Constructing cliffhangers

This week I've been re-writing the Supreme Ordeal for my novel The Code River.  The book is at heart an adventure novel, but at the end of it my heroes and heroines face extreme danger.  They have to defend their civilian research station against attack by hostile flyers.  And it's by no means certain that they'll survive the attack.

We're familiar with big set-piece battle scenes at the end of countless movies.  Destruction of Star Wars' Death Star comes to mind, or the battle at Mordor.  In movies the action is frenetic as we cut from the doings of one character to another, to another, following each as they get deeper and deeper into trouble.  Just when they're about to get killed, the scene switches to another character.  This is the art of the cliffhanger.  It leaves us on the edge of our seats, biting our nails as we wonder if our hero or heroine will get out of this scrape.

So how do we translate that to writing action scenes in books?  There's no doubt that we need to.  Readers of novels are influenced by the structure and pacing of movies.  And certainly in a commercial genre adventure story they're going to expect the same edge-of-the-seat moments.  Which means we need a series of cliffhangers in the narrative, a string of "now get out of that" moments.

One way to create these is to finish a chapter at one of those tense, nail-biting moments.  In one of my Panthera books I end a chapter with the main character literally hanging off a cliff.  But it's difficult to keep throwing these extreme moments at the same character one after another.  We run the risk of the reader crying "overkill".

An easier way, for me at least, is to have cliffhangers happening to several viewpoint characters at the same time.  And that's what I'm doing in my rewrite of The Code River. Chita has to stop a saboteur placing a bomb that blows up the place.  Then I cut to Tal, who has to stop a laser cannon blowing up.   Then another attack comes in, and Chita has to rescue Tal.  Then she has to deal with intruders on the boundary who are trying to to kill her friend Mercyn.  And then she spots her childhood tormentor and wants to kill the bully...

I find this way of constructing cliffhangers, being able to dart about between my characters, produces a far more effective Supreme Ordeal.  I wonder if I'll still think so when I read through what I've done on this rewrite.