Monday Mastery: Hook and payoff
What I learned about writing from viral TikTok videos
Welcome to Monday Mastery, an all-new series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.
I recently bought a course on how to create viral TikTok videos. Don’t judge me. I was curious! (And the course creators’ ads worked like a charm on me …)
One of the things they taught in this course is how you need a strong hook and payoff for a video to be successful.
The course creators’ rules are as follows:
The hook has to be the very first thing viewers hear or see — within 5 seconds — and it has to be intriguing enough to stop users from scrolling.
The payoff has to be at the very end, and it has to be worth watching for.
It got me thinking about hooks and payoffs when we’re writing for an audience.
The hook and the payoff should exist in your writing, too — but they have work a little differently for readers versus short-form video viewers.
The hook
It’s true, you need to hook your reader right away — but you can’t stop with a single hook.
Take an article, for example.
The headline has to hook the reader enough to get them to read the first sentence.
The first sentence has to hook the reader enough to get them to read the first paragraph.
The first paragraph has to hook them enough to read the whole intro.
The intro has to hook them enough to move them into the body content — and so on, all the way to the concluding sentence.
Now, let’s take an email.
The subject line has to hook the recipient enough that they open the email.
The first sentence of the email has to hook them enough that they don’t immediately delete it (or worse, mark it as spam!).
And so on, to the end.
We hook a reader through:
Resonance (personal, emotional connection)
Pacing
Organization and structure (what goes where)
Word choice
Storytelling
The payoff
Unlike what those experts recommended for short-form video content, in content written for an audience you can’t wait until the end for the payoff.
The reader needs to feel like they’re getting value at every step.
No one is going to read a 100-word email, much less a 2,000-word article, to get to a payoff.
Journalists use an inverted pyramid structure in news articles for this reason. They put the most important information (the lead) in the first paragraph.
Like the hook, you’re probably going to need more than one payoff when you’re writing for an audience.
A good rule of thumb is there should be a payoff — even just a small one — in every section of your writing. If you have an article with an intro, three body sections, and a conclusion, there should be five payoffs.
So what do I mean by “payoff”?
An answer to a question
A story
Information that can help the reader
A concept, framework or process
A statistic
A visual
A call-to-action
Hook ‘em and pay ‘em off
In a world of TikTok videos, writers have to contend with audiences that have ever-decreasing attention spans. But writing and short-form video are two very different mediums, consumed in very different ways. Hooks and payoffs work in writing, but you have to approach them differently to engage, persuade and move readers.