The Surefire Hook: The Unexpected

Picture this scene from a few weeks ago: It is late evening, slightly overcast with the teeniest of breeze in the air. I have just opened the screen door of my second-floor deck and my miniature dachshund, Libby, has bounced down the flight of stairs till she reaches the bottom, whereupon Libby takes off across the yard and begins to bark and growl.

In the duskiness, I peer over the stairs and a deer—not a sweet little doe, mind you, a BIG deer, is jauntily walking across the yard toward Libby. At which point, Libby hightails it back to the safety of the stairs (but continues to bark). I stand there, open-mouthed and gaping. I mean, this is a full-grown deer in the middle of my fenced-in back yard. And when I say fence, I am talking about a six foot tall fence. I glance at the gate and it’s closed tight. The deer and I lock eyeballs across the expanse of the yard and I say out loud, “How did you get in my yard?”

The deer bolts and very gracefully leaps over my six-foot fence.

Oh, okay. That’s how.

Anyway, it’s not unusual for me to see deer in the green belt behind my house. There’s a river that runs through the green belt and there are all kinds of interesting wildlife back there. But up until a few weeks ago, the wildlife, with perhaps the exception of owls, hawks, turtles, and snakes, stayed on the other side of the fence. It was completely unexpected, that deer in the middle of my backyard, and I had to call my youngest son to report this phenomenon. (He went to Berry College and deer are pretty much all over the campus so he was not as surprised as I was to find that a deer had jumped the fence. “That’s what deer do,” he said. But still, he admitted that a deer in the Hall backyard was semi-bizarre.)

I tell you all this to make a simple point about story: The unexpected is what makes this a good story, and why I had to call my son, and why I may have called all the other Junior Halls and various and sundry neighbors. You see, a deer behind the fence is pretty typical, even in a suburban neighborhood like mine. But a deer in the middle of a fenced-in backyard, well, that definitely grabbed my attention.

So the next time that you are stumped as to why your short story’s not selling or your book is mired down in the middle and no agents are biting or the article you pitched hasn’t been awarded a contract, consider whether you’ve written something predictable or something unexpected.

Make your reader stop for a moment to think, “I did not see that coming.”

Sort of like a deer in the middle of a fenced-in backyard.


~Cathy C. Hall
(Deer image courtesy of Pixabay. The deer in my backyard was MUCH bigger.)