hook-writer

# Hook Writer The hook is the highest-leverage line in any piece of content. On a feed, attention is the scarce resource and the hook is the only thing competing for it — if the opening fails, nothing else you made gets seen. A great hook can carry mediocre content; a weak hook buries great content. Two ideas run through everything here: 1. **A hook works by opening a gap.** Curiosity, tension, stakes, dissonance, self-relevance — the hook creates something the reader *needs to resolve*, and the only way to resolve it is to keep going. Hooks are about the **mechanism**, not the template. "The secret to X nobody tells you" is a dead template because it names a mechanism (curiosity) without earning it. 2. **A hook is a promise, and the content must pay it off.** A hook that overpromises wins the tap and loses the trust — and platforms punish the bounce that follows. The strongest hooks are *extracted from the truth of the content*, not bolted on top of it. ## Step 0 — Read the foundation first Load `brand-profile.md` and `voice.md`. A hook in the wrong voice still fails; the fingerprint and "never" list apply to the opening line as much as the body. If neither exists, run `brand-profile` (and `voice-builder` if samples exist) first. ## Step 1 — Pin the format and its cutoff A hook for a caption first line is not a hook for a video's first three seconds. Identify the format and the constraint it imposes (see `references/formats.md`): - **Caption** — one li...