So cliffhangers. WHY DO WE DO THEM. Some reasons.
No wait. First. Keep in mind this important Three Jaguars fact: a novel is not a story. A novel is a way of packaging a story of a certain length, in a certain way, with a certain kind of marketing fluff and with certain cultural and reader expectations. Okay? Okay. Onward!
MARKETING REASONS
Cliffhangers work.
Yeah, yeah, I know. People rage about them. I’ve raged about them. It doesn’t change that they keep people coming back. Often the angriest people are the ones who are first in line to find out What Happens Next (why not, right? They wouldn't be so upset if they weren't invested). There’s a reason television seasons often end on cliffhangers. We have an entire artform that revolves around cliffhangers (what?). No, really: what do you think the punchline of a joke is?
We’re wired to find the anticipation of a reward as pleasurable as its acquisition. It’s a survival thing: you have to motivate people to go looking for that honeycomb or bush of wild berries, and it’s not the reward that pulls us on, it’s the hope of the reward. And stories, no matter how abstract, can trigger that same thrill when we’re in pursuit of their endings.
The reason cliffhangers don’t die as a thing is because they keep people coming back.
Sad but true, I know. I have been one of those people who threw a book against a wall and wept bitter tears over an abrupt ending I knew wouldn’t be resolved for over a year because So Slow Author Why So Slow. >.> But even in my own work, I notice that the series that conclude in cliffhangers draw more sales to the end of the series than the ones that are more episodic in style.
This is not my reason for writing cliffhangers, though. Onward!
PACKAGING REASONS
Books, the physical things with pages, have points past which they become too large to be feasible. A very long story crammed into a physical object with pages needs either to have many, many pages (dictionary); to have a very large form factor (textbook); or have reeeeally tiny font and as little whitespace as you can get away with (most cheap mass market paperbacks). So that’s one problem.
The other problem is modern, and caused by databases. (Seriously.) In this case, it's the fact that the same story can be packaged in different ways: paper, audio, e-, serial, enacted with puppets, etc. But a reader always wants to know ‘wait, did I read this already?’ when they look at any given story. If the same story, as an e-book, is so long it needs to be split into many separate print books, then they aren’t linked together in the retailer database and readers are left wondering, ‘wait, is this part 2 of the book I read as a whole thing as an e-book’?
They get confused and don’t want to deal with it. I don’t blame them. I wouldn't either. So that’s problem two.
Given these issues, splitting stories into manageable pieces so that existing technology can handle them is a good thing. (The tool always shapes the art. This is a sobering thing to reflect on, and probably an entirely different post.)
This is one of the two reasons I write a lot of cliffhangers. Particularly since my print readers have asked me not to force them to squint at tiny fonts squeezed onto pages with almost no margins. I don’t think that’s legible or pretty either, so I’m all about making the book comfortable to read when you’re reading it. I produced one doorstopper print edition (Spots) and that was enough to convince me not to do that again.
ARTISTIC REASONS
Pauses are important.
Pauses give singers time to breathe, and make notes distinct from one another in music. Spaces between written words make their meaning clearer and the communication more seamless. Gaps in conversations allow people to evaluate one another’s needs and chase tangents. Space away from a crazy life, taken outside under a tree with your eyes on the changing shapes of clouds, lets you expand and make sense of everything.
Pauses are paramount.
I don’t call myself a lyrical or literary writer, and for the most part I’m not. But there are times when the lessons you learn from lyricism help you communicate more clearly. Poetry taught me that pauses give emphasis, let ideas sink into people’s heads. This is the same internal understanding that leads writers to create scene breaks and chapter stops.
If there’s anything literary about me, in a conscious way, it’s my love of pauses.
This is the reason why some of my books have no chapters: because you’re supposed to barrel through them like a roller coaster skidding over its highest point and down, down, down without time to even gasp. This is why some of them have dozens of tiny chapters, so that you have to stop between each, to evaluate what you’re feeling and thinking, to savor the taste in your mouth and sink into your puzzlement or your delight.
A novel—remember, not a story, but a specific way of packaging a story—can be another kind of chapter, and its ending is a very definitive pause. It forces the reader completely out of the story because we have expectations of novels, and one of them is that they have endings. If the ending is actually not an ending, but a hesitation, then you get all the roller coaster feeling but it lasts and lasts and lasts. The tension is multiplied many times over.
And in the silence where your expectations were, I can slip in and meet your eyes and say, “This is going to be worth it. I promise.”
That’s the real reason I write cliffhanger endings. I am giving you time to relish the tension, to anticipate, to feel the unbearable vibration of it in your spirit, and then I’m asking you to trust me to make it worth it all. And I think, for the most part, I manage it, because once people get into my series they tend to buy to the end. I hope I manage it, anyway. I hold that trust very dear.
If you wonder why I linger so long in the denouement in most of my books, it's because of this. I'm bringing us down gently after the excitement. "Let's walk a while before we come out into the real world. Breathe."
Having said all this, I feel like leaving readers hanging too long is cruel. (I am alone in this—there’s evidence that people will wait for years if they care enough about the story despite their complaints, and that the waiting makes it even better even if the ending gets flubbed, because what felt good, what’s remembered, and what's forever after discussed was the anticipation, not the payoff). But cliffhangers… well. They're not always about a cynical money grab. They have a purpose. And if you love a writer, it's a heck of a lot of fun to grab their hands and take the plunge with them.
