging around for thirty pages just doing stuff until the writer finally hits on a good idea, then the story starts, on page 50.

So the setup is this magic closet. But there’s no story inherent in a magic closet, there are too many places it could go, and we need to know right away what the specific problem is.

So there’s an additional setup that narrows it down for us. This closet only goes to one day in the past. That’s pretty specific, but still no breakout story idea.

The hook is that It’s the day before the assassination of JFK.

So now we know that the story is about this divorced high school English teacher who has to stop the assassination, and we know that the guy who’s dying has been trying to prevent it and the ensuing escalation of the Vietnam War for thirty years.

So the whole mix is there, it’s a specific guy with a specific problem that he’s wildly unsuited to solve, and the story can start right away.