Tips for Writers: The Cliffhanger

Series are very much the thing these days. Readers love to stay with their favorite authors and characters book after book, and publishers love to keep selling the stories! Authors often love the chance to tell a longer, fuller, or more involved story as well. Yet there are very few rules, or even guidelines, for serializing a story. So how do you handle that transition from book to book?

I don't have the answers, but I do have one point I'd like to make: It is easier for readers to remember one big question than it is for them to remember many questions, big or small.

For those of you writing epic series, in which your many lengthy volumes are essentially one story, you may protest what I have to say. And your goals may require you to accept the tradeoff. That's okay, although I think it can behoove everyone to at least understand the psychology.

My favorite cliffhanger of all time happened at the end of the third season of The 4400, a scifi series that was canceled too soon, but which had some of the best plot movement of any show I've ever watched. Questions were constantly being answered; we were always learning new things, but then, there were always more things to learn. At the end of the third season, a lot of plot points had been tied up, but they left the viewer with one picture in their heads: A drug, making the rounds on the street, could give you superhuman powers. Or it could kill you. Your odds: 50/50.

This was a summer series, but I remembered that one question for nearly a full year, until the next season began.

On the other hand, I gave up on Smallville after (I think) the fourth season. At the end of that season, every character was in some kind of individual crisis, and the world as a whole was in trouble. I only had to try to remember all of that for four months, but I couldn't keep it all straight, and in the end, I decided I might as well quit watching, since I couldn't remember the salient plot points and the show had been going downhill anyway.

Now, I'm not saying the carefully orchestrated single-big-item cliffhanger made or broke either one of these shows for me. In both cases, other elements were at play. But think about it this way: Subsequent books in fantasy series often take a year or more to arrive, and unless you've given the reader something to cleave to, they may not remember enough about your earlier books to bother picking up that sequel. A single, powerful cliffhanger, is something you can give them. One question that won't quit.

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