Should cliffhangers be used in every chapter?
This is not a great question but I use a lot of cliffhangers. And I have a habit of making cliffhangers in the end of every chapter that I write just to hook the reader. The question is, is it a good idea? Won't it look monotonous after a while into the novel?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/6038. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I would say no. Not for a book.
Regardless of how you are defining cliffhanger, I don't think you need an aaiiigh!! moment at the end of every single chapter. A chapter should end for a reason, but that reason doesn't have to be a shock, reversal, discovery, or threat to life/limb/happiness.
If you use the same trick or tool repeatedly, in the same place or the same way all the time, it gets old. Your reader becomes jaded. You wouldn't use the same sentence structure over and over, right? You mix it up. So why use the same narrative tool?
Soap operas and lengthy serials need cliffhangers because the story never ends. You need a reason for the audience to keep returning. A book is pretty much by definition a finite narrative. (Even reeeeeeally long ones like A Song of Ice and Fire and Lord of the Rings.) At some point the story will come to a conclusion, and you hope your reader will complete the journey with you, so you can afford to end an internal arc because the larger arc of the entire story is still going.
If you have a neverending story, then you have to use cliffhangers to drag the audience along, because there's no quest to finish. There's no The End coming — you have to give the audience something to come back for.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads