Created by Randy Ingermanson - "the Snowflake Guy"
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

About Cliffhangers

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in Craft, Fiction Writing

Is it true that every chapter of your novel needs to end on a cliffhanger? If so, then what exactly is a cliffhanger? And if not, then why does everyone say you should end on a cliffhanger?

Nancy asked: 

How can I make readers keep reading? 

One thing that I’ve really struggled with is understanding what my teachers mean when they tell me that I have to keep my readers reading. They always tell me to try and have some sort of cliffhanger so that the readers don’t put the book down.

First of all, what exactly does that mean? Second, how can I achieve that?

I really do want to keep my readers interested, but I don’t know exactly how I’m supposed to do that, or what I’m supposed to do to not make my readers expect the next cliffhanger.

Randy sez: If you’re writing an over-the-top action-adventure novel, then typically most scenes end with a cliffhanger—your protagonist is figuratively hanging from a cliff by his fingertips. The key word here is “figuratively.” Most novels don’t have cliffs. If you want to get more literal, the scene ends with the protatonist in some sort of life-or-death situation with no obvious way out. That’s what we mean by a cliffhanger.

And that’s fine, if you’re writing an over-the-top action-adventure novel. That’s what your target audience wants. 

But not every novel is over the top, because there are all different kinds of target audiences.

And it’s not true, even in an action-adventure novel, that every single scene needs to end with a cliffhanger.

The Two Ways to End a Scene

Yes, you want to end every scene in a way that gives your reader a reason to turn the page and read the next scene. But you’ve actually got two options here:

  • End your scene with your point-of-view character in trouble. 
  • End your scene with your point-of-view character making a risky decision.

I discuss these two options in my latest book, How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method. If you want all the details, with examples from several best-selling novels, you can check that out. 

In this post, we’ll consider only the case where the scene ends with trouble.

The Right Kind of Trouble

Ending a scene with your POV character in trouble is good, but it needs to be the right kind of trouble. The right kind of trouble will make your reader worry about your character.

If your POV character is a sleazy, vicious gangster trying to rob a bank, and the robbery goes wrong, and the cops arrive and arrest him at the end of the scene, that’s certainly trouble. But your reader probably won’t worry about that character, because the creep is going to get what’s coming to him. Your reader might keep reading to see justice served. But then again, maybe not. 

But suppose your POV character is a decent guy who was coming to the bank to ask for a loan to send his daughter to college. On the way in the door, he’s grabbed by gangsters who put a gun to his head and use him as a human shield. They force him to hand over the note to the teller. Then the SWAT team busts in, there’s a shootout, and the gangsters are all killed. By some miracle, your POV character is left alive, but the cops don’t know he’s a good guy, so they arrest him. Now your reader has to turn the page.  

What’s the difference? 

In the first case, the gangster deserves trouble, and gets it. That’s justice, and it’s no cause for worry.

In the second case, your character doesn’t deserve trouble, but gets it anyway. That’s injustice, and it’s great cause for worry.

If you’re going to end your scene with trouble, make it the right kind of trouble.

Who’s in Trouble?

Every scene has a POV character, but that character might not be the protagonist of your novel. The POV character might be the novel’s villain Or your protagonist’s love interest. Or the village goofball. 

If your POV character is the villain of the story, then as we saw above, it’s not all that interesting to get him in trouble. That’s not going to force your reader to turn the page.

But what if your villain ends the scene with a success? Suppose your POV character is a vicious gangster who robs a bank and runs out the door with a big bag of cash, intent on jumping in his getaway car. Then he sees the cops coming, so he grabs an innocent bystander and drags her into the car with him to prevent the cops shooting.

That’s not trouble for your POV character. But it’s trouble for the woman they hauled into the car. And it’s trouble for the cops. Once again, that’s an injustice. And your reader’s going to worry. Your reader will turn the page.

If you’re going to end your scene with trouble, make it trouble for the right person.

But How Much Trouble?

One issue here is that most novels are not over-the-top. Not all readers are looking for a bank robbery in every scene. If you’re writing a novel at a lower level of tension, that’s fine.

But you still need to end your scenes with trouble. Scale the trouble down to the level of tension your target audience is looking for. 

And this is where I have a problem with the term “cliffhanger.” That word implies a high level of tension. High tension may not be appropriate for your novel.

But trouble is always appropriate. Seeing your characters in trouble is one of the reasons your readers read. 

If you’re going to end your scene with trouble, make it the right level of trouble for your book.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Multiple Viewpoint Characters

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in Craft, Fiction Writing Tagged: ,

How do you split out the air-time between characters in your novel when you have multiple viewpoint characters? Does your protagonist need to get more than 50%? 

Steve posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Thank-you for the serious time and effort you’ve devoted to helping aspiring writers! Your site is a treasure trove and your snowflake method gave me a significant boost.

I’ve been searching & reading through your older blog posts related to writing multiple POVs and this one hit home:

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/blog/2010/12/02/having-multiple-protagonists-in-your-novel/

Based on the cranky responses from other readers, I’m guessing it highlights a common trap… Specifically, I was drifting into multiple protagonists and hit the exact obstacle you called out: Emotional impact turns into 1 + 1 = 1/2. (I ended up with a protagonist even I didn’t care about.)

The proto-protagonists were conceived to independently uncover and feed puzzle pieces to my hero. I was hoping you’d provide some thoughts on a good balance.

For example, if two POV characters each get 50% of your novel, the emotional diffusion is obvious. Would you always try and give your hero 70%+ of the novel and let the others fight it out for the rest?

Thanks again!

Steve

Randy sez: I’ll first answer Steve’s question, then talk a little about the question of “multiple protagonists,” since this seems to have confused some people over the years.

It’s not easy to decide who should be the point-of-view character in each scene. I discussed this in my latest book, How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method. One of the core questions I ask for each scene is: who has the most to lose in this scene? Often, that person will make a good viewpoint character. But there are other questions, and it’s sometimes just a judgment call when picking the viewpoint character.

So I don’t decide in advance what percentage of scenes my protagonist gets to be the viewpoint character. He or she gets as many scenes as they deserve to make the story work. Normally, I work with 3, 4, or 5 viewpoint characters, and each gets somewhere between 10% and 40% of the total air-time. I don’t think I’ve ever had any viewpoint character who had more than 50% of the scenes.

As Steve mentioned, I wrote a blog post back in 2010 that has gotten a fair number of responses over the years. I suppose my original post could have been longer. At the time, I didn’t think it required a long response. Part of the problem was a confusion in terminology. Not everyone was clear on the difference between a “protagonist” and a “viewpoint character.” 

So let’s talk about that.

About Protagonists

The word “protagonist” comes from a Greek word meaning “player of the first part.” 

So the protagonist is effectively the #1 character in terms of emotional interest—the so-called “good guy”—the character the reader is rooting for.

You might think that there can be only one character in a novel who is #1. Because that’s what it means to be #1—it means that you’re the one at the top of the heap.

In most cases, you’d be right, but it’s possible to think of exceptions. Here are a few:

  • The story might start out with one character who is #1, but then he or she dies and another character becomes #1. In this case, there are two protagonists in the novel, but they are protagonists at different times. At any given time, there is really only one. (I’m thinking of Ken Follett’s book The Pillars of the Earth here, and also The Godfather, by Mario Puzo.)
  • The story might not really focus on any single character as #1. In this case, it’s not sensible to talk about the novel having a protagonist at all. (Who is the protagonist of Downton Abbey, for example? Or Lost? Or Friends?)
  • The leading character in the story might actually be the villain, and it’s possible that there is no single “good guy” character who could be called the protagonist. The reader is not rooting for the villain; the reader is rooting against the villain. In this case, again there is no protagonist.

Can these work? Yes, of course they can work if the author is good enough. The goal of a novel is to give the reader a powerful emotional experience. You can do that with two or more protagonists. You can do it without having any protagonist. It’s just harder than if you have one protagonist. But a really skilled writer can do it. Beginning writers generally can’t.

But that raises another issue.

About Viewpoint Characters

We need to be clear that a “protagonist” is not the same thing as a “viewpoint character.”

As I said above, the protagonist, if he exists, is the #1 character in the story, the one the reader is rooting for.

A viewpoint character is the person through whose eyes we’re living a particular scene. (So the viewpoint character can change from scene to scene.)

You can have a protagonist who is not a viewpoint character, and vice versa. (Example: Sherlock Holmes is the protagonist in the Holmes stories, but Watson is almost always the viewpoint character.)

You can let the villain of your story be the viewpoint character in some scenes. Any character in your story can be a viewpoint character. Even walk-on characters who only have one scene.

Most novels have multiple viewpoint characters, and that’s a good thing. I’ve never discouraged anyone from writing a story with multiple viewpoint characters. Beginning novelists can easily write a multi-viewpoint novel. All of my own novels have used several viewpoint characters.

As an example, The Lord of the Rings has numerous viewpoint characters. But it only has one protagonist, and that’s Frodo. (Gandalf and Aragorn might have worked well as protagonists, but they weren’t chosen. Tolkien chose Frodo to be the protagonist.)

Most Novels Have One Protagonist 

The reason most novels have one protagonist, and only one protagonist, is that it’s easier that way. It’s easier on the author. It’s easier on the reader. 

Authors who have the skills to write a novel with multiple protagonists (or none) should feel free to do so. But they’ll have to work harder to make it work.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

What if Your Best Book Comes Last in the Series?

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in Craft, Fiction Writing, Series

What if you’re writing a series and it looks like the last book in the series will be more exciting than the first? Is that bad? 

Will posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m working on the first of what I plan to be a series of fiction novels. I’ve used the Snowflake method to craft outlines for three novels so far. My question is: what to do if I think the most exciting story is in the third book? It’s kind of like George Lucas debuting the Star Wars series with Episode 4, because he wanted audiences to meet Darth Vader as a fully formed villain, rather than the conflicted boy he was in Episodes 1-3. Should I skip ahead to write book 3, which will probably change parts of books 1 & 2, or stay patient and keep building?

Randy sez: Just to make sure everybody’s on the same page, Will is referring to my wildly popular Snowflake Method of writing a novel. He’s used it to plan out a whole series, which shows some serious dedication to planning.

Kudos, Will, for mapping out three whole novels in advance! That’s hard work, and it’ll pay off for you as soon as you start writing.

It’s hard to give advice when I haven’t seen your Snowflake documents and don’t know all the details of your story. 

My view is that a lot depends on the answer to this question: “How good is Book 1 in your series?”

There are a lot of ways you could answer that, but let’s look at two possible extreme cases. You might respond:

  • “Book 1 is wretched. My target audience isn’t going to like it.”
  • “Book 1 is pretty good. If it was a standalone book, it would still make my target audience happy. But it just isn’t as good as Book 3.”

Now let’s look at those two cases.

What if Book 1 is Bad?

If Book 1 in your series is bad, then nobody is going to read Book 2 except your mother, and even she won’t read Book 3.

If that’s the case, then you need to rethink your series and figure out how to make Books 1 and 2 better. 

It sounds like you’re still in the planning stage and you haven’t written any of them yet, so there’s no high cost to revising your plans. It’s much quicker and easier to revise a Snowflake document than a four-hundred-page manuscript!

What if Book 1 is Solid?

If Book 1 in your series is in good shape, and the only problem is that it’s not as good as Book 3, then that’s a wonderful problem to have.

Remember the Harry Potter series? Book 1 was very good. Book 2 was even better. Book 3 was way better. Book 4 was massively better. And Book 7 was the best of all. That makes for a wonderful reader experience. Every book is better than the one before. 

I can’t see a downside in this case. By all means, think about how you might make Books 1 and 2 stronger. I’m a big fan of always writing the absolute best work you can write today. But once you’re done with today’s work, let it go. Then try to do better tomorrow. 

I’ve tried to do that in my own novels. (And in my blog posts. And in my e-zine.) I may not succeed in always doing better with every effort. That’s not under my control. The only thing under my control is whether I do my best work on any given day.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to start with Book 3 and then go back and do Books 1 and 2. Since Will mentioned the Star Wars series, I’ll just say that I liked Episodes 4, 5, and 6, and I thought they made a complete series. Having seen those first, I found that Episodes 1, 2, and 3 didn’t work for me, because I was comparing them to 4, 5, and 6. 

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

How Do You Decide Who Your Protagonist Is?

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in Craft, Fiction Writing Tagged:

What if your protagonist starts acting like a jerk? Should you try to make him or her behave? Or should you change to a different protagonist?

Emily posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How can you tell who your protagonist is?

I began writing my novel a couple years ago and I am still incredibly new at writing fiction. I have been kind of all over the place with it and haven’t really had a good method until I found the snowflake method and so far it seems to be the method for me. But I have now come to a new problem and that is that I am wondering if my Protagonist may be misplaced. The story is in the time a bit before the Protestant Reformation and the first disaster is that my “protagonists” wife becomes a Protestant and my protagonist feels obligated because of his values to send her away despite the fact that he loves her to death. Eventually some time later she discovers that she is pregnant with his child and to her her husband gets really upset. For some reasons he doesn’t seem to be very likeable and I am wondering if maybe it sounds like his wife should be the protagonist. Or does he have hope of being likeable if I write it right?

Randy sez: Glad to hear you’re finding the Snowflake Method useful, Emily! I don’t know much about your protagonist, but already I don’t like him. And I suspect most readers won’t like him either. Of course I might change my mind after seeing some of your novel, but as it stands, this guy is a jerk. 

So what are you going to do?

As I see it, you’ve got three options:

  • Change your protagonist’s behavior to be more likeable. 
  • Change your story so the wife is the protagonist/lead character.
  • Change the story so that your current protagonist remains the lead character but now becomes the antagonist.

In a minute, we’ll look at those three options, but let’s talk first about what a lead character is.

Your Lead Character

Your lead character is the person the story is focused on. Your lead character generally gets the biggest share of the air-time in the story. Your lead character is the person your reader is watching.

Your lead character is usually the protagonist of your story. Usually, but not always. 

As an example, in Frederick Forsyth’s novel, The Day of the Jackal, the lead character is a ruthless assassin code-named “the Jackal.” Nobody knows his real name, but a French terrorist organization hires him to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.

The novel tells the story of how the Jackal buys fake ID, gets a brilliantly disguised sniper rifle, crosses the border into France, makes his way to Paris, chooses his killing ground, and …

You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens next. The novel is brilliant and was a major best-seller in its day. I can’t justify calling the Jackal the protatonist of the story. That honor would go to Claude Lebel, the French detective leading the effort to catch the Jackal before he strikes. 

But Lebel gets comparatively little air-time. The Jackal gets more of the action than any other player. 

So in my view, the Jackal is the lead character and Lebel is the protagonist.

Let’s be clear that usually the lead character is the protagonist. It’s just not an absolute requirement.

That’s why I think you have three options, and not just two.

Now let’s look at those options in a little more detail.

Option 1: Make Your Protagonist More Likeable

Why would you choose this option?

Maybe because when you started writing the story, you liked your protagonist. You thought he had some good qualities that more than balanced out his flaws, and you hoped to write a story with a good redemption theme. That’s very reasonable. We can all think of any number of flawed people who, like Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, turn out good in the end. 

If that’s what you intended, then it sounds like you’ve let your protagonist drift a bit. He’s done things you didn’t intend, or else you intended to show a better justification for those actions.

And if that’s what’s happened to your novel, then the solution is to work through the novel, find the bad things he does, and either soften them, or show his moral dilemma more starkly and give him a stronger reason for making the bad decisions he makes. And then show us the guilt he feels and the efforts he makes to turn things right again.

That could work.

Option 2: Make the Wife Your Protagonist

This could be a lot of work, so why would you want to choose this option?

Maybe because you were actually more in tune with the wife from the beginning, even though you didn’t realize it. 

It may be that, all along, your theme has been about repression of women by male authority figures and patriarchal power systems. In a year like this one, that could play extremely well. 

It may be that you didn’t realize this was your theme. It may be that the theme developed organically and now you’re seeing that it’s at odds with the story you started telling. 

If that’s what’s happened, then it completely makes sense to make the wife the protagonist. You may need to give her more air-time. You may need to rewrite a lot of scenes. 

Or it may turn out that you don’t actually have to change very much, if that’s the story you’ve subconsciously been writing all along. Writing a novel has a way of bringing out things from your core that you didn’t know were there.

In any event, this approach could work quite well.

Option 3: Leave Your Lead Character the Same, but Change the Protagonist

This is a lot like option 2. The wife (or some other character) would now be the protagonist, while the lead character remains this cruel man.

Why would you want to choose this option? 

Maybe because your novel is about the hidden cruelty in all humans, and you want to take a deep look into evil, using a person who thinks he’s a paragon of virtue. Could play well or play poorly, depending on who your target audience is.

This option might not take that much work. Your lead character has been getting most of the air-time and he gets to keep that. But now you just need to adjust the tone so that your reader empathizes with the wife and watches in increasing horror as the lead character turns more and more to the wrong. 

If you take this tack, I’d advise you to write the first scene in the point of view of the actual protagonist. I’d recommend you give the reader a strong emotional attachment to the true protagonist early on. And you’d need to find some compelling reason why your villainish lead character gets most of the air-time. If you can’t find that compelling reason, then this probably isn’t your strongest option. (In The Day of the Jackal, the compelling reason to give the Jackal so many scenes is because he’s really quite a fascinating person, meticulous in his preparations, making it look like a dead certainty that he’s going to succeed. And that makes for a great suspense novel.)

In any event, if you go this route, you’d have a strong novel about the nature of evil.

That could work.

You Have Options; Take Your Pick

So you have several good options, Emily. They all require a bit of work, but any one of them could make a good novel.

You get to decide how you’ll play it. 

Make your decision based on who you are, what you value, and what you want to say about life.

Good luck, and have fun!

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Can You Start Your Novel With a Minor Character?

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in Fiction Writing Tagged:

If your novel begins with a minor character, is that bad? What if you need to do that to make your plot work? 

Bruce posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

i began writing a novel whose first chapter is from the POV of an unimportant character but writing so is important for the plot. the rest of the novel is in third person narrated by the author, i feel that this is complicating things. what should i do?

Randy sez: I don’t see a problem with it. 

There are any number of reasons why you might want to start a novel using some minor character.

If there’s a good reason, then do it. If there isn’t, then don’t.

Usually my blog posts are much longer than this. Usually, there’s a good reason to write a longer post. Today, there isn’t.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

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