Cliffhangers

Hmm, I think a cliffhanger might be better than the sort of half-assed non-resolution the end of Lirael has.

Must shake those bees out of my bonnet!

I suspect part of the problem is the conventional wisdom regarding word counts in various genres. If a work of 300+K words is deemed to have publishing merit in a genre that typically sees manuscripts at roughly one-third that volume, it's no drastic leap of logic to assume that someone in the chain will entertain the notion of breaking it into three books. A series can be considerably more profitable from a publisher's perspective.

Never lose sight of the core motives of those involved.

For many authors, the fiscal pressure can exceed the satisfaction inherent in their art, and they are compelled to comply with the demands of the industry.

*looks at mss spiralling out of control*

*looks for natural splitting point*

*flails*

It might involve substantial rewriting of the book.

It all depends on how it was written. Is the "book" you finished intended to stand alone or is it one volume in a single story. Take Lord of the Rings. It was written to be one book of 500k words, but it was split into three volumes to publish it. It is one of many like that. SF doesn't see too many, but there are a few. But in Fantasy, it is far more common. You need to read the books like it was written. Some stand alone nicely, others do not because the only reason they were printed in different volumes is to please the publisher. If you read a given volume and it doesn't really end, pick up the next book and continue reading until you reach the true end of the tale.

I believe I mentioned this in another thread--sometimes it works for me, and sometimes it doesn't.

The endings for the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning kept me salivating for the next book. I don't think I have ever been that desperate to read something before or since.

Yet nearly every other book that has that type of ending ticks me off so badly that I won't pick up the next.

I suppose it's how the story is told. If it's very well done and it's clear from the start that there is something epic going on that requires more than one novel to tell the whole story, then it will prompt me to continue on. If it's just an obvious money-grab or a cheap shot, you've lost a reader.

While I understand the unsatisfying nature of cliffhanger books, I don't see what's so wrong with them.

Unless you are unaware of the fact that it's a series, you should know that you're not getting the whole story. So it shouldn't really be that much of a shock that you're left hanging at the end of book one (or whichever installment). If you're buying a book in a series, I think it's generally implied that you're willing to invest in the entire series. Why wouldn't an author/publisher want to work with that tacit approval and use it to their advantage?

I have definitely turned away from various series because I didn't want to commit myself to 8,9,10 books. I'm usually good for three or four installments.

This obviously only applies to a linear series of books. Various novels and stories featuring the same character (Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, for example) should all stand alone as the story doesn't necessarily flow from one to the next.

I like cliffhangers when: Story is resolved in itself but continues into next book.

I dislike cliffhangers when: Story is not contained to a book and there is no resoulution in book 1.

There's a book I won't name, that was written by a very popular lit author who crossed into fantasy, that really annoyed me for this cliffhanger thing. IMO it was a shameless ploy to get me to buy the next book. Considering I'd just spent 700 pages reading beautiful prose surrounded by deus-ex-machina and too many cheap/convenient tricks, it made me angry. And I WON'T be buying the next book.

That being said, sometimes it works. Jim Butcher left me on a cliffhanger in "Changes" (hello? MC riddled with bullets and sinking into the lake, anyone?), and while I hated him for it I rushed out and bought the next book the day it hit the shelves. For him it worked, because it was so well done and was a natural place to end that particular novel.

Rachel Caine's earlier Morganville books were actually a series (later ones were standalones) and the way it was managed in that was there would be a resolution - whatever plot the book was about was resolved - but then there would be a sort of but not quite epilogue in that during the bit where all the characters were sitting aorund saying 'Phew, glad that's over' something would happen - a new character would turn up mysteriously, some disturbing news would be revealed or something and that would set you up for the next book.

I didn't find it annoying but I can see how doing it without the resolution be really annoying...

I think a lot depends on whether the book was intended to be its own work or was split from a larger volume. A book can end with a cliffhanger, but still also have a resolution (like with Changes). It's when a book has no resolution that I find it irritating. I found a lot of the Wheel of Time books to be like this. Many of them didn't even end in cliffhangers exactly, but they didn't have a fully satisfying resolution either. But I think this sort of thing has become more accepted because books like the Wheel of Time sold really well despite their lack of resolutions.

When I get to the end of a cliffhanger, i put the author into the "never read again" category. It's O.K. to have something unresolved, but the central conflict has to be hanfled by the end of a novel. If the author can't manage that, then i wonder why any publisher got involved. Maybe I should put the publisher on the "do Not read" list.

Snick said:

When I get to the end of a cliffhanger, i put the author into the "never read again" category. It's O.K. to have something unresolved, but the central conflict has to be hanfled by the end of a novel. If the author can't manage that, then i wonder why any publisher got involved. Maybe I should put the publisher on the "do Not read" list.

Click to expand...

Was the central plot of Lord of the Rings handled by the end of Fellowship of the ring? No. Was the central conflict of Les Miserables handled by the end of book 1 (it was published in 1862 in 5 volumes), no.

You will find that a great many first books of a series, even if it was intended to be one long story from the outset, seem to end on a very final note. That is not by initial design, but because all the advice for aspiring writers trying to sell their story says that they need to be hawking a single, stand alone, volume. This is not the norm. Those same authors, later in their career, will write the stories they want, and if they have to be broken into several volumes that it likely due to the publisher.

But I think this entire discussion is not about breaking apart a single story into multiple books, but how each book ends. There are ways to clearly end a volume without ending the story and I do know that not everyone has that talent. Tolkien found a couple of natural breaking points to split Lord of the Rings. It's not like the old movie serials, such a Perils of Pauline, Buck Rogers, or Flash Gordon. Those deliberately contrived a new conflict to bring viewers back next week. In books that does not seem to work as well, unless you have that next volume sitting there.

We need to make a clear distinction between good and bad writing. A good writer, even if they are forced to break their very long story into pieces to get it published, such as Lord of the Rings, will create or find clean breaking points that give some resolution, even though the reader knows the story is far from over. A bad writer, or badly informed writer, will attempt to contrive a cliffhanger ending to force the reader to pick up the next book. A well written story should be enough of an incentive without a contrived cliffhanger. Some stories end naturally at a cliffhanger. Fellowship of the Rings ends when the fellowship breaks, but then we are left wondering what happened to Merry and Pippin and what will become of Frodo and Sam alone. But still, there is resolution in how Aragorn and the rest of the fellowship make the decision that following Merry and Pippin is the way to go. Was anything really resolved in that scene? Only which way the three of them would travel. There was no resolution of the story of the Ring.

I think this discussion is really about how a forced/badly written cliffhanger spoils the series. It reflects on the ability of the writer to tell a story and can impact our interest in finishing it. It is not inherent to multi-part stories, but to bad writing. Some authors can handle most things in a story, but when the go to split a story that is too long, how they handle that may show where their skills are lacking. Any time we hit bad writing, be it a bad prologue, opening chapter, ending, or cliffhanger, it takes us out of the story.

And if you are truly one of the few who truly hate stories split over multiple volumes, my apologies for any offense, but I do not agree with you.

There is a huge difference between a three volume novel and a series of novels. LoTR is a single work,while Robert Parker's Spenser novels are a series. A series reuses characters, settings, etc, but t=each book in the series is a separate work. If it is not clear from the beginning that novel xyz is a three volume work; that is, if the separate volumes are sold as separate novels, then there is a problem.

There is a third way. there are a few series in which each book has a separate plot that is resolved, but there is a wider plot that all of the books touch upon, and that may, oe may not, ever be resolved. The larger plot is just part of the background for the series. The only one that I can think of is The Unbeheaded King by L. sprague de Camp.

Unimportant said:

Yup, that was the one. I didn't realise it was part of a series and bought what turned out to be book 3 of 5. It didn't make me want to buy the rest, though.

I prefer series like Stacia Kane's latest: each book stands alone and can be read alone as a satisfying reading experience, but there's a deeper thread running through that connects all the books together. My brain feels as if the characters are in a "happy for now" place while I wait for the rest of the book, rather than dangling off a cliff.

Click to expand...

I got the first one as a free download as some promotional thing on Kindle. It hooked me from the start--but I was invested and stuck with it because I knew what the score was (the whole story was intended to be told over a five book series).

I get what you're saying about Stacia's books, though. I feel that way about Jim Butcher and Kim Harrison's UF.

dogfacedboy said:

Unless you are unaware of the fact that it's a series, you should know that you're not getting the whole story.

Click to expand...

That's what killed me with Lirael. I *didn't* know. Not until I calculated the amount of plot to resolve vs. number of pages left.

This is why I had to stop reading the George RR Martin series. Drove me absolutely insane.

I enjoy cliffhangers as long as there is some form of resolution. I do not mind the story ending in such a way that I know it should be continued to solve some underlying problem, but I need some kind of resolution so that I am not sitting there thinking, "Well, did this character just die? Will he escape his kidnapping?"

An example I can think of most profoundly is the Hunger Games (the most recent book I finished). It ended with the main character thinking to herself about a boy she may or may not have feelings for. This is an unresolved issue. However, I am satisfied because the main plot (the Games) is over and a winner had been declared.

For me cliffhangers work only if i get to care enough for a story. I continued reading LOTR because i was in there and could not really get out so i got to the next part and the next.

Cliffhangers are good if, like Lost or 24, you can continue the story in a week or two and find out what happened. At most, you have to wait about three months over the summer.

They are not good if you have to wait two years or perhaps even longer for the next book to be written and published.

Some cliffhangers work because, as has been said, it's a natural place to end the story. A character getting shot and dumped into a lake can, in fact, be a legitimate ending as long as it feels like the story has been leading up to it. There must be catharsis in the climax. The ending of Northern Lights/The Golden Compass is a good example. The whole story has been building up the idea of Dust and parallel worlds. When Azrael finally opens the bridge and crosses dimensions, we get a sense of resolution to the lingering plot threads, despite the "bad" guy getting away. It gives the reader a sense that the plot has brought us to a threshold, with an uncertain future laying beyond, just as Lyra crosses the actual threshold.