Join me as I share the secret sauce of crafting chapter endings that will keep your readers on the edge of their seats!
In this video, I tackle the challenge of concluding chapters with cliffhangers that weave seamlessly into your storyline, ensuring that everything feels natural and your readers are left craving more.
Drawing from the clever works of Dick Francis, I demonstrate how to strike with a ‘big bang’ and carry the momentum to a ‘cliff hang’ without missing a beat.
Have you ever wrestled with the perfect chapter finish that propels your readers forward without raising eyebrows in bewilderment? Click through to the YouTube video and tell me about your favorite chapter wrap-up or a time when you’ve been stumped in the comments. Let’s share stories and grow together!
Hello, Jane Cleland here. “How can I end a chapter with a cliffhanger that transitions properly from the content of the chapter without feeling coincidental or contrived?”
Interesting question and a good one because this idea of incidents linking to one another in a non contrived way is crucial.
It’s the whole, whole ball game in a sense. And what I mean by that is causality. You have to have incidents that organically connect with one another in order to move your reader through the story in a way where it just flows, where they don’t say, “Huh? Say what? What just happened?”
Now, I like to use a big bang, cliffhanger structure at the chapter level. You start with a bang, you satisfy the reader curiosity that derives from that bang, and then you end on a cliffhanger, a cliffhanger that catapults the reader into the next chapter, and it continues that way. Big bang, cliffhanger.
I want to give you an example because I think it’s important to note that not all big bangs or cliffhangers have to be explosive, they can be thought provoking, they can be anything that hooks your reader’s attention, that engages their interest.
This example comes from Dick Francis’ Risk. And I’m going to read you the first line of the chapter, of chapter one, and then the last line of chapter one. Here we go. “Chapter one. Thursday, March 17, I spent the morning in anxiety, the afternoon in ecstasy, and the evening unconscious.”
It’s a great first line, right? It hooks your interest. It’s quite a day. Here’s the ending.
Here’s the last line of chapter one. “As to the how I got there, well I would never forget Thursday, March 17. The most shattering questions were those to which I could think of no answers at all. Why? What for? And what next?” And there we go, right into the next chapter.
*Transcripts are software-generated. To report any transcription errors, please use my contact form!
