On Wed, 17 Sep 1997 15:31:58 -0400 (EDT), Andrew Huang
<alhuang@hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:

Ie ... *do* use cliffhangers (someone will probably kill me for saying this
^^).

	Not quite. Use the _sparingly_. That way, you do it a little bit,
but don't annoy people so often that they just give up.

I wrote a fic last May, "Pools of Horror", where EVERY section (except
the last, of course) ended with a cliffhanger. Overall it wasn't that
popular a story, but nobody who did read it complained about that aspect
of it.

How many cliffhangers to use depends on what kind of effect you are
trying to achieve, and whether the plot you have supports them. You need
to have a situation that makes the reader think "How can they possibly
get out of this one?!" or something such. You also need a believable way
that they DO get out of it in the beginning of the next section. If this
isn't the case, trying to force it is not a good idea. You can watch old
Commando Cody serials and the like to find lots of examples of
cliffhangers that *shouldn't* have been.


Gary Kleppe
http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics