One of the greatest feelings I get from writing is when a reader finishes my book and demands I give them answers. And I don’t mean questions like “Why did you name this sex offender character after me?” or “How is a book about 17^th century fur trappers going to make enough so you can repay the sixty grand you owe me?” No, I’m talking more along the line of questions like “What happens next?” or “Is the character going to survive?”

Authors need to find ways to get their audience involved in the story. For example, in my promotion for Order of Operations, I set up a worldwide scavenger hunt where readers used clues from the book to find a $10,000 grand prize. This backfired when at least four readers were buried alive when an abandoned mine collapsed in the Nevada wilderness.

So instead, you can try using cliffhangers. This is something TV shows have used for decades and they can be incredibly effective. Audiences obsessed for whole summers about who shot JR, or if Riker was going to shave his beard or not, or if David Hasselhoff would ever turn his career around.

What you have to remember is that reading is a chore for most people. When you put cliffhangers at the ends of your chapters and at the ends of your books, you make it more fun and engaging. Think of your reader as a dog and the cliffhangers are the treats you give them for shitting in their neighbor’s pool after he leaves for work. We’ll manipulate people for personal profit on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now there’s some debate about who first invented the cliffhanger. Some people think it was Thomas Hardy. Others say it comes from 1001 Nights. I always thought it was Melville, who ended Moby Dick with Ishmael starting the Whalers Initiative and going around to recruit the best whalers on the planet to defeat the White Whale. But apparently, that doesn’t happen in the book at all.

In any case, cliffhangers are when a scene, chapter or book ends abruptly without a resolution. Cliffhangers are meant to be shocking. But you need to be careful how you use them. When I wrote Chair, I ended with the main character defeating the villain by throwing her into a tar pit. However, the last scene ended with a hand reaching up out of the tar pit. In the poorly-received sequel Sofa, however, it turned out that arm belonged to a Neanderthal who’d been dead for millennia and had been forced to the surface by tectonic activity. Common mistakes like this are best avoided.

So let’s look at some tips to improve our cliffhangers:

Tip 1 – Give Readers Room to Speculate

A good cliffhanger should hint at a world of possibilities. What you reveal to your reader is just the tip of the ice cube poking out of the surface of your morning glass of scotch. If there’s a surprise death, make sure you’ve got at least half a dozen plausible suspects.

One of the chapters in my sci-fi novel Destination Earth ends with a spaceship signaling red alert. But this could be for many reasons. Maybe space debris hit the lightspeed core, maybe their enemy, the Cormolites, finally honed in on their location, maybe the Alliance has come to arrest them for sex trafficking humans. These are exactly the ideas you want your audience thinking of.

Tip 2 – Brainstorm a Huge List of Problems Specific to Your Character

I suggest making a huge list of potential problems your character will have throughout the story. You don’t need to use or even mention them, but doing so will help you flesh out your character, and then when you get to a point in the narrative that would benefit from a cliffhanger, you’re spoiled for choice. For example, when I wrote Minge, here’s just a fraction of what I wrote:

• Minge’s former high school bestie wants to kill her.
• Minge’s is addicted to blackjack.
• Minge has a narrow windpipe which makes her more susceptible to choking.
• Minge is addicted to roulette.
• Minge owes thousands to several organized crime syndicates.
• Minge’s mother left home before she was born. And then again a few years later.
• Minge is addicted to scratch off tickets.
• Minge doesn’t know how to read.

Tip 3 – Use Foreshadowing

A great cliffhanger, especially early in your book, won’t just create suspense but also hint at something further down the line. Chapter Five in Ode to Adelay ends this way:

 “ ‘Cough… cough… cough cough cough.’ I knew I had to stop coughing before Deardra got home. And then I heard the garage door open.” So you can see, not only are we wondering whether or not his wife will catch him smoking weed, this also foreshadows Adelay’s eventual death from choking on a chunk of melon.  

Tip 4 – Resolve the conflict, but not all of it

So often, you want to end a chapter with a big climax, a death riddled with pathos, a key resolution. The key though, is to always have something in the background that’s not settled. You can really take your reader off guard here. If you kill off the main villain, readers might forget about the henchman, and that’s the perfect time have her cut the cable of their funicular. If the characters survive a wild storm, we’re so happy we forget about the bag of drugs they need to survive and we end with the cliffhanger of them realizing they have lost it.  

But really, when you’re writing a cliffhanger there’s one method that never fails to work…