Cliffhangers

Oh, those cliffhangers. They make you want to scream. Your adrenaline is at a top high and the chapter or the book stops. You grab your chest because you can’t believe what you just experienced.

The definition of a cliffhanger is when a story or plotline ends suddenly or a large plot twist occurs and is left unresolved. It is a device that is used to cause suspense, but most importantly, it leaves unanswered questions that make the reader or viewer want to come back to learn what will happen.

Should you use one? Mostly yes, depending on what you are writing on. A cliffhanger between chapters can be an extra hook for your audience if the plot is loosening its grasp. It can make your reader say, I can’t put this down now. I need to know what happened! I mean you have seen it in movies, TV series, and read it in books. Cliffhangers pull you back in.

How can you craft a cliffhanger then? First, knit your story and build towards that point. Create questions that will have some answers and hold a huge question for when the cliffhanger will be implemented. Try to charge the scene with much emotion as possible. Is there a battle? Has the boy and girl finally in the perfect spot where he/she can confess love? Do you remember the last scene of inception? Have you played Jenga? How about that imagining you are taking a piece of the tower and it is wobbly and then you end your chapter. Yes! End it. Abruptly.

That sudden end to the chapter will build so many questions for the audience. If we are talking battle try something like, as the marksman pulls the trigger a rain of bullets rushes my way. My eyes locked with Eve and all I could think was about our last kiss. And you end it. Bullets driving to the character? Will he die? Will somebody jump in to save that character? Is this a superhero-themed story and he will use his power?

No matter how you elaborate on the last sentence, just make sure, even though you will explain what really happened later, ask yourself if lots of questions can be built around that last sentence. The important thing as CJ McDaniel says, “For an effective cliffhanger, the author must create problems worth caring for.”

So once you drop down that cliffhanger, do you answer the question? No. Let linger for a moment. Let it simmer if you can. Go somewhere else. Another POV, flashback, make a time jump. This will create a bit of awareness to your reader that even though they are reading through important details of the story, they are on a mission to know what happened.

Once you are ready to answer the question imagine how much drama you want to build. Again remember the wobbly Jenga tower. What if it wobble to the point it was going to fall, but it stabilizes. With the battle scene, we can say the character at least got hit with one bullet and survived. If we are imagining the tower falling you can say the character died, but then would it actually create the means of lingering what happened with all those bullets? Unless this sparks a chain reaction with whom that character locked their eyes to and that person saves the day. Or that wobbly tower got back together quickly and something actually jumped into that character’s path and saved him/her.

That is another thing with cliffhangers, you can choose what intensity you want to put it on. You got to remember that audiences want to be entertained. So what level of the spectrum you need them to be? Ask yourself, what part of the story is the cliffhanger put on? Is it in the middle where a better climax will blow the reader’s mind? Is it at the end, because you are thinking of a companion book, trilogy, or series? This last part is important, if you are doing a one-piece book, please do not leave your story on a cliffhanger if the question isn’t answer somewhere in the book. You can’t finish a book with un-answered questions unless you made the reader a co-pilot to this journey and you want them to think of what path they’ll choose in the end.

How do you see yourself doing cliffhangers? Let me know in the comment section so we can have a discussion. That is all I have for now. I wish everyone well and as always… keep writing mis amigos.