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Hanging by the Fingernails: Writing Cliffhangers

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by Chris Eboch

AdvancedPlotting200

Several years ago I ghostwrote a novel about a well-known girl sleuth. The series used cliffhanger chapter endings. That seemed easy enough—find a dramatic moment and end the chapter.

Turns out writing strong cliffhangers is trickier than that. The editor responded to my effort with this comment: “I would like to see more of a slow build-up toward the intense action. In horror movies, it’s always the ominous music and the main character slowly opening the closet door that scares us the most, not the moment right after she opens the door.”

She’s noting the difference between suspense and surprise.

When something happens suddenly and unexpectedly, that’s a surprise. If you’re walking down the street and something falls onto your head, you’ll be surprised. But since the surprise came out of nowhere, it wasn’t suspenseful.

When writing, we may be tempted to keep secrets and then let them out—bang! But suspense comes from suspecting that something will happen and worrying about it or anticipating it.

To build up dramatic chapter endings, give the reader clues that something bad—or excitingly good—is happening. Here’s an example from Haunted: The Ghost on the Stairs, a novel for ages 8 to 12. The narrator, Jon, isn’t sure he believes his sister Tania saw a ghost, but goes with her to look as their stepfather films his ghost hunter TV show.

At the top of the stairs, my stepfather stood in the glare of a spotlight, a few feet away from a camera. I took a step backward and tugged at Tania’s arm. No one had seen us yet, and we could still escape.Tania turned to me. The look in her eyes made my stomach flip.The moment isn’t bad for a cliffhanger, but it needs more buildup. Here’s the published version:

At the top of the stairs, my stepfather stood in the glare of a spotlight, a few feet away from a camera. I took a step backward and tugged at Tania’s arm. No one had seen us yet, and we could still escape.She didn’t back up. She swayed.I took a quick step forward and put my arm around her so she wouldn’t fall. I looked down into her face. I’d never seen anyone so white. White as death. Or white as a ghost.“Tania,” I whispered. I gave her a shake. She took a quick breath and dragged her eyes away from the staircase and to my face. The look in them made my stomach flip.To get the most out of dramatic moments, you actually slow the pace by using more detail. Focus on sensory details with emotional impact.

Powerful Paragraphing

Long paragraphs are fine for description. Short paragraphs are best for action, because the eye moves more quickly down the page, making the story read faster. You can also emphasize an important sentence by putting that sentence into a paragraph by itself. Compare these examples:

Version 1:

My car picked up speed as it rolled down the steep hill. The light at the bottom turned yellow so I stepped on the brakes. The car didn’t slow down. The light turned red as I pressed harder, leaning back in my seat, using my whole leg to force the brake pedal toward the floor. I sped toward the intersection while other cars entered from the sides. I sailed into the intersection, horns blaring and brakes squealing around me as I passed within inches of two cars coming from each side.Version 2:

My car picked up speed as it rolled down the steep hill. The light at the bottom turned yellow.I stepped on the brakes. The car didn’t slow down.The light turned red.I pressed harder, leaning back in my seat, using my whole leg to force the brake pedal toward the floor.I sped toward the intersection. Other cars entered from the sides.I sailed into the intersection. Horns blared and brakes squealed around me.I passed within inches of two cars coming from each side.These use nearly the same words, but in the second version I broke up long sentences, and I used seven paragraphs instead of one. The second version better captures the narrator’s breathless panic.

You can have dramatic chapter endings even if the characters aren’t in physical danger. In a young adult romance, for example, the drama may come from social humiliation at school and awkward or exciting moments with the love interest. Play up those moments for maximum effect.

Not every chapter has to end with a major cliffhanger. You can end in a quieter moment, as long as you’re still looking forward, reminding the reader that the character’s troubles are not over.

Cliffhangers are a powerful tool to build suspense. Choose a dramatic moment and expand the moment with sensory details for drama. You’ll keep readers turning the page.

BanditsPeak150Chris Eboch writes fiction and nonfiction for all ages. In Bandits Peak, a teenage boy meets strangers hiding on the mountains and gets drawn into their crimes, until he risks his life to expose them. The Eyes of Pharaoh is an action-packed mystery set in ancient Egypt. The Genie’s Gift is an Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy adventure. In The Well of Sacrifice, a Mayan girl in ninth-century Guatemala rebels against the High Priest who sacrifices anyone challenging his power. Her writing craft books include You Can Write for Children: How to Write Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers and Advanced Plotting.

Learn more at www.chriseboch.com or her Amazon page, or check out her writing tips at her Write Like a Pro! blog. Sign up for her Workshop newsletter for classes and critique offers.

Chris also writes novels of suspense and romance for adults under the name Kris Bock; read excerpts at www.krisbock.com.

This article was originally published in the August 2011 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: 12 Ways to Build Suspense

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising Fiction

For many writers, the challenge of story lies in how to plot, rather than plod, through the long, languid, middle of the novel. The key to holding your reader’s attention lies in the art of maintaining suspense. This article presents a list of elements that will increase the suspense in your story. Build as many into your plot as it can accommodate.

1. Make at least one character especially violent or adversarial. This character is a wild card. He should have the ability and inclination to severely and unexpectedly hurt your hero (or at least hurt your hero’s chances of achieving her goal).

2. Spring surprises. Keep the reader guessing. Provide many obstacles that come at your hero when she least expects them and when your reader least expects them. Provide at least one surprise turning point in each chapter. These surprises must not be contrived events, however. They must all stem from the characters, their goals, and their motivations.

3. Mislead your reader. If you mislead your reader, the surprises will have more impact. Nevertheless, you must play fair. Leave clues that are consistent with who your characters are—even if the characters are different from how your reader believes them to be.

4. Do your worst. In every scene, ask yourself: What is the worst thing that could happen to the hero? Then make it happen.

5. Take away that which is most important to your hero. What does your hero care about more than anything else? Take it away, or better yet, destroy it. At the very least, put it at risk.

6. Haunt your hero with memories of a past failure. Relate the failure to the events in the book. Put your hero in the same situation she was in when she experienced her failure. Use her memories of that failure to undermine her confidence and make her challenges more difficult and more personal.

7. Turn the environment loose upon your characters. In my science fiction novel, Worlds Asunder, the vacuum of space lurks beyond the walls of the buildings, vehicles, and pressure suits that keep my characters alive. I frequently turn it loose inside.

For the purpose of building suspense, “environment” doesn’t have to mean “natural phenomena.” It can refer to any element of the character’s surroundings that is beyond the control of the main characters, including sociological, political, or economic circumstances and events. To keep an environmental event from seeming contrived, establish early that such an event is possible.

8. Employ phobias. What is your hero afraid of? Make him confront the source of his fear. If you choose something the reader also fears, it will heighten his emotional response.

9. Never make anything easy. Turn all your minor challenges into major ordeals. Make even simple tasks difficult if circumstances can justify your doing so.

10. Show that the danger is real. Hurt your hero, kill a good guy, or both. If you kill someone your hero cares about, it will raise the personal stakes and inject a strong emotional element into your plot. At one point in Worlds Asunder, my hero is hospitalized for his wounds following a battle for his life. In addition, several good guys die, including one of my hero’s closest relatives. This shows that the threat to him is very real.

11. Impose a deadline. This is the ticking clock. It need not be a clock the hero can see, or one with a specified time to zero, but one way or another you must create a sense of urgency.

In Worlds Asunder, the political events surrounding my hero’s investigation escalate toward war. If he can solve the case in time, his findings might defuse the building crisis. He doesn’t know how much time he has, but he and the reader can see the escalation. In alternating scenes, the hero takes a step toward solving the case, and then political events expand. This creates an unseen clock. My hero and the reader are never quite sure it hasn’t already reached zero, the point beyond which no one can stop the war.

12. Prevent your hero from running away. You don’t need to impose a physical barrier, but make your hero’s need to stay in the conflict stronger than his desire to escape it. The same must be true for your villain. In Worlds Asunder, my hero wants to retire and go home to his family—that would be his escape—but averting war is much more important. He won’t quit, even when the stakes rise and he must risk losing his own daughter.

Use these techniques in combination. Don’t restrict yourself to one suspense builder per scene. Stack these elements one upon another, particularly in key scenes. This will compel your reader to keep turning the pages.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the December 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



The Best Way to Create Suspense Is…

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by Keith Pyeatt

KeithPyeatt206SSuspense is an emotion. It’s that feeling when you don’t know what’s going to happen next…but you want to. Using that definition, it’s easy to see why creating suspense is an effective way to keep readers turning pages.

I write in the broad category of suspense/thriller, and I was already scheduled to write this article when the print galleys for my novel Dark Knowledge arrived. While I searched for typos, I also noted the different ways I generated suspense so I could share some of my favorite methods with you.

1. Use setting to enhance or create suspense. I mention setting first because I used it to build suspense right from the opening paragraphs of Dark Knowledge. My mentally challenged protagonist, Wesley, enters a world inside his mind that’s shrouded in fog, radiates a “bad color” that terrifies him, and proves it can hurt him. The mind-world became a steady source of suspense because I kept it mysterious, dangerous, and full of paranormal surprises, but suspenseful settings certainly don’t need to be supernatural ones. A boat on rough seas, a job interview, or a packed department store during a bridal sale can all add tension and suspense, especially if there’s a pregnant passenger on the boat, the interviewee needs the job to feed his family, and there’s a good reason why the bride-to-be needs a certain gown.

2. Withholding information from readers can generate suspense, but be careful not to be too obvious and cheesy about it (like I was with the title of this article) or the reader will feel manipulated. Withheld information works best when it’s natural. For example, the point of view (POV) characters introduced so far don’t know the information, so they can’t relay it to the reader. This method is a clear favorite of mine, and it works well because I normally have multiple POV characters in my novels, which helps me control when information is presented.

3. Withholding information from the protagonist is another great way to create suspense, especially in novels with multiple POV characters. Let that antagonist reveal his dastardly plans to the readers. Doing so creates the classic “Don’t go in there!” response when readers know the bad guy is waiting behind the door with a knife but the hero doesn’t. Note that this type of suspense pretty much defines the difference between suspense and mystery novels. In a mystery, we know Professor Plum was killed from the beginning pages, but we don’t know who bludgeoned him to death with a candlestick until the end. The fun is trying to figure out who did it and why. In a suspense/thriller, the professor is alive, but the readers know Miss Scarlet’s plans and motivations to kill him. The suspense is whether the hero will discover the plan and be able to stop Professor Plum from meeting his death in the library.

4. Impose a time restraint. Whether the bank will repossess Grandma’s iron lung if money isn’t raised in time or the wormhole that leads to present day Earth is about to close, a hero’s race against a ticking clock adds urgency and suspense.

5. Complicate things. For an added shot of suspense, start the ticking clock mentioned above, and just when it looks like your hero might actually succeed in time, drop a delay or complication on her. Now will she make it? Yes? Drop another complication on her.

6. Be unpredictable. Readers are smart, and once they get used to the flow of a story, they may start thinking they know where it’s going. Add an unexpected twist, and now they’re in suspense about how this new development, revelation, or character will change the course. The only way to know is to keep reading.

7. Mind games are another of my favorite ploys, which is probably why my paranormal thrillers can also be classified as psychological thrillers. I love a good dilemma, and there’s a whopper of one in Dark Knowledge that stands out as a suspenseful element. Wesley doesn’t know whether to sacrifice his life to save his soul or if he needs to sacrifice his soul to protect mankind from evil. With a big dilemma like that, readers get a whole new element of suspense. In addition to wondering “can he succeed?” and “can he succeed in time?” they wonder along with the character which course of action leads to success. Smaller dilemmas add suspense too, so experiment with them. Create a reason your protagonist can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t do something, then make sure he must do it to get what he needs. Or give him options, but make sure every option has a serious downside.

8. Create a convergence where separate lines of action meet, combine their energies, and shoot the story forward. In Dark Knowledge, there’s a point where three scenes, each written from a different character’s POV, bring story-lines together as the characters charge into the mind-world for the climactic battle. Different motivations drive each character to the same point, and the convergence supercharges the tension and suspense.

9. Make the hero act alone or at a disadvantage. There’s strength in numbers, so isolate your character when he needs help the most. Wesley has friends who would do anything for him, so I…Well, I’m not telling, but isolating the main character is a technique I frequently use to beef up suspense. A variation of isolation is to impose a disadvantage on your hero at a critical time. Maybe your urban fantasy heroine left her sword on all night and discovers it’s out of juice just as a shape-shifting monkey demon attacks. Now how’s she going to fight it?

10. Make the reader care about the characters. Sure, determined government hit men in helicopters chasing a desperate man through an active minefield is high action and may grab a reader’s attention, but the suspense you need to hold interest comes from giving the readers reasons to care what happens to the desperate man. Let readers into your hero’s head. Better yet, into his heart. Flesh out your antagonists and other major characters so readers care what happens to them, too.

Remember, suspense is an emotion.

daeva front 145Keith Pyeatt served as an officer of SouthWest Writers for three years and received the SWW Parris Award in 2009. He writes paranormal thrillers that he calls “Horror with Heart.” He now lives in Tucson, Arizona, and he recently released his fourth novel, Daeva. Other published novels are Struck, Dark Knowledge, and Above Haldis Notch. Find out more about Keith by visiting his website at KeithPyeatt.com or his blog at Keithpyeatt.blogspot.com.

This article was originally published in the November 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



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