The Art of Storytelling: Edition 10

You’ve said it, or heard it. “You don’t know what happened to me yesterday.” Nothing given away, and somehow the room leans in anyway.

That’s a hook. You already use them, probably daily, without thinking about it. This edition is about doing it on purpose.

What a hook actually is

A hook is a gap. Something your audience half knows, with one piece missing.

Psychologist George Loewenstein named this in 1994: curiosity isn’t triggered by total ignorance, it’s triggered by partial knowledge. You need to know just enough to notice something is missing. That missing piece creates a small, real discomfort, a kind of mental itch, and the mind wants it resolved.

That’s why “you don’t know what happened to me yesterday” works and “let me tell you about my week” doesn’t. The first names a specific gap. The second is just an announcement.

What’s happening in the brain

This isn’t only a writing trick. Curiosity research shows dopamine circuits treat information itself as a reward, not just food or money. Your brain gets a small hit simply from anticipating an answer.

Curiosity also peaks at a sweet spot: not too little known, not too much. A gap that’s too vague feels irrelevant. A gap that’s already answered feels dull. The best hooks sit right in between, specific enough to matter, open enough to pull.

Where hooks go wrong

In the room, I see the same mistake over and over. People default to the hook that’s comfortable for them, not the one that fits the story. The same opener, reused because it’s familiar, not because it’s earned.

A good hook is tailored. It fits this story, for this audience, right now. A generic one is loose, and loose loses power fast, whether you’re opening a keynote, a client meeting, or a LinkedIn post someone was two seconds from scrolling past.

A few that work

Books do it in one line. Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, a contradiction your brain can’t leave alone. Orwell opened 1984 with clocks striking thirteen, one wrong detail in an otherwise ordinary sentence.

On stage, the same principle holds. The strongest openings skip the introduction entirely and drop straight into a specific, unresolved moment, then make the audience wait a beat for the rest.

On LinkedIn, it’s the same mechanism at a smaller scale. A post that opens with a flat announcement gets scrolled past. A post that opens with a specific, unfinished moment gets read.

Try this: Name Your Gap

Next time you’re about to tell a story, pitch, or write a post, try this before you start:

Write down what your audience already knows or assumes about the topic. Then name the one specific piece they don’t have yet, the piece that would actually change something for them if they knew it. Write a single sentence that points at that missing piece without filling it in. Read it back. If it sounds like something you’d say about anyone’s week, tighten it until it could only be about this one.

That’s the difference between a hook and a habit.