Iconic Memorable Hooks: an article by: GF Willmetts.
Have you noticed how easy it is to remember iconic places and where they are? I mean, you only have to look at the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe to know they are in Paris. The same goes for sports events, even if people won’t remember where they took place in four years’ time. The same applies to Tower Bridge in London or the Sydney Opera House in… well, Sydney, Australia. All right, the last one is a bit of a giveaway, but you get my point about remembering places.
The same thing applies to fictional planets. You can easily distinguish Vulcan from Skaro, from Pern, or even Arrakis. That’s not difficult. One is a hot world, one is mostly petrified from a nuclear war, one has thread burning the ground whenever its moon gets too close, and the last is mostly desert. Do I need to mention Tatooine or Hoth? The names get ingrained, even down to the spelling. I don’t even have to tell you which reality they belong to. Oddly, fictional Earth is less memorable unless aspects of it are being destroyed by Martian war machines.
This phenomenon extends to a mixture of real and fictional places. The Devil’s Tower is immediately identified with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although I doubt UFO fans go there to pay homage to the film; they likely visit to see if it could really be used as a beacon for a giant mothership after 40 years. People tend to be more interested in visiting filming locations, which has become a tourist industry in itself.
Our memory is often better with visual information linked to words than the other way around. Even so, you have to wonder how some places get ingrained in our memory even more strongly than character names. Are you likely to visit them all? Probably just for the series or films you liked.
It’s a simple analysis to say that our visual memory is stronger than our word memory, hence we probably remember more from films than books. Even so, we need to read books if only to strengthen that part of our memory and not just rely on the snippets we read online. Visual prompts are strengthened by word cues, which is why the fictional planets mentioned above don’t need accompanying photographs.
The same thing also applies to spacecraft. You can easily identify the Enterprise from the Discovery or the Millennium Falcon just by looking at pictures. Try that with remembering the name of the spacecraft from Forbidden Planet. The C-57D is a lot harder to remember, illustrating that having a memorable name is just as important. You’d likely just remember it as looking like a flying saucer.
Memorable names are important. In my own fiction, I work both ways. My Psi-Kick stories were thought out with a good selection of names, occasionally associated with the characters’ abilities. The Vampiri have complicated names that even I have to check for spelling accuracy, but this was done to ensure they came across as being very old and distinct, almost like a different species. Yet, I can also write first-person stories without using a name, because I use a different kind of hook for readers to remember the characters.
This approach isn’t uncommon, but let’s look at names in the superhero genre. Yes, it’s easy to remember the secret identities of both superheroes and supervillains. Stan Lee’s use of the same double initial made names like Peter Parker, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Bruce Banner, Scott Summers, Warren Worthington, et al., stick in your head, as did names that didn’t follow that pattern, like Tony Stark and Ben Grimm (I bet you can remember his middle initial ‘J’ since he said it enough times during the Stan Lee era). I can still remember the alter egos of the original members of the Legion of Super-Heroes and even their home planets. That might just be me and my quirky memory, or the fact that they did the roll call at the start of each story.
A good name or place sticks in the memory. I discovered a few years ago that when it comes to character names in American TV shows, the writers often check for real-life counterparts—not to find unique names, but to see how common they are. A common name reduces the chances of a match to a created personality and lowers the risk of being sued. Even so, this approach can only go so far. It’s probably easier to mix a conventional surname with a nickname and rely more on the latter in dialogue.
As a writer, I’m aware that words have power, especially if they can be remembered, but you can never be too sure which ones will last. Generally, selection is based on what feels right. Even when authors select words from other sources, there still has to be a sense that they fit. When I first read Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy, I wasn’t aware of his word sources, but they inadvertently stuck with me. It was only decades later that I learned they were mostly from Arabic sources, which makes sense for a desert world. Even so, I still wonder how the word ‘ghola’ stuck in my memory, let alone how I could spell it correctly after so many years. Looking up the Arabic meaning, it translates to ‘cast out’, nothing to do with cloning. For me now, it simply means another word for ‘clone’.
When you read Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and stop referring to the glossary at the back of the book, you realize you’ve learned to associate Cyrillic words with their meanings. This highlights how you learn words from books, no matter what you’re reading.
Although I’ve emphasized the significance of names and how we remember them, I’m now going to throw you a curveball. In some of my short stories, I don’t always name my characters, especially in first-person narratives. After all, how often do you think of yourself by your own name? Sure, you might use your first name or nickname when addressing yourself while pondering a problem, but this information doesn’t help the reader identify with your character. You want to share only what’s important, not stop to give a name check. You hope that you’ve got them engrossed in the story so much that they don’t care. See The Quotas Man story this month. Yet, as I hope I’ve proven over the years, you still read the story. Objectively, the name doesn’t have to be the hook; it can just as easily be the puzzle line that introduces you to the plot. In the trade, this is actually called ‘the hook’.
If you have to describe a story plot, chances are you’ll use the hook. ‘Civil war on a desert planet’ and you’re describing Dune. What’s the final frontier from? In a ‘galaxy, far far away’. Exactly. The hook is what stays in your memory, hence its name. How strong it is depends on many things—from repetition to novelty. A lot depends on what can get inside your head. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with whether you like or dislike the subject. Should I mention Plan 9 From Outer Space for those who’ve seen it?
This tells us a lot about how our memories are stored. The tag or hook stays at the top of the memory while some of the details fade. Test yourself on various films or books and see what you use to recall them. Whether you like it or not, you’re carrying a lot of hooks in your memory, whether the original creators intended it or not. Having something unique is what makes it important. No wonder you can remember places you’ve never visited around the world. I’ve got the centre of Amsterdam in my head from films and TV and could probably point out landmarks despite never being outside of the UK. It’s a useful burden of memory, but it’s the way memory hooks things up.
© GF Willmetts 2024
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