Partials & Cliffhangers
ManuscriptsWhen I looked in my email box this morning, I was happy to discover that an agent was interested in seeing the first 5-10 pages of my manuscript for "The Story of After." I sent the first ten because at the ten page mark, Florian introduces the idea behind the title. It was a good stopping point, I thought, and I hope that ending the submission there will make the agent curious enough to ask for a bit more--or even the entire manuscript. We will see. My main goal (to keep the stress level down) is to simply keep enough query letters out there that the ms is "always out," as one of my Boot Camp pals suggested. I will be sending out another query letter this week (there's also another to which I have not had a reply yet), so that less rides on the outcome of the request for a partial. In the mean time, more revisions.
It seems like it should be fairly obvious where to end a story. A story ends when you have fulfilled the promise/question/mystery/or some such thing that was set out at the beginning. Luke destroys the Death Star and saves the princess who was captured in the opening sequence. Harry Potter finishes off Lord Voldemort. Lucy and her siblings return to our world after the end of each adventure. Evil is vanquished. Lost objects are found. Kings and queens are crowned. The murderer is hauled off to jail. Love conquers all.
When I first became interested in books, I was fairly ignorant of the concept of the cliffhanger. Most books written for younger children don't employ the device. I think that the first time I became seriously aware of issue was I saw "The Empire Strikes Back" as a young teen. The entire audience audibly groaned when the end credits ran. Nothing was more frustrating than being left hanging for years while George Lucas put together the final movie in the trilogy. More movies have left me hanging since then, usually between installments two and three. There are three reasons, however, that his is less of an issue with movies than with books, at least as far as I am concerned. First, many of the movies in question, such as "The Lord of the Rings," are based on books, for which the ending is already known or available in as little as a few days of reading. Second, if you do have to actually wait for the next installment, it is fairly easy to get up to speed with a two to four hour review of the previous movies. (Well, Harry Potter became a marathon, but you can still see all of the movies over a weekend if need be, and besides, the endings are still in book form.) Third, and perhaps most importantly, in recent years, movies with cliffhanger endings are part of a planned two to three part set filmed either concurrently or nearly back-to-back such that the movies come out half a year to a year apart.
Cliffhanger endings in books, however, are a huge problem for me. First, books are usually far more detailed than movies. Secondary plot lines and characters are easily forgotten in the intervening year/years, necessitating a complete rereading of the previous book/books to get back up to speed, which cannot happen in the few hours it takes to see a movie. Second, and most importantly as both a reader and a writer, a cliffhanger ending feels like a cheat. Not to put too fine a point on it, but aside from epics, there really is no need to leave a reader dangling by tacking on an extra chapter or two to introduce new material after the main story is wrapped up. Even with epics, though, it shouldn't be that much of a stretch to find a stopping point that ends the story at an obvious break in the action. The Harry Potter books, for example, ended at the end of the school year, and except between books six and seven, wrapped up the majority of the plot threads at the end of each book. Obviously, there was more to the story each time, but for now at least, Harry was going back to Privet Drive and the adventures were over.
There seems to be a upsetting trend of late, though, that has me reading more and more books where the ending actually leaves the reader dangling. Really dangling. Two books that I read in the last decade actually ended with one of the principle characters in mortal danger--and these were both first books in trilogies that were not advertised as such when I picked them up at the local bookstore. One of those trilogies actually took nearly a decade to finally get finished.
I have tried to get around this trend by waiting until an entire trilogy was out to begin reading it at all, but I have been burned there, too. Some trilogies turn out to be four or five books (again, not advertised as such when the first few come out).
I have decided that this is a marketing ploy--and a very annoying one at that. And frankly, it should be entirely unnecessary. Leaving your readers eager for more does not mean tricking them by adding additional material onto the end of a completed story. Many popular, classical, and award winning trilogies and series have not employed this device to lure readers back because it is unnecessary. Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" books, C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books are good examples of books that didn't need to trick the readers to get them back to the bookstore for the next installment. Each one is a complete, stand-alone story. Each one, however, is so engaging that it makes the reader want to go back and revisit that world another time.
I'm not going to disclose the titles that have caused such ire, for I imagine that you can think of a few all by yourselves. Suffice it to say, though, that if the trend continues, an unintended consequence might be is that more readers like myself will wait longer and longer to try out new books for fear of getting burned.
What are your pet peeves with books?