Hanging By a Thread

I'm getting a bit tired of watching a big budget, usually American, television series for around twenty weeks only to find a great big cliff-hanger at the end. You know the sort. The hero's been chasing the bad guy for the best part of half a year and they finally meet up, guns pointed at each other as they stand in some gloomy shed they talk at length, tying up all the season's loose ends. We know who did what to whom and, however implausible it may seem, how they did it. The only thing that we need to know now is how this standoff will end.

Cut to the outside of the shed. Suddenly the entire building erupts in an immense ball of flame. Who lived? Who died? Cue titles and someone with a Geordie accent saying "And you can find out what happened when we show the next series in the New Year."

What? I invested twenty-odd weeks of my life and a good chunk of my Sky+ box hard drive in the series for that? They made me care about these people that don't really exist and I have to wait half a year to find out if they survive? That's if the series isn't cancelled and they're left in some kind of fictional limbo like 'Sapphire and Steel' or Sam from 'Quantum Leap'. It's just not on.

That kind of thing works fine for the end of a single episode though in the same way that the old black and white serial films used to end each short installment. "How will Flash Gordon escape the villainous Emperor Ming? Find out next week." And it's fine in comics too. It's quite acceptable to finish an issue with the Green Goblin knocking Spider-Man out and throwing him off the top of the Empire State Building. Will Spidey come round in time before he goes bug splat? Probably, yes. My guess is that the Human Torch will fly in and catch him. Again.

But when did you ever get to the end of a four-hundred page novel only to read, 'To be continued in the sequel. Available from all good booksellers next year'? I can't see any good publisher letting that go. Even most of the Kindle 99p authors balk at that. A fiction book has to have a beginning, a middle and, crucially, an ending. Even if its part of a series of linked stories it should also work as a standalone piece on its own. Grab any Sherlock Holmes tale for example and you have everything that you need to know about the great detective in that self-contained piece. The same with Miss Marple or Poirot.

There are exceptions - Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter - but they're few and far between. And even they tie up most of the threads in each volume. It seems that television drama is the only form of entertainment media where it's become accepted and expected for the consumer to wait for the story to continue. Am I alone in thinking that this is wrong?

So in closing I'd like to pass on something that I've learned from all my years of writing. The secret of writing a good cliff-hanger is -

© Shaun Finnie 2014