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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31029
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31029
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A drama is fundamentally about values and about a choice between values that reveals who the protagonist is in their heart of hearts. The first question that a story has to answer, therefore, is one of values. Who is the protagonist, what does he have now that he cherishes, and what does he desire that he does not possess. (Alternatively what thing that he cherishes will be taken away from him so that he has to give up something else he values to get it back.)

The reader knows (probably not consciously, since we learn to love stories long before we learn to analyse them) that at the heart of every story is a choice of values, and so the first thing they are looking for at the beginning of a story is what the protagonist values. There are at least two values that matter: the value the protagonist will seek to attain, and the value they they will have to give up as the price of attaining the first value.

Those values are the hook. They are what tells the reader that this is someone with something to lose and something to gain. It is important to note here that the hook is not action. The hook is values. Values establish the essential grounds of drama, and that is what the reader is looking for at the beginning. You can certainly use action to establish values. But it is the values exposed by the action that are the hook, not the action itself. Conversely, you can establish values without action, or at least without violent action.

You can, for instance, establish values through a religious initiation. Religion is very much concerned with values. Religious beliefs and practices are expressions of values, or of facts which have consequences for values. A religious initiation is an initiation into a set of values and a set of ideas which are the ground of values, and so it can do exactly the job that you need to do at the beginning of a story.

What you have to be careful of is that religious practice, and religious initiation in particular, are so routinely vilified in fiction today that it has become a kind of lazy shorthand for authors to establish the villain by making them a religious leader who requires or inflicts religious initiations on poor defenceless protagonists. This is, to my mind, an appalling bit of prejudice, but it is an inescapable part of the contemporary literary culture in which your story must find its audience. This means that if this is not what you intend the reader to get from this initiation, you are going to have to work extra hard to make sure they get the message you want rather than assuming the default message that the culture has primed them to expect.

Original score: 2