Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the
Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the December 4 posting of the IWSG are
Ronel, Deniz, Pat Garcia, Olga Godim, and
Cathrina Constantine!
December 4 question - Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?__________________________________________
The only series I've written so far (recently finished! hurray!) is the
Menopausal Superheroes. In writing it, I used some tropes, abandoned others, and tried to twist still others. I wanted the books to feel like what they are--superhero stories--but to also be their own thing, so that was sometimes a delicate dance.
Cliffhangers are bread and butter in superhero stories--going as far back as the oldest comic books and movie serials with superpowered characters.
I know some readers hate cliffhangers, feeling that they are a manipulation designed to pull them into the next book. That can be true, but sometimes, they are genre expectation and the best way to tell a story.
The end of the first book has been described as a cliffhanger by some (usually by folks who don't like cliffhangers). If you read my reviews of that
first book, people who don't love it almost universally complain that it ended in a cliffhanger.
I don't think it exactly is…my heroes had met their primary goal, and the next problem presented itself immediately. That fits the comic book feel of it to me. True that it wasn't all wrapped up…but no was left in the middle of an immediate crisis. Heroes seldom get to enjoy or celebrate their wins for long--there's always another fight looming.
That said, the second, third, and fourth books end more fully than that first one. So maybe I came around to what some of my readers were saying. We'll find out next summer if they like what I've done with the fifth and final book in the series--coming to you in summer 2025 from Falstaff Books!
For myself as a reader, it's a case by case scenario. Some cliffhangers feel organic to the story and others just feel like tacked-on manipulations. So some I love, and some frustrate me. I don't think there's a right answer to this one. You gotta do what's right for each story.
And, yes, a cliffhanger is a tactic to drive readers to pick up the next book in a series. Done well, it's no more manipulative than writing engaging characters, leaving a question unanswered, or showing an assumption about what's happened might be mistaken. I don't think writers are doing anything wrong if they work some curious and tension-building techniques in to pull a reader through a whole series. That's just good story telling (and a little business sense).
So, what do y'all think? Cliffhangers, yea or no? Why?
