Mysteries, implied threats, and cliffhangers

Recently I've been doing the marathon read-through aloud of my final draft of my novel Starfire.  And reading it out loud has got me noticing the structure of the novel closely.

We're always told to finish chapters with a cliffhanger, but not every one can end that way.  If you have twenty short chapters, each ending with a cliffhanger, the writing can seem breathless.  There's nowhere for the poor reader to take a break from the relentless pace.  That might work for a thriller, but a cozy mystery or a romance isn't going to fare so well from that treatment.

The last ten chapters of Starfire do in fact go from cliffhanger to cliffhanger.  They're short, sharp, and  get my heroine Ria into one scare after another.  When I was doing the edit I marvelled at my ingenuity in dreaming up so many ways to get her put in danger.  And most of them were unintentional.

But there are chapters earlier on in the book where that isn't appropriate.  Some early chapters end  with a mystery.  The biggest of these is the news that Ria's cousin Perran has gone missing. This is the central mystery that drives Ria's actions throughout the story as she sets out to find him.

In some places, the chapter ends with a new mystery.  A rumour that the alien Ha'linn have lost an important artefact is one.  And later, Perran is suspected of having stolen that artefact.  Is that the reason why he disappeared?  Or has he been kidnapped by pirates?  Answering those questions is what drives Ria into danger, and into Ha'linn space.

And then there are the implied threats.  Several chapters end with Ria thinking 'I hope I'm right about  this.  If I'm not, then I'm in big trouble.'  Sometimes the threat is tangible.  In one place, she's in a speeding car that's headed at high speed for a solid steel barrier.  Will the car manage to stop in time? Or will Ria get hurt in the impact?

Then there's the occasion when the space station's AI is about to lock down the observatory that Ria is in.  The chapter ends with her running towards a rapidly closing airlock door.  Will she make it?

I've come to see mysteries and implied threats as different forms of cliffhanger.  Sometimes we need more subtlety than leaving our character at the end of a chapter hanging off a cliff by her fingertips.