I’ve been thinking about endings a bit lately. I’ve recently misplaced a cat, and it’s uncertain whether she’s going to come back- or if she’s even alive. Were my life a book, this part would be a dangling plot thread. I can’t even call it a cliffhanger, because life isn’t divided into chapters or scenes. There’s no definitive end to this character, so far, and it’s very frustrating not to have clear answers.
Fortunately for readers, a book isn’t like real life, and a good author takes care to wrap up all the dangling plot threads- or leave them on an intriguing but not panic-inducing note, so he can bring back that thread in the sequel.
Romance authors in particular cultivate the skill of wrapping up some threads and leaving others dangling, introducing secondary characters in the first book, leaving their state of affairs unsettled while the main couple gets their happy ending, then focusing the next book in the series on the once-secondary couple. And the first couple usually has a baby in that book, to help tie the series together. Sort of like leaving a tail at the end of your knitting or crocheting, so you have something to attach the next piece to.
An unabashed cliffhanger can be emotionally satisfying, too, if it’s done well. I’m not very good at writing them, but the cliffhangers I’ve read and enjoyed were subtly foreshadowed (the author didn’t say what was going to happen, but there was a sense that something was going to happen) and the emotional punch was in keeping with the story and the genre (if your nice, sweet regency romance ends in a bloody birth scene, horrible death, or the perennially-favorite carriage accident, your readers are going to chase you and hit you with sticks).
For most readers, the emotional satisfaction of a cliffhanger comes from knowing that they can turn the page, and the next chapter’s right there. Or, back in the day, they could sit in front of their TV at the same time next week, and see the cliffhanger resolved or the plot thread wrapped up. That’s why ending a book on a cliffhanger or leaving a massive dangling plot thread is so risky. Some readers will wait patiently for the next installment, some will wall the book and resolve never to give you money again. And some authors make multi-million dollar careers out of leaving their plot threads dangling- I’m looking at you, George R.R. Martin!
From one of the worst examples of tying up loose threads, to one of the best: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. His larger Middle-Earth world has some unresolved threads- it’s hard to write as much as he did in one world, for so many years, and not have some contradictions or details that fall by the wayside- but the Lord of the Rings tale does a good job of explaining what happened to everyone. One of my favorite examples is introduced in part one and isn’t resolved until part six- but it is resolved! The hobbits are traveling out of the Shire, and are obliged to purchase a pack pony from an enemy at a ridiculous price. The pony, Bill, becomes a faithful companion until they lose him outside the mines of Moria, and think he’s gone forever. But as the hobbits are returning home, nearly a year later, they find out that Bill has found his way safely back to his old home and is waiting for them.
It’s a cute moment, and incredibly emotionally satisfying, perhaps because it’s unexpected and not strictly necessary. No one would have noticed if Tolkien didn’t include the paragraph or so that concludes Bill’s part in the story, but he did include it, and it wraps up a thread most readers didn’t even realize was dangling. It was an extra level of conscientiousness on the part of the author, and while not all readers will notice, the ones that do notice, appreciate it.
Tolkien went the extra mile to tie up loose ends. You might not have to be that scrupulous, and different genres have more or less strict conventions. Most readers don’t mind a little chaos in our reading, as long as there’s a hope of a final ending somewhere in the future. But when a character or plot thread simply disappears, we’re left looking around helplessly and asking, ‘now, what?’
Mad Genius Club 
2 responses to “Now, What?”
The Lord of the Rings absolutely needed that wind down section at the end, cleaning up loses ends, and showing that life goes on, even after the harrowing events that the primary story ended with.
I personally learned to hate cliffhangers from gaming in the late 90’s/ early 2000’s. That was around when gaming had developed to the point there were a lot of excellent, and strongly narratively driven single player games out. That had their studios fold or merge or their publishers die halfway through the arc, and many multi-game series end right on an Empire Strikes Back grade cliffhanger ending.
Freespace 2 was one of the notable ones for me. Excellent space combat game, right before the entire genre died. It ended with a secondary antagonist disco img how to communicate with the silent Big Bad, and warping off with them, the discovery that the Big Bad had a massive fleet of super destroyers each more powerful than anything the TVA had, and that they could supernova stars.
Your last mission is you literally escorting the evacuation from them destroying an entire star system.
A real, ‘Oh what do we do now?’ moment.
Then Interplay went bankrupt spectacularly, the Volition dev team was bought by one company, and the Volition IP was bought by a different company.
Yeah…
Also the entire Half Life series. That was/is kind of their thing.
The thing that keeps a cliffhanger from being a mere gimmick is providing the reader with closure or resolution on very important things that he wasn’t necessarily looking for, but needed, while withholding the thing he thinks he is looking for. You also need to be careful to set up how the hero gets off the cliff such that the reader doesn’t feel cheated.
Most everyone’s favorite Star Wars movie ends on what should be a downer — the rebellion has suffered a catastrophic loss, Han has been captured, frozen, and shipped off to Jabba the Hutt, and Luke has lost a hand and, seemingly, his chance to be a Jedi. But the mystery of what happened to Luke’s father was resolved in a big way, and was part of the catharsis of the climax. Between that and the general feel of “we got away and can regroup” feeling of the final scene make the cliffhanger work.
Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novel Changes has most readers entering the final chapter thinking “Jeebus, he wasn’t kidding about that title, was he?”, and then ends on what should be an impossible cliffhanger for a first-person narrated series. Which is only heightened when you realize the next book is titled Ghost Story. The “mechanical” resolution (i.e., the physical working out of how Harry’s bacon is saved) of the cliffhanger at the end of the next book is, perhaps, a slight let-down (although entirely logical). But the actual solution to the mystery (who did this? WHY?) is so right, and so satisfying and in character, that the other possible shortcomings don’t bother most readers at all.