Schticks that Stick

As per my homepage, some stories lodge in your head and never leave. Years later you might forget the nitty-gritty of the plot, but you remember the thing, the one idea the whole piece was built on. I call it a gimmick, but to avoid negative connotations, let’s define it as the schtick! The hook, the one-sentence pitch. Here’s how I used a schtick.

First you go into the woods, find one that fits well in your hand and… jk

I often see schticks appear in two ways:

The World is the Hook

Some pieces grab you by where they put you. My favorites are video games. Fallout is one joke held for thirty years now: the future as 1950s America imagined it, with rayguns and ad jingles and capitalist optimism, dropped into a radioactive wasteland. Atompunk. You can describe it in a single sentence, and never mistake it for anything else.

Sidenote: Fallout, as initially designed, was not based in ’50s futuristic culture, but rather: the future if the transistor was never invented, placed in the nuclear fallout of a world in which society relied on vacuum tubes. But I digress…

BioShock does the same thing with Rapture: a city on the ocean floor, built by a man (Andrew Ryan) who decided that God and taxes were holding society back. A mixture of Art Deco and genius left unchecked brings out an unforgettable city under the sea.

The Structure is the Hook

Other pieces grab you by how they’re built. Pulp Fiction tells its story out of order, so a man killed in the middle could be alive again at the end. Megamind opens with the hero plummeting to his death, then rewinds. BioShock, again, but I wouldn’t dare spoil it if you haven’t played it. So go play it!

But tell any of these pieces straight and you’ve got a much different, much more ordinary piece. The reordering, the reveal, the world? That’s the hook.

With a schtick comes a warning. On its own, a schtick is just… a gimmick. You can have the cleverest premise and still lose momentum in the first five minutes. What makes Rapture, Fallout, Pulp Fiction, or even Megamind stick isn’t the gimmick — it’s the dialogue, the history, the twists and turns. So the real test isn’t “is the hook clever.” It’s: once you’re inside, is there a world that breathes? A story that benefits from its unique structure? Does it build the characters? Does the thing actually mean what it’s doing? A hook with nothing behind it might as well be a trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist. Simply a fun idea.

Now, how do I use gimmicks? And when? Well… I use them everywhere!

The Emmett Dunham Method (EDM for short)

I start every project with a fun idea, then add a schtick. That’s the cheap part done. The hard part comes after:

• Flight Response: Birthed and brought to life by Bearden Ezra Douglas. My role as a writer was to polish the genius he’d already laid onto the page. An anthology telling three short stories about different people “running” in life, it gave me a lot to work with. In fact, when we began working towards producing the piece, he already had a finished script. Where I came in was finding the nuance: tightening dialogue, heightening metaphors, and bringing my passion for layered writing. But the schtick was already there, and it was clever.
• Potty Talk: My precious baby, built off of a joke while conversing with colleagues at UMBC. Complaining about a bunch of media that was being released and performed at the time (late 2022/early 2023, I believe), I jokingly claimed I could write a play with two men talking while taking a dump that would be better than what was being put out. Four years later, and now it’s become a complex analysis of the struggles modern masculinity faces and how both the men and the women around them perpetuate self-sabotaging behaviors. One joke led to possibly one of the greatest pieces of art I’ve ever made. Or am making… because, as of writing this post, I’m still not finished. But rest assured, it is coming!
• El Silbón: Born out of a UMBC puppetry class. Inspired by Venezuelan folklore, I wrote a final piece about a monster who whistles. At the time, Ren Gill was all over my feeds, and I took great pleasure in his lyrical storytelling and unique acoustic sound (which often featured whistling). With a whistle and a plethora of South American history to pull from, El Silbón was, once again, built from a schtick — one I seek to eventually build into an eerie animated musical short.

I wouldn’t want to spoil any potential future projects, but all of my favorite ideas come from a unique style or gimmicky idea, fleshed out into something heartfelt and layered.

So in my humble opinion, lead with the hook. Then cultivate it: the world, the characters, the parts that will carry it. That’s what makes a schtick stick.