I never really thought about this, but as I near completion of my first two manuscripts in a series of five, I get the crushing news from an established agent offering free advice that cliff-hangers are taboo…at least in her opinion. She says (and, perhaps such is the industry paradigm) that each book should stand alone. While I agree one should re-introduce characters in subsequent books in a series (to help a new reader), the cliff-hanger is critical to my underlying story line. Hence, I am writing a SERIES - not episodes…what doesn’t the industry understand???
Is it really true that a cliff-hanger is taboo? Seems so short-sighted to me. Please give me a spark of hope and talk me off the ledge. The cliff-hanger will keep readers wanting more, wouldn’t you agree? Your thoughts? This really takes the wind out of my sails. Very depressed.
A publisher wants an author’s first-book-ever to stand alone, so that if the author thereafter goes AWOL/can’t write another good book/the book tanks, they don’t have the whole “but it was supposed to be a series” entanglement. Either from the standpoint of a frustrated author or a frustrated fanbase.
Not every volume of a mutivolume series needs to end with a cliffhanger. Wrap up a secondary arc or two, provide a major revelation, and plant seeds for how the story will continue. LetEmpire Strikes Backbe your guide here - I know, it’s a movie, but it’s also the perfect example of how to write a story that satisfies readers while also leaving them wanting more.
Optimally, IMHO, each volume of a series should be a standalone story, with a beginning, middle and end, while at the same time being part of the entire series’ story arc. It sounds tough, but that’s why they pay you guys the big bucks.
I say this as a reader, not a writer, so take it for what it’s worth. For me, a cliff hanger at the end of a book feels like a cheap trick and leaves me slightly pissed off. There are plenty of ways to leave the reader invested in what happens next without resorting to a gimmick.
And maybe you think of “cliff hanger” differently than the agent means? Like Alessan says, Empire Strikes Back definitely leaves a lot of hanging threads, but I wouldn’t call it a cliff hanger. You know the hanging threads will take the next movie to resolve, not something that will be answered in the first scene.
I’ll offer up the Fellowship of the Ring as a non-cliff hanger example. When it ends, the story isn’t over. You don’t know if Merry and Pippin are alive, if Frodo and Sam will make it into Modor, etc. A cliff-hanger ending would have been “as Frodo and Sam crossed the river, a lone orc appeared. Slowly it fitted an arrow into its bow and drew the string. The arrow flew toward its destination.”
I think all serial works should emphasize being good on a solitary basis. No one is going to read a whole series if one or two of the books in the series are just fodder.
I’m a publisher and I publish a lot of riveting series (IMHO), but each book has a conclusion and catharsis. Otherwise the reader would scream, throw the book through a window, and never trust the author again.
Hunger Games is another good example. The first novel is stand-alone, the second novel, when everyone’s reasonably hooked-in, has a major cliffhanger.
Also, trilogies are de rigeur in fantasy and science fiction, but NOT in mystery/thriller. All the major players in those genres are episodic, with maybe a thin connecting arc on top.
And yet, The Two Towers (the book) ends on one of the most famous cliff-hanger lines in all of literature: “Frodo was alive, but taken by the Enemy.” Of course, a complication is that Tolkien didn’t intend that to be the end of a physical volume, merely the end of a section of the novel.
That said, I tend to agree that in general cliff-hanger endings feel cheap, like something out of creaky old adventure serials, or the old Batman TV show. Leaving some ongoing plot threads open? Sure. Ending with a character in immediate physical danger, leaving the reader to fill in an imaginary “How will our hero escape this predicament? Pick up the next volume and find out”? No thanks. We should want to come back for the next book because we like the characters, the setting, and the type of story being told. Not because you neglected to provide us an ending in the previous book.
Harry Turtledove pulled that trick on me without warning – no indication on the front or back cover that the book was “Book One in a Series” – and I got so mad, I sawed the goddam book in half and mailed half to him and half to his publisher, with a bitterly written note, “Don’t ever do this again.”
Fair warning, or else I curse you with the burning fury of a nest of fire ants.
Speaking personally, I go farther: I prefer series of books which you can read in any order without a great loss of enjoyment. Take Jack Vance’s “The Demon Prince” series, five novels which, while they do progress in an overall story arc, don’t depend on internal order. You can read 'em in pretty much any order, and get most of the same pleasure.
Talbot Mundy, in the 1920’s, wrote a number of Kiplingesque “Far East” adventure novels, with continuing characters and sequential situations – and it doesn’t matter a damn what order you read 'em in.
Wild guess–the first volume of the Worldwar series, right? I had the same reaction–though I didn’t saw anything in half!
You bring up a good point. I would go so far as to say that there are actually two different types of “series.” Those like A Song of Ice and Fire or Harry Potter, where a single ongoing story is told over multiple books. And those like, say, the Sherlock Holmes or Perry Mason series, in which the same characters return, but each story or novel is complete in itself, with little or no need to have read previous entries in order to enjoy the one you’ve got. As noted, fantasy and science fiction are big on the former type of series, mystery on the latter type.
Like you, I tend to prefer the read-'em-in-any-order type of series.
Exactly so! And all they had to do was be honest about it on the book’s cover somewhere.
(FWIW, I’ve met Harry Turtledove, and he’s one of the nicest souls you could ever hope to chat with! Brilliant, kind, gentle, and funny! But, AARGH! Hitting the end of that book and learning it isn’t an “end” at all… Pardon me: I have no mouth and I must scream… MMMNMNNNNMNMMNMN!)
Phil Farmer wrote to books set in ancient Opar, the lost city of the Tarzan books. The first ended in a cliff-hanger. I read some reviews by really pissed off reviewers. That was in 1974 when he should have known better.
I agree that The Empire Strikes Back is a good model for a cliff-hanger - but A New Hope is an even better model for a first book in a series. The goals of the characters have been accomplished, but there is still a lot to do, so you want to see more while being satisfied by what you did see.
Fuck no. If your first novel is a good story, I am inclined to believe that your second novel might also be a good story, which means that if I want more of the same I’m more inclined to buy your next book. If your first novel is half a story, you have given me no reason to believe you are capable of writing a satifying conclusion - for all I know the next one will be just as bad.
Besides, you can satisfy readers and keep them wanting more. They’re not contradictions. I mean, a steak dinner satisfies me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t want more steak in the future.
If you’re writing a series, you need to establish it first. Smarter people than I have given you the reasons behind that.
And even if you get established, a ‘cliff-hanger’ must also provide a sense of closure, a feeling that the story is told, but still leaves you wondering ‘what happens next?’
If I may be so bold, let me quote the last couple of paragraphs from a novel by the SF writer David Weber, who knows something about series. This is from book 9 in the Honorverse series.
See, it closes the story but leaves you wanting more.
If you must have a cliff-hanger, use it for the end of a chapter…not the end of the book.
I read The Lord of the Rings all at once, so I didn’t mind, but I don’t like that sort of story organization very much. I like each story to be complete in itself even if there is a continuing line over three or five books or even more. Someone mentioned Vance’s Demon Prince stories as an excellent example of that and I agree. I love Patricia Briggs’s Werewolf (not to mention a were-coyote and elves and vampires) stories in the same way. The series can go on and on, but each one wraps up as a story.
In general, I strongly prefer for each book in a series to have as self-contained a story as possible–especially the first in a series. In essence, at any time, there should be two stories going on: the A story is the immediate story of the book, and the B story is the arc of the series.
For example, the A story of the first novel in a series might be “The protagonist is cut off from home and must find a way back.” The B story is about why things are so screwed up that they were cut off in the first place. So you wrap the first novel with the protagonist getting home (satisfying the A story), but finding that things are messed up there, too. The next novel in the series continues to advance the B story with an A story about dealing with the problems the protagonist finds in their own people. Book 3 finds the protagonist leading their now-unified people against whatever caused all this crap in the first place; the B story becomes the A story, and gets wrapped up with the end of the trilogy.
This approach provides satisfaction and a release of story tension with the conclusion of each book, while leaving elements unresolved to draw people back. Without some resolution, you get frustrated reactions like some of the ones described in this thread.
Harry Potter is actually a good example of where each book tells a self-contained story—has its own climax and resolution, wraps up many (though not all) of its loose ends, doesn’t leave its characters in any immediate danger—yet the whole series makes up a larger overarching story.
Yes, that’s true, although it’s still a pretty good example of a series that almost has to be read in order. I probably ought to have used something like Harry Turtledove’s various alternate history series as my second example.
I should qualify my statement above by saying that most series these days are a hybrid of the two types that I suggested. Very few modern series are true “stand-alones” in the sense that they are completely episodic and can be read in most any order. The majority of series books, while each may be a complete story in itself, also feature ongoing plotlines that are larger than any one book. So even in mystery series, there will be plot progression in the detective’s personal life. To take Tony Hillerman’s Navajo detective series as an example, you have ongoing plot streams like Jim Chee’s various romantic foibles and his advance up the ranks, Joe Leaphorn’s efforts to find something to occupy his time during his retirement, and so on. Each mystery is wrapped up by the end of the novel, but these storylines continue.
You don’t absolutely have to read Hillerman’s books in order, but it’s probably somewhat more rewarding and less confusing if you do. But again, no cliff-hangers between books.
