A Question Mark Looks Like A Fish Hook

We’re always being told to hook our reader in the opening pages of our script.

How many times have you heard that? Hook your reader early!

Great. Solid advice. How?

Well, good writing. Sure. Strong characters. Clear goals. Vivid worlds. Stakes. Specificity.

Fresh and interesting scenes that feel cinematic yet grounded. All great stuff.

But how do you really latch that fish hook into the reader’s brain and drag them through those tricky opening pages?

There just so happens to be a tool in your writing tacklebox for this. And it’s so obvious it even looks like the thing you need.

It’s a question mark.

It’s some evolutionary quirk of the human brain that we crave order. We hate chaos. That’s why timelapse cleaning videos are so satisfying to watch. Messy = chaos. Clean = order.

One form of chaos that particularly rankles us is a gap in our knowledge. A question asked but not yet answered.

Imagine you’re at a party and someone tells you the set-up of a long joke, but then gets interrupted and leaves before telling you the punchline. How frustrating would that be?

As in life, so in stories. If you, writer, ask a question, you’ll be planting a little fish hook in the reader’s brain that won’t unlatch until you give them the answer.

This is how murder mysteries are built. They ask a question at the start - who killed this person, and why? (chaos). And they answer it right at the end. The various gaps in our knowledge are filled. The killer is brought to justice (order).

How many times have you stayed up late to finish a not-very-good detective thriller, purely because you thought I need to know how this ends.

Asking a question is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to engage a viewer. It’s the ultimate low hanging fruit. It works harder than all the strong characters and clear goals and vivid worlds put together.

Zach Creggers’ Weapons is shaping up to be a massive box office hit. It’s an excellent film across the board - craft, acting, direction. But I believe there’s another reason it’s resonated so strongly beyond its core audience.

Like a murder mystery, Weapons asks a question in its opening moments and answers it in the final sequence.

What happened to all those children? Such a bizarre, unsettling breach in the natural order of things. The question creates a profound, disturbing state of chaos in our minds.

We crave resolution. And in delaying that resolution, the film keeps the fish hook planted for almost the entire run time.

Weapons is billed as a horror film. It is a horror film. But it wraps its horror around a puzzle-box mystery that keeps viewers engaged beyond the jump-scares and creepiness.

But what if you don’t have any questions? What if you’re not writing a puzzle box or a murder mystery?

Fear not. The question mark is still your friend. Here’s how you can use it.

Having your characters ask a question is one thing. Provoking a question in the mind of your audience is a different thing altogether.

Let’s do a little experiment. You see two headlines. Which one are you more likely to click on?

One has a question literally in its title. The other is just a statement.

The first one sounds intriguing enough. Lots of people would like to make an extra £50 a week…

But lets be honest. Your first thought when reading headline 1 will be something along the lines of, scam. Or at least scam-adjacent. Some dodgy MLM scheme; maybe online surveys; at best probably very low-paid remote work.

Or you might think…actually I’m good. Not sure if I need that extra £50 enough to click on a random link.

Sure, there’s a question in there. But it’s not necessarily enough to draw you in.

But that second headline. That does something different to your brain. You first thought after reading the second headline might be:

I’m losing £50 a week? How? Wouldn’t I notice that? Is someone ripping me off? What exactly is going on here? And how can you, of all people, stop it happening?

These two headlines could easily link to the same article. But that second headline conjures questions without actually posing them. It creates chaos in our brain. And only by clicking the link will that chaos be restored to order.

Against your better judgement, you need to know the answer to a question that wasn’t even asked.

Let’s look at two examples from television.

First up, Mad Men

For two whole episodes we’re introduced to the chic, low-stakes world of affluent advertising execs in 1960s Manhattan.

We get the measure of the show. Beautifully cut costumes; aspirational homes and bars and offices; arch then-vs-now satire. All sitting on the shoulders of our suave, unshakeable protagonist Don Draper.

Then comes the opening scene of the third episode.

Don’s on a train. A man approaches. We don’t recognise him, but Don does. The man addresses Don as Dick Whitman, and Don responds like this is the most normal thing in the world. They reminisce about their service days, then the man moves off.

And that’s it.

We have no idea why this man thinks Don is called Dick Whitman, or why Don allows him to go on thinking that. We get no answers in the episode, nor in the next episode. The mystery lingers behind the day-to-day dramas at Sterling Cooper.

No questions asked. No mystery within the world of the show itself. And yet, a hook in our brain. What’s the deal with the Don/Dick thing? We need an answer!

If you’ve seen the full seven seasons, you’ll know that this mystery isn’t particularly consequential. But in these early episodes, it’s enough to have us leaning forward, craving resolution.

It’s a constructed mystery embedded into what’s essentially a premium soap opera.

Here’s another example.

In the pilot episode of Better Call Saul, Saul Goodman (still known as Jimmy McGill) is a struggling attorney. He’s a bottom-feeding, ambulance-chasing public defender, scraping by on $700 gigs and operating out of the back of a Vietnamese beauty parlour.

And yet when, in amongst a stack of final notices, he finds a cheque for $26,000…he tears it into pieces.

Why? We know he’s desperate for money. Why in the hell does he choose to live in penury rather than cashing the cheque?

Like Mad Men, the answer is actually part of the premise. It needn’t be a great enigma at all. A lesser writer would’ve introduced Jimmy’s battle with his brother’s employers before the cheque-ripping scene.

But Vince Gilligan* is made of sterner stuff. By holding back the source of Jimmy’s motivation, he plants that little fish hook in our brain.

What a weird thing to do, tear up a cheque. What’s going on here? Why would he do that?

Neither of these examples are asking a question in the text of the drama - the protagonists themselves know what’s going on.

Rather, the writers are creating a mystery in the mind of the viewer.

And it’s all to do with the order in which they deploy information.

*Vince Gilligan is a master at throwing out little fish hooks. He uses this technique so often its basically a motif in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul - but it never gets old.

And one final example from my own career. I was developing Monday with the brilliant Greek director Argyris Papadimitropoulos.

We knew we wanted to track two ex-pats living in Greece over several months, charting the rise and fall of their tumultuous romance.

And we knew that the draw of the film would be the grounded, gritty, incidental details of a relationship as it blossoms and then painfully decays. Something many of us can relate to.

But we felt like it needed something else. We were still missing…a hook

Then I landed on an idea that sparked our imagination. What if we restricted ourselves to a single 24 period per sequence? We could only check in with them on a single day. Five Mondays spread out over a year, with large gaps in between.

It focused our attention and gave the story the guardrails it needed. But it did something else - it created little pockets of mystery.

Each time we meet Mickey and Chloe at a new stage of their lives, questions immediately arise in the mind of the viewer as to what has happened since we last saw them.

Which major incidents have we missed, and how have they impacted the relationship?

We had a lot of fun drip-feeding these missing details that the viewer naturally craved.

And suddenly the script came alive. Cast, financiers, and everything else fell into place. Eighteen months later I was in Athens, watching Sebastian Stan and Denise Gough flirt, frolic, and fight.

So take a look at your current script. Do you need to lay out every piece of story information sequentially? Is there room for a little ambiguity?

Can you back-to-front a character’s action and their motivation?

Can you provoke a question by simply changing what we learn, and when?

Can you take the building blocks of your premise and jumble them around to keep us craving answers?

How many fish hooks do you have in your tackle box?

I try to keep things inspirational here, but a particular article by the writer Cole Haddon struck a chord.

It’s a no-punches-pulled account of selling his first spec script, and as far as I’m concerned it does a great job of capturing the euphoria, despair and general “break-evenness” of the process.

It’s also a great time capsule to the “before times” of 16 years ago.

It’s not the most uplifting read, and made worse by the fact that it all went down in the golden years of the late 2000s, rather than the AHEM less than optimal industry conditions of 2025 - so proceed with caution.

Thanks for reading.

Till next Tuesday, go get after it.

Rob