Articles·Cliffhangers
Chapters and plot structure
A chapter that tidies every loose end is often a dull chapter. Leave the decision unmade, and the reader will turn the page for you.
Fiction allows a looser structure than many other kinds of writing, but you still have to keep the reader awake. The instinct, when you are starting out, is to round a scene off to its natural conclusion, tidy the loose ends, and declare the chapter finished. That was my instinct. I liked chapters that resolved the drama they had started. The result was fiction about as gripping as a weather forecast. There was no jeopardy, no unanswered question, no reason to begin the next chapter tonight rather than next month.
Not every novel needs mystery in the crime-novel sense. Every novel does need to hold interest. One of the simplest techniques is to end the chapter before the events in it are resolved. If a character is on the brink of a decision that will change their life, show the build-up and stop before you tell the reader what they choose. Better still, delay that answer by at least a chapter, and let the next chapter attend to a subplot. You have just given the reader a reason to continue. As a writer, you should not ask for much more than that.
A simple machine that sells
One of the clearest modern examples of this machinery is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The idea is old. It owes a great deal to the Saturday-morning serial: you run a story until the moment the audience is about to learn the crucial thing, then you cut away. A second thread runs until it, too, is about to become interesting, and you leave it in mid-air while you return to pay off the first cliffhanger. Then you make another promise and cut again. The chapters are short enough that boredom has nowhere to sit.
The book is a phenomenon partly because an unusual proportion of the people who buy it read it to the end. They enjoy the twists, they finish quickly, and they tell a friend. I am not saying your novel must be built on that template. I am saying you should understand how a book that almost everybody finishes is constructed, before you invent a structure of your own and hope the reader will supply the curiosity you forgot to engineer.
Start late
If the reader needs to know what happened before page one, do not delay the real story with a history lesson. Begin at an interesting moment — conflict, or a decision that will not wait — and work the past in as you go. It does not have to be a flashback. It can be two people meeting after a long separation and failing to talk about anything else. It can be the accusation that flies out in an argument. It can be the answer a patient eventually gives a psychiatrist. The past is seasoning. The present is the meal.