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This week: Capturing Readers with Cliffhangers Edited by: Joy  
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Every single chapter of those books had to end with a cliffhanger. It was the law. A chapter would finish with "Tash stepped off the spaceship and heard a blood-curdling scream!" Then you'd read the next chapter and it would say "But apparently it was just a bird."
Daniel Wallace on the Galaxy of Fear series
Moominpappa: "That was thrilling, eh? But you see, it's a trick all good authors use, to close a chapter at the ghastliest moment."
Tove Jonsson, from Moominpappa's Memoirs
Brightening at the discovery that they were not a bereaved couple in need of counseling, Fullbright revealed his true convivial nature. "Come in, come in! I was just cremating a customer."
Dean Koontz, from the Frankenstein-Prodigal Son
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about writing cliffhangers.
Your Drama Newsletter Editors: zwisis kittiara Joy
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Note: In the editorial, I refer to third person singular as he, to also mean the female gender, because I don't like to use they or he/she. |
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Dean Koontz, the master of suspense, ends chapter ten of his novel Phantoms with: “In that strange, suspended bubble of time, Jenny had an icy premonition that she didn’t want to believe. She was certain—she sensed; she knew—that all of them would not leave this place alive.” Now, don’t you think this is some strong cliffhanger even without any physical action?
A cliffhanger is a plot device that heightens the intensity of a story. Cliffhangers usually come at the end of scenes or chapters. Similar to hooks, their main purpose is to tempt the reader to go on reading by signaling a dramatic teaser or creating an emotional tension for the story.
During the pulp fiction days, serials usually ended with someone, usually the protagonist, being in physical danger, so to make the viewers, listeners, or readers want to come back for the next segment. One such story used to be Perils of Pauline. Yet, even before that, Charles Dickens used cliffhangers in periodicals since he wrote his novels as serials. He began this practice with Pickwick Papers, in the form of text accompanying a series of engravings. His approach aroused curiosity and made him a sensational writer. Not only Dickens but also Alexandre Dumas in France made use of serialized fiction and cliffhangers, and even a couple of millenniums ago, in Ancient Greece, Sophocles used cliffhangers in his trilogies.
In our day, popular soap operas and TV dramas in series frequently use cliffhangers by manipulating the audience’s attention to several different points of view or to the different stories of different people in the same plot. This sometimes results in the loss of reader interest and a loss in tension; however, while they raise the suspense level in one person’s storyline, if they include hints for the next person’s dilemma in the cliffhanger, the transition becomes smooth, and the viewers do come back.
Cliffhangers are used in the endings of chapters, scenes, or the serial segments of TV and Film. As each category of fiction creates its own mix of emotional experiences, this doesn’t mean that you should end every scene and every chapter with a scream or a knife in the back, for such chapters, although they bind their readers to the book, do not guarantee success. It is all right to leave a few chapter endings on a lower tone. After all, how you use the cliffhangers depends on the story or the novel you are writing, and not every novel needs to keep the readers on their toes all the time.
My personal preference is to write the first chapter of a book as exciting as possible and end it with a cliffhanger, even if a subtle one, only because, in the process of accepting a novel for publication, most editors and publishers do not read beyond the first chapter, especially if the chapter is dull. Then, in the course of writing the story, if a cliffhanger is dangled in front of the reader, it should be resolved quickly enough in the next chapter or the following one.
You might ask, “Do cliffhangers only point to dangerous situations?” Not necessarily. Cliffhangers can be physical or emotional. In a physical cliffhanger, the concrete action like a stabbing of falling off a precipice is for the reader to visualize; on the other hand, this occurrence may be signaled as if something will or might happen soon. In an emotional cliffhanger, the writer may leave a character at the height of an emotion or with the threat of strong emotion in his next step. A good example can be a mother finding her child in danger or unknowingly walking into a situation where her child might be in danger.
A cliffhanger can be shown through narration, in a dialogue, or by a character’s uncovering a truth in some way. James Scott Bell, in his book Plot & Structure, page 124-125, categorizes the cliffhanger endings as:
Impending disaster
Dangerous emotions
Portent or an omen
Mysterious dialogue
Secret revealed
Major decision or vow
Announcement of a shattering event
Reversal or surprise (which is a new information that turns the story around.)
Question left in the air
A cliffhanger ending is useful for chapters and scenes for building tension, but in a series, ending each novel in a cliffhanger without finishing the core story suggests that the writer is using a gimmick to sell books and his main objective is to make money; therefore, it is a much better idea to keep cliffhangers at the ends of scenes and chapters but not at the ends of novels.
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Drama: June 25, 2014 Issue [#6381]
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