Author: Cheyenne Munawar

  • The Secret to Avoiding Cliffhanger Anger

    Many authors suggest using cliffhangers as incentive for readers to continue, but they also warn that this technique can anger readers who feel cheated when they learn they must wait longer for the satisfaction they’d been promised. Common advice seems to be to use them sparingly and only when you know what you’re doing. But how can you be sure when a cliffhanger is right?

    Here’s the biggest difference between good and bad cliffhangers and as long as you keep it in mind, you’ll be able to use them at the end of every chapter if you want!

    As with the Hook at the beginning of a story, readers keep reading because of anticipation. Get them to ask a specific question about what is going to happen and they’ll keep going until their anticipation is satisfied.

    Bad cliffhangers bring the reader all the way up to the point of answering their question, but then go back on this promise. The reader is left wondering the same thing as they were before. They feel cheated, and rightly so. The first time this happens, they will probably keep reading anyway, but if this is a multiple offense or worse yet they’re being asked to purchase the next book in order to find out the answer to their question, they just might give up on your story. Why should they risk being cheated again?

    A good cliffhanger, however, ends the scene by answering the reader’s question with a surprise, leaving the reader asking a new question than the one they were asking before.

    Great examples of this can be found in The Hunger Games. Nearly every chapter ends by answering the question the story had been building up the whole time, but with a twist. Chapter one starts out with the the promise we will see the Reaping, but when a name is drawn from the girl’s bowl, it’s one we never considered was at risk. Right from the start, the reader has anticipation for the Reaping which keeps them reading until the end of the chapter, and when they get there, there’s no way they’re putting that book down!

    Soap operas are also great at this, especially the British soap, Eastenders, particularly the episodes from the mid 2000s. I’m not a soap opera fan, but I got hooked from a single episode on PBS when nothing else was on. I just had to tune in again to see how each plot twist came out and before I knew it, I was there every weekend for the next four years. My entire week revolved my show, and when it was preempted for pledge drives, I didn’t think I’d survive the suspense. (Moral of the story: Don’t watch tv! It’ll waste away your life!)

    Throwing in just anything unexpected at the end won’t do. It has to be something that the reader could have anticipated, but didn’t because they were focused on something else.

    Remember to make a promise to your reader early on about what is coming later in the story, and then deliver on that promise with a twist!

    Mystery and humor are a wonderful genres for this sort of slight of hand. The obvious suspect (or punchline), the one you’re probably keeping your eye on even though you know better, is never the culprit. In the end it comes out that the real bad guy has been right under our noses the whole time! This is an absolute must. Your surprise ending or plot twist cannot be something your reader would never have been able to foresee. It must be something that was subtly planted as a possibility, but then swept aside when the emphasis is put on other concerns.

    In The Hunger Games, we know all along that Prim’s name is in the Reaping, but since Katniss has made sure it was entered only once and is so sure herself that her sister is not at risk, we believe her and instead share her concern for herself and Gale.

    As long as you keep in mind the secret recipe for good cliffhangers, you can use them as much as you like to create addictive and surprising stories that will keep your readers coming back for more.

  • Creating Story Seeds: Premise + Plot = Story

    There are lots of fill-in-the-blank templates to create a good hook or pitch for what your story is about. But does that really help you understand how those moving parts that make up your story work together?

    I like to call such a paragraph pitch for a story a story seed. A story seed is made of a premise and a plot. These two create a snapshot of what your story is about. If you know how these various parts fit and move together, this snapshot can not only be used to pitch your story, but to grow it later on when you’re ready to plot your novel.

    Start with the premise. This can be put in a single sentence often starting with the words “What if…?” More specifically, things like:

    What if there was a place where…?

    What if there was a person who…?

    Depending on which of these starts off your premise, you might call your story either character driven or plot driven. More about that here (link to article on a story’s driving forces).

    If your premise is more about a person and less about a setting, you might be able to create your plot triangle first and then figure out your premise line from there. Once you know more about this character, you can visualize a world that would be challenging in some way for them to live in. If your “what if” line is about a person having a special ability rather than what they want to accomplish or who stands in their way, it is likely still a premise rather than part of the plot.

    Often when people say they have a great “story idea”, but what they really have is a world or a scenario which has not yet developed a plot. It’s still a premise. These kinds of ideas can come from anywhere and can be used to tell all sorts of stories. It’s the sort of thing we as writers are always on the hunt for and good premise ideas can be sparked every day if we’re looking for them.

    Here is an example premise:

    What if there was a world where the atmosphere was toxic at sea level and everyone lived in the mountains and used airships and balloons to get around?

    This idea came from a combination of a “what if” question (what if a planet had an oxygen/radon atmosphere?) and a genre (steampunk). Usually a premise will be the combination of such a question and a genre, the genre being the angle from which to approach and explore the question. If this question is combined with another genre, fantasy or sci-fi for instance, the outcome could look entirely different. People would instead be riding dragons or flying shuttles over this toxic abyss.

    Sounds interesting, maybe. But I don’t see any characters or conflict. There is potential for conflict, but until some character has to go into that toxic air for some reason, there is no story.

    This premise can lead to other more detailed world building such as what would the surface of such a planet look like? Could plant life survive in radon? How would such plants be different from what we have here on Earth? Each time you ask more questions like this, you will think of potential hazards and conflicts which will become scenes in your story.

    Now we can build our plot. I like to think of a plot as a triangle made of three points: Protagonist, Antagonist and Goal.

    plotTriangle
    Plot Triangle

    Your premise must be linked like a chain to at least one of these to start. You can tie in the other points of the triangle later and when you are finished, you will have a pyramid or more accurately, a tetrahedron, with your premise as the tip and your plot triangle as the base. Many different plot triangles could be attached to any given premise, it’s all about the type of story you want to tell within that setting or scenario. It’s most important for the triangle to be tight. If those three plot triangle points don’t all relate to each other, it doesn’t matter how closely they tie in to the premise.

    storyTetrahedron
    Story Pyramid (or Tetrahedron)

    Let’s see what different points of this triangle we can create based on this premise. Let’s start with the Goal since we can do that without being specific about people and it will force us to make the main conflict of the story intrinsic to this setting.

    Well, we have this toxic wasteland that people need aircraft to traverse. Perhaps this story could be about a journey? The goal could be to get somewhere across this “sea”? Or maybe people are stranded after their craft wrecked? Maybe this is about survival and a rescue mission?

    Now let’s look at the Antagonist. Already we’ve seen we don’t need a person for this. The cruel environment would suffice. But what if we did add a person? It often helps for our hero to have a real person to face. Who would this be? How could he use this world to his advantage? Maybe his secret lair is hidden in the toxic lowlands? Maybe he, through technology or otherwise, can breath down there?

    Finally, lets think about our Protagonist. How can this world effect him? Maybe, as often is a good idea with the POV character, let’s start more mundane. Maybe he runs or works for an airship company? Maybe the only one in his town? The people there rely on him but his ships are falling apart. When they fail, he’ll loose his business and the town will loose its only means of contact and trade with the rest of the world.

    This is just brainstorming, we don’t need to use all three of these ideas in the same story. Depending on which one we start with, the other points of the plot triangle will need to develop to suit it. In the end, the triangle needs to be related according to one of these lines:

    The Protagonist wants the Goal, but the Antagonist stands in his way and he must fight to overcome and win.

    Or…

    The Antagonist wants the Goal, but when his actions injure the Protagonist, our hero fights back to save the day.

    The protagonist can further be broken down into his own character triangle. A triangle, for story or for character, is a snapshot, a single state that you can use to build an arc, story arc or character arc, which is the actual story in motion.

    Lets put our premise line and plot triangle into words and add them together. We end up with this:

    There is a world where everyone lives in the mountains to escape the toxic lowlands where none can survive.

    +

    Our hero wants to rescue the survivors of a wreckage in the valley but the villain is revealed to be the true cause of the accident and does everything he can to prevent the safe return of the passengers and crew.

    In other words:

    storyEquation
    Story Equation

    So our finished story seed might look something like this:

    In a world where everyone lives in the mountains to escape the toxic air in the lowlands, anyone stranded near sea level would perish. When an airship journeying across the valley wrecks, the passengers and crew are left struggling to survive. Our hero, owner of the only airship company on the mountain and struggling to keep his own ships in working order, must race to rescue them before it is too late. But he soon learns the wreck was no accident and finds himself in a fight to save even his own ship and crew.

    Now not only do we have a pitch for our story, but we have seen how each of these parts came together to create it. Next we can move on to plotting this novel, using this paragraph as our seed.

  • Celebrating My 10th Nanoversary! (And Digging Out My First NaNoWriMo Draft)

    Then and now, my winner badges from 2007 and 2017.

    I can still remember sitting at my desk at the end of the upstairs hall to write my very first novel. It’s hard to believe that was already ten years ago! I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo every year since then and even a few Camp NaNos. Each November a new story came to life on my computer, but rarely have I ever even looked at them again after validating my word count.

    Hopefully they’ve aged enough by now, and what better time than my 10th Nanoversary to return to my old fifty-thousand-word stories. Several of my computers have crashed since then, so I was worried I wouldn’t find all of them, but digging around in my old backups, I found my very first draft from NaNoWriMo 2007.

    He knew the Timeway would be just of the path to the right not far ahead. After a while he reached the point he had seen and he recognized it immediately even though it didn’t look much different from the rest of the path. He turned aside and walked of the path. After a few moments Victor saw it in person. The Timeway was a large stone archway with a faint blue light that looked like the surface of water stretched across it. It was standing strong even though the keystone was missing. Victor approached it cautiously and stared through the opening of it. He saw the woods behind the Timeway, but the trees looked older and the moss was thicker. Victor knew what he had to do and without further hesitation he walked in through the Timeway.

    Ouch… not so good.

    But I wouldn’t be a writer today if it weren’t for that first novel draft, and after such a start, I could only improve.

    Do you have any old drafts that have been waiting patiently on a shelf or hard drive? Maybe it’s time to dust them off and have a look, if not to make something of them, at least to see some proof of how far you’ve come. Early work is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s inspiring.