The Art of the Cliffhanger
How I learned how to tease at a young age.
Writing a thriller is a thrilling experience. I thought I loved reading thrillers, but writing them? It’s even better. One of the best things about it is creating the classic ‘cliffhanger’.
The etymology of the cliffhanger dates back almost a century to the 1930s film serials that traditionally had their heroes facing peril such as - you’ve guessed it - hanging from a cliff at the end of the episode only to survive by some ingenious method when you returned to watch the next in the series the following day or week.
As a child, I lived for cliffhangers in virtually everything I watched. I watched series like T-Bag and the Seven Silver Spoons and Watt on Earth, glued to the screen to see which brilliantly devised puzzle would be designed to appear at the end of the episode then solved at the start of the next one, whilst maintaining a narrative arc and entertaining the viewer at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not how I saw it when I was 10, or 13 or even 16, but in my late teens and early twenties, this is exactly what I put together as a key method of entertainment I was hooked on.
This led me to reading thrillers, and in turn has led to me writing them.
Back in my teens for a moment - excuse the temporary sugar addiction and widows peak fringe combo - I loved one show’s cliffhangers more than anything, and that was the mid-1960s version of Batman. Now in my forties, I’m as interested in Superhero movies as I am in 17th century green glazed earthenware bed pans, that is to say not at all. But Batman repeats in the 1990s hit different.
Each episode ended on a cliffhanger so ludicrous as to be hilarious, such as a conveyor belt into a roaring fire or a literal device hanging over a cliff. Batman (superb) and Robin (a twat) were perennially perched over a precipice or doomed to disaster only to produce a gadget or some simple muscle exercise to escape their predicament when you returned the next night.
Reader, I always returned the next night.
As I grew older, my love of cliffhangers moved from the screen to the page. This started not in thrillers, or even YA fiction, but in the work of Georges Remi, a.k.a. Hergé. The Adventures of Tintin were also brought to life on screen and I enjoyed the TV series a lot but the books were everything to me.
I bought them all, saving up funds from my paper round, and obsessed over Hergé’s ability to turn cliffhangers into the last frame at the bottom right of 95% of the pages of each story. This is because the original stories were published as a single page of Le Petit Vingtième, a weekly youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.
Here’s a great example of the stunning artwork and brilliant expository and entertaining plot coming to a cliffhanger in the last frame.
I mean, there’s a lot to unpack. Who are those guys? Why are they flying an unregistered plane? For who? And is Tintin dead?*
From Tintin books, my love of the cliffhanger developed to thrillers, penned by authors such as Michael Connelly, Simon Kernick, Linwood Barclay and Harlan Coben. Latterly, I’ve been working with Harlan - of a fashion - by studying his BBC Maestro course on the art of writing thrillers and everything he says about asking questions with cliffhangers and answering them quickly makes total sense to me.
I love writing cliffhangers, both at the end of the majority of my chapters and in general in terms of plot, at the close of major sections of each novel. They fuel the reader’s enjoyment so much of the time, but they also make it fun for the writer to carry on writing. We read as we write, I find.
So what is my novel, and what’s its about?
Well, if I told you all that now, you’d have no need to return, would you?
*no, Tintin wasn’t dead.