hello everybody J here with the perfect story we're on video three hooks and endings and if you're just coming in and you haven't seen the schedule of videos that are going to release this is it right here so let's start with some definitions first of all this is um about Hooks and endings so the hook is really it's called the inciting incident in most craft books and it occurs early in the beginning it's the major um it's just a really cool thing that happens early in the beginning that gets your reader attention and of course the ending starts with the crisis and ends with the Duma and that's just like an EPA kind of final scene in the whole book that wraps things up at the end the hook can predict the ending but it doesn't have to as long as something in the beginning ties back to the ending and you can remember that from the very first video where I kind of hammered this point home that really good books tie these two things together in some way and gives the reader a sense of completion and that and that everything that you wrote In the book has meaning and the hook is exactly what it sounds like for example in Star Wars It's when Luke Skywalker buys two droids in the Silence of the Lambs it's when Clarice is sent to interview Hannibal lecor in the Martian it's when Mark Watley is stranded on Mars and in Fight Club it's when the narrator meets Tyler Duran in taking turns my book it's When Quinn finds Chella and Michelle's bed and a really good hook um it's not going to deter probably a whole lot of people if you have a really good beginning but it can grab people that you might not get so it's a really good uh idea to have a good hook in the beginning of your book so we're going to add this into our little graph and we're going to modify our story structure once again the hook is actually a peak and a valley at the very beginning of your book and then you start building to the 25% point the ending starts with the crisis um goes through a thing I call the regroup then you have a high tension Peak called the climax and of course the ending called The Dan Numa so we talked about how the book is really divided into three parts beginning middle and end the beginning is the to the first 25% Mark in your book the middle is middle 50% and right around 75% you start this thing called the crisis now you can play around with this percentage point a little bit in novels you don't have to have it at the 75% Mark I've had it as late in the 80s sometimes it really depends on the book and the plot so if you're finding yourself hard to keep that crisis at 75% and it gets pushed a little farther into the book I think that's fine as long as it fits your story the ending really has four guideposts which is the crisis and that's the moment when all hope is lost the regroup that's when the main character comes up with the new plan the climax is the amazing solution to the last problem and of course the danuma which ties up all the Loose Ends the ending is a quick series of Peaks and valleys they happen pretty quickly if you notice in the beginning you have 25% of your book to build to that first plot Point well in the ending you're mixing all these four components together in that same 25% or maybe even less so all this stuff is happening pretty quickly the most important part of the ending is going to be your climax because that is the point where everything comes together so that's where you pull off the impossible and deliver on all your promises to the reader if you fail to deliver to your readers they will be left unsatisfied and I cannot even tell you how this how important this is because I've read a lot of books lately where the ending just doesn't do it for me and it kind of ruins the whole book I've also read one recently that added in a plot point that I don't think really needed to be there because this particular author did not tie it up at the end just left it open for interpretation which authors tend to do a lot in literary fiction and I really don't know why they do that cuz I don't think anybody likes it right every if you're going to introduce a plot Point make it have meaning if you introduce something as big as this was it was huge it was a very big like what if in this story and she just left it undone like never answered the question and that's all you could think about at the end is well what was it or wasn't it and you never get an answer so that is just very unsatisfying so yeah if you're writing literary fiction go for it I guess and you're I guess you're not concerned about your reader satisfaction but if you're writing genre fiction you really can't do that because most genre fiction has rules and one of the rules is it's got an ending so in the beginning use your hook to set up your end and in the end resolve the main conflict and give your readers a proper Duma and once again your ending must be satisfying I love this quote from Aristotle because he says that the end of an effective plot must be unex expected but inevitable and that means that when your reader looks back on the story they realize that everything you did had meaning and led up to this point in time and there's no other way that this book could have ended there's just no other way and that's what the inevitable part means and it's really important because readers Come Away thinking this author really knows what she's doing and took me on a ride with a purpose and now that I'm at the end I understand understand you know why all these things happened okay let's take a little time out for romance because romance has a lot of rules and one of them is you have to have a happily ever after and all romance readers know there will be a happily ever after if you're not writing a happily ever after you're not writing a romance you're writing something else but if all the readers wanted was the happily ever after it wouldn't matter what your plot was and obviously the plot matters or all books would be created equal so how you get to the end really really does matter I'm going to go through the book 321 to kind of illustrate this and as I said in the last video most of my books have three plots plz of romance so in 321 the main character Ark is hiding a secret the other main character JD is dealing with a past mistake and the other main character blue is recovering from her captivity they all three are falling in love in this threesome Arrangement and and um trying to live together as not a couple obviously CU it's three people but as a threesome so in the end of 321 I'll just say that the end of 321 is really what makes this book because I have pointed out to you in other videos that I had a few books that I think I plotted perfectly and 321 was not one of them because I feel there's things in the middle that I could have done better but the ending is perfect and the ending is when JD is wrecked um by the mistake that happened a few years earlier which resulted in the death of his girlfriend and his baby being sold to black market baby sellers but this is the information that the reader gets throughout the middle of the story but in the ending there's a Twist because they find out that JD is the one who sold his baby and resulted in his girlfriend's death and this is the whole reason why Arc was afraid he was suicidal through the whole book and at the end JD kills himself when blue confronts him when she finds out that this is actually what's going on so how I got to the happily ever after is the only thing that mattered in 321 the readers Really lik JD because he was charming and um he was the funloving one but they knew because of my blurb that there was something was going to happen at the end and the way I got to the final happily ever after was what made this book great and my blur um My Little tagline on my cover was not everything should come in threes and so they knew that even though this is being touted as a three soulmates book love story it wasn't going to end that way and I think I made that pretty clear um all the way through and so they were hoping they were wrong but they weren't so how you get to the end really really does matter if I could give you one piece of advice I would tell you not to be afraid to write epic endings the hook is what makes a reader give you a chance and read your book but the end is what keeps the readers coming back and turns them into fans so you really really need to take a lot of time on the ending and the hook to get your reader interested in how you like to tell a story and what I would suggest is you go grab your favorite book it doesn't matter what genre it is it doesn't matter which book it is and but you should read it again and you should write down while you're reading what you love about it in almost every case you're going to come back and say it was the ending but it's not just the end that you love most of the time people are going to say you love the way the author got to the end and this is why I say good books tie the beginning to the end because readers want to feel like you know what you're doing this was a purposeful plot and you took them on a ride and everything had meaning so once again your guide post for the ending the crisis is the moment when all hope is lost the regroup is when the main character comes up with a new plan to solve the crisis um the climax is when they put that amazing solution into action and solve the last problem and the Duma is when they tie up the Loose Ends so let's go through what is a good crisis of course this is different in every genre so keep that in mind but basically your characters are challenged in a unique and believable way where everything is at stake and your reader feels like failure is inevitable they call this the dark moment in a lot of cases the regroup is when your main character figures out a way to fix things um and put things into motion to solve the final Conflict that's the solution and the solution should involve significant risk now if you're writing action adventure this could be a death of the main character or a death of somebody important to the main character in a romance could be this relationship is not going to work um there's a lot of ways to think of that but it needs to be a solution to the final problem and one thing I would caution you with writing Solutions is that even if you have a very complicated solution and very complicated plot you really need to make it clear in the regroup section of your book how you're going to solve this problem and even if you keep a secret from your reader like I do this a lot keep the secret from the reader so they don't get that final solution till the very end you should set it up so once they get the solution they can follow along with little effort you don't want to confuse them at the end now I've read in fact my favorite book of all times has a very confusing solution and regroup but it was just so great I didn't care and I actually have read that book several times and each time I read it I'm like yeah yeah it makes total sense but then later I always forget like it I always think no it didn't make sense so you really got to try your best to keep the solution spelled out as simply as possible while still keeping um the mystery and Intrigue going until you decide to end the book so the reader wants to believe that the solution will work but they should be preparing themselves for the ultimate tragedy if they know the solution's going to work and they feel in their heart oh this is all going to work out they're going to put the book down I do that all the time all the time I get to the crisis and then I'm like well um I I just lose interest so you don't want to do that you want to keep them reading what makes a good climax again unexpected but inevitable I got an amazing response from 321 book and amazing reviews from fans because they fell in love with all three characters they wanted to believe even though I told them in the blur the three soulmates could really happen and they never expected me to kill JD in the end but of course I did and JD's suicide in front of blo Ark was the only way this plot could resolve he was never going to forgive himself he was never going to heal and this threesome was never going to last but I pulled it off in the dunat because I followed through with unexpected but inevitable and even though you're not allowed to kill a main character in a romance readers forgave me because I gave them the perfect day Numa I wrote a very non-traditional romance and ended it with a very traditional happily ever after so that's how I pulled it off and um I'm not going to lie and say you could do that in every case but this story was just set up and it allowed for it okay we're going to go through two books and I call this anatomy of an end and I'm going to go through two different books and I'm not really going to explain the plots too much because they're just way too complicated but I want to show you two different examples of how to set up an ending and I have two completely different kinds of books the first one is um one of my sci-fi books it's called fledge it's number two in the I am just junko series it's a sci-fi thriller with very high action and it's plot driven and the second one is a book called TT it's rook and Rona number five and it's a romantic suspense with with very low action and it's all character-driven so I'm going to give you two examples of this and again the anatomy of the end includes the crisis the recovery the climax and the ending sequence and I say sequence in all of these because for me at least there's not just one scene or if you're doing dual point of view it's not just one scene for her and one scene for him I usually do a long sequence for each one of these things and that's what I'm going to show you two different ways to do it in this little example Le and my plots are very complicated so keep that in mind and once again if you're going to do a complicated plot with a complicated solution you need to keep the solution simple it it doesn't have to be you know actionably simple but you need to use the right words to explain to your reader so that in their head they think it's simple I hope that uh makes sense I'm not telling you not to have a complicated solution at all I'm telling you to explain it to the reader in very easy terms and um just the right you know sentences that can firmly establish that they understand what's going to happen or what is happening in the climax so the first book is called fledge like I said sci-fi thriller High action and it's plot driven so of course I'm not going to go through all these plot points because it doesn't make sense if you didn't read the book you're not going to understand but I just want you to see them and know that before we get to the crisis a lot of things happen we have a beginning and a middle so then We Begin The Crisis and as I said I usually have a sequence of crises that happen at the same time and this book is a perfect example because I actually have four very very big crises happening pretty much all at the same time at the 75% mark and um each one of them like the first one starts out pretty bad but they just get bigger and bigger and bigger until the final one happens and your reader is just like w I just don't see how this can ever turn out right so that's what you want them to feel you want them to feel no hope at all and then I have a sequence of recovery scenes and in this particular book there are six total scenes that make up the recovery sequence in the regroup that's what I'm calling the regroup in my four guidepost so they get uh it's a really complicated book so I'm not even going to get into the plot of it but just know that I I have six of them all stacked one upon the other in that whole regroup um section and the bottom line is that the reader comes away knowing there is a plan I don't explain the plan to them at all because that would ruin the ending but they know there is a plan and they feel like junko has something up her sleeve and somehow she's going to pull this off even though it looks like it's impossible then I have a sequence of climaxes so it's not just one ending that I planned in this book I had actually six major points at the climax where all the things needed to resolve because as I said it's very long complicated book so the reader knows there is resolution but still no ending time out because I'd like to point out that everything in the recovery and the climax was set up earlier in the book everything that I listed in that um list of recovery and climax sequences every single point was mentioned before I got to the 75% point in the book and I think I mentioned that in the last video that you cannot introduce something new at the end of the book so even if you just mention it in one or two sentences in the beginning or in the middle that's great but you can you have to have set it up before you get to that point in the book otherwise readers feel like you just pulled it out of your ass and you just made it up as you went and you don't want them to think that you want them to think that you set this up on purpose so the ending sequence as I said I've been reading a lot of books lately where there's no ending and it's like what the you know and most of these are sci-fi literary fiction and I guess this is what editors seem to be looking for because they're traditionally published books but it's not what I'm looking for as a reader so even though I finished the book I was you know not motivated to go leave a raving review for these things because I just felt unsatisfied at the end so don't forget to end your book if you presented a problem in the book you have to find a solution for it the only time you're you don't have to find a solution for it is if this is a book in a series and you have already planned on solving that problem in a later book we're going to talk more about series coming up soon and that's perfectly fine but if you don't have a series and this is a standalone book or you don't plan on carrying that problem through then you need to solve it in this story right here so there are two types of endings as I said we went through the first book that was plot driven the fledge book was set up to stack the crises on top of one another for maximum dramatic effect because it is a plot driven book but in the Tau book because it's character driven I set it up totally differently I set it up as a series of crises solving them along the way for maximum character development so the ending sequence for junko is um I had three resolutions and I'm not going to go through them like I said because you just don't understand the plot if you haven't read it but there were three resolutions at the end where every loose end that I could think of for this particular book were tied up now this particular Series has a lot of mystery and this is only book two and there are several books after this one so there are still lots of mystery left in the book but all the major conflicts in this book when it started were all resolved at the end and there was actually um a little happily ever after at the end of this one which didn't happen in the other ones in series until the very last book so there was a completion of junko's character Arc where she started this book thinking she knew the difference between good and evil and she knew who is on which side and at the end she realizes no she has no idea what good and evil really means and there are many Shades of Gray between these two things and you can always have somebody more evil and the person you think is evil and so that was her character Arc that resolved at the end of the book junko fledge was a textbook example of structure and in that I mean that the beginning was exactly 25% the middle was exactly 50% and the ending was exactly 25% but as I have said earlier I think you can play around with the ending it really depends on the type of story you have or whether or not you can really fill in 25% of your book with those four um sequence events those guide poost because sometimes in a romance you can't stretch it out that long you just can't so you have to play around with it a little bit at the end but don't think that you can do that in the beginning and the middle cuz you can't you still have to try and follow the rules up until that point so the second um anatomy of the end is the taau book and as I um explained in the junko book um there's a beginning where lots of happens we have a beginning and a middle and then we begin the crisis and in this particular book I stacked the crisis um with the recoveries one on top of each other so I had and this was not um the recovery section it was just I was solving the crisis along the way that's that's all I was doing so I had one crisis which is a problem and then I had one recovery which is a solution and um I did that three times so by the time we get to the climax there's also three climax scenes and how um this the problems in this book get solved and they happen stacked one on top of each other and then there is a resolution to the end which is all the loose ends are tied up and the character Arc for Ford is that he learns that starting over as possible and the beginning of the book starts with him you running away from something and the ending of the book has him coming to terms with what he was running from and starting something new so make sure you keep your theme in mind um and tie the beginning to the end when I plot a book everything is done with purpose if this then that the story starts with a goal and by the end of the book The Reader understands the purpose of the story every scene has a goal and every scene leads to the ending all words enhance the theme so keep that in mind that's why I think theme is so important and if you have a theme it's so much easier to write the book because you know why you're writing it if you don't have a theme you can often find um when you get to the end that you do have one you just didn't know it but wouldn't it be nicer if you were writing along your theme the whole time so you didn't have to second guess yourself or wonder where you're going next with that thing or how this character should act so all words should enhance the theme and you really should go in knowing what that is if you're writing Romance the End is where you present a dark moment where the relationship falls apart that's the crisis have both characters realize something profound which is the recovery make your hero give your heroine a grand gesture which is the climax and then give them their perfect happily ever after which is the Duma so the take-home point is that that your hook should be original the hook is what makes people keep reading it's the look inside sample it can set up the end but it doesn't have to and it should be clever every plot has been done but not every plot has been done your way and also one more point the amount of tension drama and conflict depends on your genre or subgenre so if you're writing military science fiction then your tension drama and conflict is going to be way off the charts compared to somebody who's writing R Mantic comedy cuz there are just two completely different types of books and to take a point for your ending is that they should be intense the crisis has the most tension drama and conflict in the whole story to that point but that's not enough because the climax must have even more you know remember your plot graph where the little Peaks and valleys are going up the incline and you notice that the climax is higher than the crisis that's because the energy is higher there and also your your day new should be original and satisfying so once again the guy poost are the crisis the regroup the climax and the Duma and don't leave any of these things out it's really important that you put them all in so plotting a book we've gone through Beginnings middles and endings and hooks and scenes so far and you want to hook them in the beginning plant clues for the end you want to present and solve problems in the middle in a stepwise manner to build tension drama and suspense you want to have a series of complex problems as your crisis and by complex again it really depends on your genre or sub genre and you want to make each one worse than the last so if you're you know wondering well how do I do that in a romance if it's not you know epic and mindblowing I I mean I don't know a problem could be anything you get a drink spilled on a dress that's a problem you can solve it um versus something in like sci-fi military where people are getting killed so keep that in mind it's it's all relative compared to your genre some genre and your plot and you want to make each um problem worse than the last make your character plan how to solve them solve the crisis problems in a unique way and then make sure you have a proper ending that ties back to the beginning in order to keep your reader satisfied one more thing is about the fluff I'm going to go through this again it's boring and readers always know so don't do it because you're on a 5-year plan right if you want to be here in 5 years and I said this in the perfect year for the marketing videos then you have to plan it and so forget about all those people who are writing stupid porn and are making tons of money right now if you want to go write stupid porn feel free go for it but if you want to be here in 5 years because you have an actual career then you better um make sure that the books you're writing have meaning if you don't want to start all over with a pen name so ask yourself when you're plotting do you want to be on five years and if you do then plot something original so my process again start to finish and once more I'm going to reiterate that this is just my process and this is just my view on how to plot a book there are 100 you know other books out there courses out there are going to tell you how to do it differently and that's fine you don't have to agree with my method this is just the one that works for me and take what you want out of it and leave the rest behind if it doesn't work for you but I come up with the concept premise characters first then I come up with a theme and then I decide how the books end then I figure out the first twist the last twist then I get from the first twist to the crisis which is the middle and then I decide how to start because if I know the ending I know the best place to start and that's when I actually begin writing and once again if this structure stuff is your thing then get these books because if you're relating to these videos all of this came right out of these books and you're going to get a lot more out of them than you are these videos I think so don't be afraid to go and give them a try and if you don't like one of them try the other one try one at a time if you're not um super into structure I would recommend the plot Whisperer first if you want an excellent um breakdown or story structure for the film um story Silence of the Lambs that's in the story grid and story engineering is just one of my favorites even though it's a little bit wordy um it really makes a lot of sense to me so coming up um we have done Beginnings middles and scenes Hooks and endings and next time we're going to do point interviewing characters which is probably one of my very very favorite things to do so I can't wait to to get that one up so again if you don't want to check back every week There's a little form at the end of this post you can put in your email and you'll be notified every time I put up a video and it just makes it easier so you don't have to remember to come back every two weeks not every week every two weeks because these are releasing every two weeks on Wednesday okay that's it and again if you have any questions just leave a comment and as soon as I see it I'll give it an answer thanks for stopping by and I hope you got something from this