If you’d like to chime in and let us know your answers to the questions or drop a link to your post if you’re participating, please do so in the comments! And check out the IWSG website for more answers!

December 4 question – Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

Jayden: Absolutely! I try to end chapters on cliffhangers, and definitely blog posts. I want my readers coming back for more. As a reader, if there’s a good cliffhanger, I’m going to just keep reading, which is the best case scenario.

Richard: I’m a big cliffhanger fan. They were actually the original topic of my Master’s thesis (though it broadened a little bit by the end). The most important thing to remember is to make sure the energy flows through the cliffhanger. The cliff should be at or near peak tension, but it needs to release in an exciting way after the chapter (or whatever) break. 

A “fake” cliffhanger (someone is about to die! but it’s resolved by the second paragraph of the next page) is just a depressing tease for the reader. “I started another chapter for this?” Even worse is the overly delayed resolution (someone is about to die! and we won’t even see them again for three or four chapters), which diffuses the tension of the initial cliffhanger, and tends to undersell when it finally comes back– how much danger could they really have been in if it took 100 pages to get there?

Drop a link to your IWSG post in the comments so we can come check it out!