Last year, Joseph Finder, author of several thrillers set in a government environment, provided an interesting tutorial titled “What’s a Hook? The Art of the Pitch.” He relates the hook to a fishing hook, and then he says:

“A fishing hook needs bait and a fisherman, though, and a writing hook needs a story. An unusual situation, however intriguing, is not a story. “A family digs a swimming pool in the backyard, and finds a buried time capsule” is a great premise for a novel – but what happens next? “A family’s discovery of a time capsule buried in their backyard makes them the targets of government agents from every country in the world” – that’s a story hook, because now we know that the time capsule sets a chain of events in motion.”

But what Joseph Finder didn’t tell you is why adding the government agents makes this a “hook.” Of course, if you’ve read my chapter in Novelsmithing called “Plotting,” you already know the answer. It’s because the author has just locked the central conflict. A family finding a time capsule is just an event with a protagonist. No story. World governments after the family because of the time capsule provides an antagonist and locks the central conflict. We have a story because conflict has a time history. Conflict has to be locked, escalated, reversed, come to term with, and resolved. Story is the time-history of conflict.

Plus, understanding the nature of conflict adds theme. The family could just simply turn over the time capsule, and we still have no story. The governments could see the time capsule, realize that it’s worthless to them, and we still have no story. But if the family doesn’t want to give up the time capsule, and the governments wish to pursue the matter, we have continuing conflict, and the reasons for the family resisting and the governments pursuing the family, together with the nature of the time capsule, provide the theme. Theme is the philosophy behind the conflict. If you don’t realize this, you may have conflict and your novel plotted, but it may still not have meaning. Theme provides the story with meaning, and if you don’t understand what your story means, the reader will find it to be intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

Describing story as “what happens next” isn’t the complete picture. If what-happens-next doesn’t follow the central conflict from locking to resolving, it doesn’t constitute a complete story.