Writing hooks that actually stick

The single most useful thing you can do inside this product is stop using our hooks and start writing your own. Yours will be worse by any objective measure and they will work better, because you made them. That is not encouragement, it is the finding.

This is how to make one in about twenty seconds.

The five rules

1. Say the word out loud first. Not read it. Spelling lies, especially in French. You are looking for a sound, and your eyes will not find it.
2. Take the first syllable or two. You do not need the whole word. The hook gets you to the doorstep and your mouth finishes the walk.
3. Find a real thing that sounds like it. A noun you can see. If the best you can find is a proper name or a nonsense sound, take the proper name.
4. Put it in one scene with the meaning. The two things have to interact. Touching, crushing, eating, wearing, breaking.
5. See it for two seconds. Actually close your eyes. This is the step everybody skips and it is the step that does the work.

Worked examples

• queso, Spanish, cheese. Sounds like "case". A briefcase clicks open and there is nothing inside but one enormous burning wedge of cheese.
• Fenster, German, window. Sounds like "fan". A ceiling fan has been bolted to a window and is throwing snow into the room.
• eau, French, water. Sounds like "oh". A person says oh and a bucket of water comes out of their mouth instead of the word.
• chuva, Portuguese, rain. Sounds like "shoo va". You shoo the rain away with a tea towel and it retreats politely.

None of those are clever. Cleverness is not what makes them work.

The three traps

The story that grows

You start with a cat on a cake and by the third revision there is a birthday, a waiter and a thunderstorm. Now you have to remember a short film to get to one word. Cut it back to the two objects and one verb.

The abstract keyword

"Sounds like consider" is not a keyword, because you cannot see considering. If the only sound match you can find is abstract, use a proper noun instead. A person you know, a place you have been, a brand. Those are concrete and they are already in your memory with an address attached.

The hook you never look at again

A hook is scaffolding. After thirty or forty successful recalls you will find the word arrives before the picture does, and eventually the picture stops coming at all. That is the technique working, not failing. Do not go back and polish hooks for words you already know.

If the language has gender

Put the gender inside the scene rather than beside it. In this product the rule never varies: masculine is on fire, feminine is underwater, neuter is frozen solid. So the burning briefcase of cheese is not a coincidence, it is telling you that queso is masculine, and after about a fortnight you stop noticing you are doing it.