One key ingredient among thrillers, regardless of the underlying writing style, is the cliff-hanger. Webster defines the device as \u201can adventure serial or melodrama presented in installments each ending in suspense\u201d. A spot on definition. The natural bookend to the hook, or lead-in, a good cliff-hanger leaves the reader wanting more.<\/p>\n
After seven months of working on Velocity it’s my conclusion that ending every chapter with a cliff-hanger is a very difficult task, the opposite of what I expected. This is not for want of examples. Most television shows use the technique, and I’ve certainly watched my share of those. Films do it, and I’ve read a few dozen thrillers in the last few years. How hard could it be really? To me, pretty rough going, but part of the process. <\/p>\n
Why bother so much with cliff-hangers? It all comes back to my single biggest obstacle: a lack of focus. Not that I can’t focus at the keyboard, but exploring the back story of a character, even where it isn’t necessarily part of the story is very tempting. Extremely tempting at times. Runaway narrative is fun for the writer, not so nifty for the reader.<\/p>\n
And that’s where cliff-hangers come in, because thinking in terms of short, tight scenes impels focus. It forces a thorough consideration of the beginning, middle and end at the scene level. Focus is the means and a natural byproduct of the exercise.<\/p>\n
While some cliff-hangers in Velocity are more dramatic than others, with twenty-three chapters in the can, I believe the the results are worth the time. So I’ll keep at them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One key ingredient among thrillers, regardless of the underlying writing style, is the cliff-hanger. Webster defines the device as \u201can adventure serial or melodrama presented in installments each ending in suspense\u201d. A spot on definition. The natural bookend to the hook, or lead-in, a good cliff-hanger leaves the reader wanting more. After seven months of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}