The Hook’s Correctness
or A Writer's Dilemma (short story)
Photo: Unsplash/ Vidar Nordli-Mathisen
The historian opens a new blank page in Scrivener.
Three figurines stand aligned a few centimeters from the laptop screen: a replica of a terracotta soldier, a sculpture in faux Parian marble, and a bronze Etruscan goddess delicately holding her dress with her left hand.
Qin, Nike, and Thana. H cannot write without them in sight.
No. Forget everything you read in Primo Levi. This book is not about the raw experience of victims.
It’s Saturday night. From the seventeenth floor, the club lights at the edge of the park shimmer. The historian gazes out the wide window for a few moments, then sips his tea and rereads his notes.
The code of growth is what the audience ultimately takes from a good story.
The page refuses to yield. His left hand strokes his carefully groomed beard, his eyes fixed on the figurines. For hours he has struggled to find a marketable angle. He needs to sell this book. The few articles he’s published in recent months barely paid for his meal vouchers.
H brushes his fingers over the bonneted head of the young Etruscan, who begins to dance. Etruscan ritual. All about faith.
He keeps writing as Thana lets her dress slip off and lifts her arms above her head. Her fingers curve into the soft classical ballet position, the thumb tilting lightly toward the index. A seated chorus of women echoes the melody’s gentle rhythm. Thana spins faster and faster, whirling like a spindle.
Her skin turns blue, and H watches in horror as the young woman bares her fangs. She becomes Charun, the omen of death.
Thana stops. She shudders, tries to hide, but a Roman arrow pierces her back. It isn’t the first time this has happened to her, right after she begins to dance.
H deletes everything.
No, I won’t write from the victim’s view. Victims don’t sell. Today’s bestsellers turn ordinary men into executioners.
A new idea, he has to try it.
Qin stirs. Ashen, because his tunic’s red bled into the soil where he waited more than twenty centuries. Hair tied in a bun, jaw set, the infantryman raises his sword. He knows he is about to kill. His gestures are fluid. One, two, three fall beneath his blade, their blood spilling to his feet. Qin’s soles step into the wet, sticky earth.
H’s words, crafted to chill the reader to the bone, pour swiftly across the screen. He types at over eighty words per minute. Severed heads, dying horses, the cloying smell of blood flowing, and flowing, and flowing.
I should have remembered Maistre: in the animal realm rules the violent law, forever seeking life’s secret through blood. And above every beast stands man, the merciless destroyer.
H lifts his right hand from the keyboard and reaches toward Qin. He has to push him away from Nike. It is vital to shield her from the assassin. His blows are deadly.
“Don’t even think about it!” Qin shouts, his thick moustache bristling as H’s hand is about to move him aside. “The earth is always drenched in blood. It is nothing but an altar.”
Qin raises his sword again, turning his torso toward Nike.
H rushes to erase his words. He wipes the screen and mutters: “I’m drowning in clichés again.”
He scowls. The market doesn’t need another book about mute masses of victims, nor another glorifying executioners. No, he will not make that mistake.
I need something unpredictable. The inevitable must slip in unnoticed.
Nike flutters her wings. It’s truly she— stolen by the French from her altar on Samothrace, stripped of her arms and of all expression. So famous, she now waits on the staircase at the Louvre, as graceful as she once was on the prow of her ship.
Qin lunges with his sword. One strand breaks free, quivering in the air with menace.
“Stop, madman, stop!” H cries, trying to block him, but only scratching his fingers on the fighter’s shell-like vest.
“My tribe must win. She is the enemy,” Qin’s voice booms through the laptop.
“What do you know of this?” H seethes with wrath. “Stay in your antiquity. It was better then, trust me. Be glad you never knew nationalism.”
“You’re talking nonsense.” Qin fixes his bun.
“Pinnacle of inflamed emotion,” H mumbles.
Qin lifts his sword. “Are you mocking me? I don’t understand a word.” Qin lunges at H.
“At least back then, each side knew its enemies,” H presses, and Qin halts his attack.
H sips his tea, forcing himself to calm down now that Qin has lowered his gaze and is cleaning his sword.
He can return to his 22,000 words on nationalism. That is all he has managed in the past three months.
A dogma. Illusions. Contrasts. Chauvinism.
He writes again: “The administration of things will replace the governance of people, Engels proclaimed it one hundred and fifty years ago. Yet today’s world is again stumbling toward a confused moral effort. A world torn by the excesses of nationalism.”
Thana pinches Nike, who folds her wings in fear. H moves her to the left side of the laptop. He strokes her wings, trying to calm her.
“You cannot be afraid,” he tells her in soft voice. “You are my protagonist. The sea wind holds your wings forever open. You are the symbol of victory.”
Thana shakes her hands in protest. “Am I humiliated again?”
“Who even remembers the Etruscans?” H waves dismissively.
There’s a reason he chose the three figurines, and it has nothing to do with their personalities. Thana represents the defeated, Qin is always on the side of the victors, and Nike is the balance, though lately she’s turned into a bit of a coward.
No matter how hard he tries, H can’t focus. He switches on the television. A parade of the powerful: money, tariffs, patriotism shouted in sharp voices. Not many options: dark horror films or animal shows. H turns back to the page. The salsa rhythm from the park’s club pierces the night.
This book must sell. It must have backers, influencers, and at least one prize to bring me back into the spotlight.
He writes again: “The rise of nationalism today is a global phenomenon, perhaps the strongest of all. Young dissidents abandon or attack universities, intellectual pursuits, organized education, because they identify them with this vast dehumanizing machine.”
He hesitates. The words feel hollow, now he needs to take a stand. How much longer can he keep dodging it?
He types again: “We need patriots to bring change.”
There. He’s managed to write it, even though a tingling creeps across his skin. Yet with this hook, the book will sell this year.
Thana keeps dancing, Nike’s wings remain frozen, and Qin studies his sword with care.
The words spill across the screen at more than a hundred words per minute, aligning themselves neatly beneath the right hook.
The end