Clever Excitement-Builder Or Annoying Cliché?
Caution: Spoilers
Cliffhangers are infuriating and exciting. Authors love leaving us – and their characters – in limbo, dangling off the metaphorical cliff.
In movies, the most famous one might arguably be ‘The Italian Job.’ The what-happens-next ending suited the film, and was in hindsight more satisfying than letting the scoundrels get away with the loot or having them caught.
In ‘Inception‘, we never learned the truth about which reality Cobb ended up in. Again, this was in keeping with rest of the film.
It’s important to note that these cliff hangers are the intended endings, and the question of ‘what happens next?’ is an integral part of the story. They are not meant to build up to anything beyond the movie’s original scope.
Here’s the rub
The problem arises when cliffhangers are setting up sequels. No movie shows this more than ‘Matrix:Reloaded,’ since the last of the Matrix films never really lived up to it. Don’t get me wrong. I liked it. I just would have liked it a lot more if my expectations hadn’t been ramped up to the max by ‘Reloaded.’
If you watched ‘24,’ where almost every episode leaves you with your heart in your mouth, you have to wait a week at most for the next instalment. Or you get the boxset. With the Matrix, the wait stretched for over six months. But nowadays, too many TV programs use cliffhangers to bridge the wait to the next season. And assuming we get to see a next season at all, we’re stuck for six to twelve months not knowing. Will it be worth it?
After all, the payoff has to be equal to the suspense created by the cutoff. But cliffhangers have other problems.
We perceive the annoyance created at the end of one episode as delicious for only a brief moment. By the time the sequel comes around, we might at best remember the anticipation, but hardly any of the plot used to set it up. And this is why cliffhangers are bad for readers and for authors, too.
As a reader, my heartbeat hammers in my ears.
The car goes into tail spin, and the heroine holds onto the car’s oh-crap handle. “Marty?” she shouts. But the driver’s head lolls to the side, his eyes wide and empty. She reaches for the steering wheel. Too late. The car veers off the road into a field. Her stomach bounces. The engine sputters and a double-dip in the bumpy ground rattles her like a rag doll. She bites her tongue, tastes her blood. Oh no. A tree. A f***ing tree. The tree isn’t getting out of the way. Move, dammit, move!
The end.
Our adrenaline is keeping us going, and the cut-off puts us into a spin. The whole day, our brain won’t let us rest, mulling over the different outcomes. Heck, I can’t wait for the next book. I want to read it now!
Nine months later.
Ah, the next book’s out. Great. I’ll definitely buy it, although I probably won’t get around to reading it until Christmas.
Come Christmas, I sit down with a lovely cup of tea and the book. I remember that the last one ended on a cliffhanger. A car accident. I psych myself up. My heartbeat’s in the healthy range, but my expectations are sky-high.
She wakes up, a regular beep echoing the beating of her heart. She rolls her head to the side. Her mother sits in a chair by her bedside, with more white hairs than she remembers.
“Oh darling.” Her mother takes her hand. “I’ve been so worried.”
Cue the reader, who reads on, with her expectations dashed. What happened to the high-octane car chase? To her raised expectations? Why exactly did her pulse jitter so much nine months ago? For a tepid hospital room scene?
Reader satisfaction
Basically, shouldn’t books have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with most plotlines neatly tied up with a bow? But if the author used a cliffhanger, the next book, in my experience, may not recreate the outpour of adrenaline, or it doesn’t even try.
Perhaps I’m too old-fashioned, and reader satisfaction is overrated. I’m an experimental writer. With every book, I push my boundaries to try something I haven’t tried before. But cliffhangers aren’t for me. I just don’t see the advantage.
As a reader, I don’t mind them too much. Some are even done with incredible finesse, and the sequels keep all their predessors’ promises. Those few books I treasure.
As for the rest, I’ve become numb to them. You end your reading experience not with a satisfied sigh but with a pained scream, only to embark on a new adventure nine months later which leaves you equally frustrated. And with more and more authors making use of the cliffhanger, the novelty is wearing off.
The cliffhanger should not be the go-to tool for authors. How refreshing it would be to read a story with an ending.
How do you feel about cliffhangers? Love them? Perhaps you know some books that have pulled them off perfectly? Let me know.
January 19, 2015
Cliff hangers for chapters is fine. That’s a good old hook – but don’t give me a cliff hanger for the end of a book, because that just annoys me. There was a young adult novel that I read that did exactly that as a way to lure the reader to read the next one. I felt so manipulated and used, that I refused to read anymore of her books. I want a book to wrap up at the end. I’m okay if the story continues in a new book, but it has to be a new story line for the characters.
January 21, 2015
I’m so glad I’m not alone in this. Perhaps there should be a cliffhanger warning on books so we can decide whether or not we want to invest our time. That way, you may have never bought that YA novel. 🙂