Cross-Referenced: A Hoy Book Test Variation

Here’s a Hoy Book Test variation that was inspired by the mailbag post on Monday. As I said in that response, I don’t particularly feel the need to justify the use of a second book with the Hoy Book Test. But I had the idea for this variation where a second book is required and tried it out the other day with my friend Lyndsey at the public library and it ended up going over surprisingly well, and I think it’s conceptually pretty interesting.

I asked Lyndsey to grab any novel from the library.

She came back with a book called The Drift by C.J. Tudor.

I checked to see how many pages it was (getting the info—the first noun or interesting word—I needed for the Hoy test) and handed the book back to her.

“Okay, about 340 pages. I want you to take this book and do something a little strange with it. I want you to hold it in front of you and almost let it guide you to another book that seemingly has nothing to do with this one. Another novel. One with about the same number of pages. Anything in the 300s is fine. I know it sounds stupid, but actually try to imagine it’s pulling you to an area of the library and then let it guide you like a dowsing rod to a particular book.”

Lyndsey left and came back with both books: The Drift and then some other book whose name I don’t remember, but the title might as well have been, “Lonely Woman Fucks a Cowboy.” It had one of these types of covers:

I explained to Lyndsey the theory on how there are really only seven types of plots, broadly speaking.

“That’s kind of well known, but what people don’t always know is that there is usually even more connective tissue between stories than just those plots. Even from page to page and book to book, you’ll see correlations between the thematic elements, or names, or words that start with the same letter. I’ll show you.”

I took the cowboy book for myself and slid the other book over to Lyndsey. [I don’t bother to force anything here. She brought back two random books from the library. And I just took one.] I told her to flip through the pages, and I’d say stop on a random page.

I stopped her on page 90 of the book she held, and I opened my book to page 90 as well. “What are the first few words on that page in your book,” I asked. She read out from the first line. It was about a guy named Paul who had a “new life.” I read from page 90 in my book. It was about a guy named Todd who the narrator went to high school with and how he hadn’t changed in years.

“See?” I said, “on both page 90s they’re writing about a male, with a one syllable name, and about how their life has or hasn’t evolved. Even though this is a cowboy romance, and that book is some kind of survival story, there’s still that overlap.”

I got a little lucky here, but I was prepared to find some correlation (or lack-there-of (you’ll see)) between what was on the pages regardless. I just happened to get one that was very obvious.

“Here, we’ll try it again. Once you look into this stuff, you get pretty good at seeing the connections. Here, I’ll flip this time and you call out stop.”

I flipped through the book and stopped where she said to, then miscalled the page for the one I knew in the book she held—168. I told her to go to that page but don’t read anything yet. As she did, I secretly flipped a few pages in my book so I could actually be on that page as well. If you’re way far away from the page you need to get to, you can also just close the book absentmindedly, and then open it back up and flip to that page.

I read the first line from my page 168. It was about a road that was very straight.

I knew on her page 168 the first words were “The wind.”

Now it’s just time to improvise.

“Okay, so this is. about a very straight road. Now, your book takes place in the mountains or something, yeah? So I doubt it’s going to be about a road. But I think it will be something that goes straight and goes off into the distance. Something natural. What does that in the mountains? A bird maybe? Or like… the wind or something? Can you read the first few words on that page?”

She opens the book and reads, “The wind died down….”

There was like a half-second where she didn’t react. Her attitude was sort of like, “Yes, that’s correct. You thought it might be about the wind, and it was.” She was almost too caught up in the premise at first.

But then it hit her. It can’t be that all books have some sort of similarities from page to page. “Wait… what?” she said. “How is that possible?” She grabbed my book and compared it to hers.

If you don’t like bullshitting on the spot, then you’re not going to have fun with this premise. I enjoy this sort of thing, so I don’t stress it. And I’ve given myself a wide range of opportunities to find a “hit.” I’ve said there’s going to be a correlation thematically, or that letters used or the types of words will be similar in some manner.

And while the end result has to be the first word or two they’re looking at on their page, I can use any word or imagery from the first sentence of the page in the book I’m holding to get there. So there are a lot of paths to take.

And remember, you know what word they’re going to be reading in the end, so no matter what, you have that hit in your pocket. So even if you have to just give up on the premise, you still have a trick that works. You can always just say, “Hmm… well from the way this top line is structured, I would guess the first word or two in your book would have something to do with teeth.” (Assuming that’s the word you know they’ll be thinking of.)

To practice your BS’ing, just get two novels and go through page by page. Looking at the first line in one book on a given page, and seeing how you might use that line to get you to the first words on the same page in a different book.

I find it very easy to do 20% of the time, somewhat challenging 50% of the time, and seemingly impossible about 30% of the time.

Structurally, having them riffle the pages and call out a page number during the introductory phase completely normalizes that procedure. And the premise of all books having this connection page by page completely justifies the second book as well.

The key is to have some idea in the back of your mind how you might handle a correlation or a non-correlation for both sets of pages.

Cheat Sheet

First Set of Pages

If you can make some sort of correlation: Make it.

If you can’t make some sort of correlation: “Okay, interesting. So your book has a noun related to business. And mine has the word ‘trot.’” Start “working out” what that means under your breath. “Okay, so page 90 is a noun there and a verb here. Business. More of like… an animal? So something natural, I guess you’d say. So that’s a differential of what…47? 49?” You’re just mumbling something like that to yourself under your breath. The idea here is that you didn’t expect these two words to be similar. But you’re somehow calculating some sort “relationship” between those two words. So you can then apply that “calculation” in the next phase.

Second Set of Pages

If you can make some sort of correlation, and you also could the first round: Make it. Showing once again how these books are connected.

If you can’t make a correlation, and you also couldn’t the first round: “Okay… so if that same differential is carrying on through the book. Hmm…. then since this word is ‘keyboard,’ the first interesting word on your page should be…hmm… it’s going to be food related. Something big and heavy. What’s heavy? A turkey or something. Read what it is for me. Oh… a watermelon? That makes sense. I should have gotten that.”

If you can make some sort of correlation, but you couldn’t the first round: “Okay, so when we were back on page 90 there was no discernible connection. But that’s not going to be constant. These things sort of fluctuate and intersect like sin waves. So with that differential…hmm… here on page 168 we should be much closer. Not thematically, not with a 47 differential of course, but with my word—Sunflower—yours will probably also start with an S. Somewhat long word. A couple syllables, at least. But again, thematically, it shouldn’t be something that exists in nature. Something… I don’t know… like ‘spreadsheet’ or ‘switchblade’ or something. What is it? Oh… it is spreadsheet? Yeah, that seemed likely.”

If you can’t make some sort of correlation, and you couldn’t the first round: “Okay, with that initial differential and my word—Sparkling—yours should be something hmm … a proper noun… more towards the front of the alphabet. Like a man’s name with a D or an E at the start. Maybe F. Although…[shakes head] no that’s too much I think. Can you check? What is it? It’s Dominic? Yeah, that makes sense.”

To be clear, all this talk of a “differential” is just to imply there’s some sort of metric that can be used to track how different two words are from each other.

At some point, it makes sense to get a look at another page in your book so you can repeat this, if you want. Just switch books to “see if you can do it from the other direction.”