A cliffhanger ends a chapter, episode or book at a moment of suspense, leaving a character in danger or a question unanswered so that the reader wants to continue.
Where the term comes from
Merriam-Webster gives the first sense as an adventure serial or melodrama presented in installments, each ending in suspense. A second sense is a contest whose outcome is in doubt until the very end, and the word is also used for any suspenseful situation. The dictionary dates the term to around 1931. The Wikipedia article on cliffhangers reports that the device is much older: One Thousand and One Nights ends each night on a cliffhanger, and the Victorian serial novel made it a staple. It also describes a scene in Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes, serialised in Tinsley's Magazine from 1872 to 1873, in which Henry Knight is left hanging off a cliff. The critic David Lodge, quoted there, calls it a classic scene of suspense and a literal picture of the later term, without claiming it as the origin.
An example
Perpetua has spent the chapter creeping through her family's farmhouse at night. She lifts the cellar hatch. The lamp below is already burning, and a chair is pulled up to the table, where her brother's boots stand side by side. He has been missing for a week. The chapter ends on the boots, and the next chapter opens with the door at the top of the stairs swinging shut behind her. The reader has been given an image, a threat and a question, and a hand reaching for the next page.
Common mistakes
- Cheating. If the suspense ends with "it was only a dream" or an explanation that was never possible, readers feel tricked.
- Ending every chapter on one. Suspense used on every page becomes background noise.
- Cutting away to a new scene and then never returning to the thread, or returning so late that the tension has gone.
- Ending a book on a cliffhanger without giving that book its own resolved question, which can leave readers feeling the story was only half delivered.
How to check your manuscript
Read the last paragraph of every chapter in a row and mark which end on a question, which on a feeling, and which on closure. Look for a pattern that serves the story: a run of closed endings can be a rest, and a run of open ones may be exhausting. For each cliffhanger, read the next opening and check that it answers the promise honestly. If you have beta readers, see where each one stopped reading, since a break in a place you did not plan is useful evidence. The entry on pacing covers how endings shape rhythm, and how to write a series discusses endings that must carry readers into another book.
In Musael, beta reader links let you send chosen chapters and see how far each reader got, which shows whether your chapter endings are pulling people forward.