Schticks that stick

Some stories lodge in your head and never leave. Years later you can't remember the plot, but you remember the thing, the one idea the whole piece was built on. Call it the schtick: the hook, the gimmick, the one-sentence pitch. It's the part people mistake for the whole job.

Here's how I split it. A schtick shows up two ways.

The world is the hook

Some pieces grab you by where they put you. Fallout is one joke held for thirty years: the future as 1950s America imagined it, all ray guns and ad jingles and nuclear optimism, dropped into a radioactive wasteland. Atompunk. You can describe it in a sentence and never mistake it for anything else.

BioShock does it with Rapture: a city on the ocean floor, built by a man who decided God and taxes were holding genius back. Art-deco, leaking, full of people who took the philosophy too far.

The structure is the hook

Other pieces grab you by how they're built. Pulp Fiction tells its story out of order, so a man who gets killed in the middle is alive again at the end. Megamind opens at the hero's funeral and rewinds. BioShock, again, because it's greedy, spends hours letting you believe you're choosing, then shows you that you were taking orders the whole time.

Tell any of them straight and you've got an ordinary piece. The reordering, the reveal, the world. That's the hook.

But the hook isn't what makes it stick

Here's the part that took me too long to learn: a schtick on its own is a gimmick. You can have the cleverest premise going and still bounce off it in five minutes. What makes Rapture stick isn't "a city under the sea." It's the hours you spend in it, the people who used to live there, the argument it keeps making, the fact that it means it. The hook gets you in the door. The storytelling is what makes you stay.

So the real test isn't "is the hook clever." It's: once you're inside, is there a world that breathes? Characters worth your time? Does the thing actually mean what it's doing? A hook with nothing behind it is a trailer for a movie that doesn't exist.

My turn

I start from a hook too, but the hook is the cheap part. The job is everything after it:

• Flight Response: three stories that never share a scene, all rhyming on one reflex, fight or flight. The structure is the hook; the three lives are the reason to watch.
• Potty Talk: two acts that never leave one men's room. The confinement gets you in the door; what keeps you there is eight people saying the things you only say when there's no exit. The long version: single location as a pressure cooker.
• El Silbón: a folktale whose monster comes at you backward, faintest when he's near, loudest once he's gone. Part One has been performed live.

Lead with the hook. Then put the work in behind it: the world, the characters, the part that means it. That's what makes a schtick stick.