Part IV: Cliffhangers

Back when I first started writing, I wrote all my scenes in an orderly, linear, logical fashion. My legal training, remember, required it. If a character got up in the morning, I had to mention the whole showering/tooth brushing/driving to work/ parking the car thing. No detail was too insignificant for me to include it. Boring the reader to tears and then to an early grave was not one of my concerns in the early years. Reader pleasure, or lack thereof, rarely entered my mind. All my scenes began at the beginning—of a day, of a conversation—and ended at the end—of a conversation, of a love scene, of a day. More often than not, a chapter closed out with the character going to bed for the night and trying to get to sleep.

Are you feeling drowsy yet?

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that ending scenes at the end gave readers absolutely no reason to ever pick the book up again. When I put characters safely to bed for the night, I ran the very real risk that readers would put the book down forever. With so many wonderful books competing for attention these days, why would a reader come back to a story that has so little tension and essentially gives the reader permission to put it down by providing a nice, clean breaking point?

But what about ending scenes … in the middle?

Brenda Joyce does it in “The Game.” Oh, how well I remember reading the book before bed and thinking I would just get to the end of a chapter and put it down for the night. Only guess what? The ends of the chapters were the most tension-filled parts of the book. Why? Because the chapters end at the height of the scenes.

Proof? You want proof? What about the chapter that ends with Katherine coming face to face with her pirate-kidnapper for the first time? What about the multiple scenes and/or chapters ending with the characters teetering on the brink of making love for the first time? What about—worst of all!—the chapter that ends with Liam kidnapping Katherine for the SECOND time on her wedding night to ANOTHER man, telling her, “I told you once before … that I would come for you when the time was ripe.”

If you think you’re getting any sleep when the chapters end like that, you’d better think again.

I’ve gotten smarter. I want my readers to stay up, reading, all night, to show up late for work or, better yet, to call in to work. I want them glued to their seats with wide, saucer eyes—dying to see what’s coming next. So now I end in the middle. The middle of revelations, the middle of arguments, the middle of love scenes. It’s a dirty trick, I know, to pull on unsuspecting and tired readers who only want to unwind for ten minutes before they go to sleep, but there’s no shame in my game.

Cliffhangers keep ‘em coming back and I want my readers to come back.

Enough said.