Cliffhangers: The Edge of Glory
The hero is being chased by the bad guys. He scales the forest, taking the largest steps he could. In his concentration, he doesn’t notice a root protruding from the ground. The front of his shoe snags and he topples to the floor. His foot is stuck in the root, and as he tries to free himself from its grasp, a shadow looms from behind him.
And then the credits roll. The episode just ended on a cliffhanger, and you have to wait a week to find out what happens next.
Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
Cliffhangers take the story to a climax and ends the episode there. No resolution, no answer. It’s a plot device that absolutely frustrates audiences but at the same time keeps them coming back for more. Cliffhangers often involve the protagonist in a difficult situation or the characters witnessing a shocking revelation.
Cliffhangers use our natural yearning for certainty. Whenever we are presented with uncertainties, we tend to feel uneasy until they are resolved. The bigger the uncertainty and resolution, the more emotional payoff we experience. This is how well-written cliffhangers keep us satisfied and interested.
One of the oldest cliffhangers in history is found in medieval Arabic literature, specifically One Thousand and One Nights. In this piece, Scheherazade narrates a series of stories over a span of 1,001 nights to King Shahryar. She ends each story on a cliffhanger to save herself from execution.
In English literature, Charles Dickens is known to have pioneered the style. Dickens published serialized stories in magazines, each one ending in an unresolved or brand-new conflict. However, it was named in 1873, when Thomas Hardy ended one of his serials with a protagonist being left hanging on a cliff.
Cliffhangers eventually made their way around the world and across various media as technology progressed. Early 1920s and 1930s films often ended on cliffhangers, and when the television was invented, television writers used minor cliffhangers to stop viewers from changing the channel during commercial breaks.
Effective cliffhangers are abrupt, unexpected, and strategic. There has to be a buildup, and the audience must be provided with enough information so that they don’t get lost. For example, if your cliffhanger is to unveil a villain, then your protagonist must have faced difficult situations without knowing who had been involved in all these.
However, a resolution must always come after a cliffhanger. You could delay the resolution for a little while, but doing so for too long in hopes that it will keep the audience in suspense actually works the opposite way. Your audience may get tired waiting for something to happen and eventually get bored and stop following your story. Other than the dissatisfaction of being left in the air, they could also be annoyed from having been led on a wild goose chase.
Another thing to remember when creating cliffhangers is that they don’t always have to be life or death. It could be as fickle as making it to the bus stop on time or being able to buy the right kind of clothes. As long as the conflict is important to the protagonist, then it’s good enough.
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