A Cascade of Cliffhangers

I'm re-writing the end of my novel this week. There were all sorts of things wrong with my first attempt at the ending.  I've done things like switch viewpoint into the head of a character who then passively watches from a safe distance as other characters risk danger.  I also didn't have enough jeopardy for those characters.  Nobody was at risk of getting killed, and nothing much got destroyed.

This is always a difficult challenge for me, because I dislike large-scale destruction in stories.  I think it's often just gratuitous violence against things so that there can be a grand spectacle.  There's no denying that this type of storytelling puts characters in jeopardy.  But is it the only way to ramp up tension at the end of a book?

I would answer that question with a resounding no, and I set out to prove it in my manuscript.  There were some things I definitely needed to fix.  Characters without agency was one.  In my original I have one of the main characters off stage, somewhere over the prairie, completely away from the scene of all the action.  She needed bringing centre-stage, and putting into danger.  So now I have the colonists defending their buildings from potential destruction with totally inadequate resources.  I'm being intentionally vague here, because I know that one of the readers of this blog is worried that I'll spoil the ending for him by revealing too much.

What can I reveal?  Well, one of the ways to ratchet up the tension is to end consecutive chapters with what I call a cascade of cliffhangers.  You can cut off the action in the middle so the reader doesn't know if that character survives.  You can switch viewpoints at places where the action is still in progress, so that the reader has to read on to find out what happens.

This technique can be used to great effect to avoid resorting to violence,  Gareth Powell's Fleet of Knives is a brilliant example of how to do it.  The chapters often cut away at key points which leave the action hanging.   And he has an absolutely masterful two-word chapter in response to a massive  threat of violence.  It is so understated, yet it says everything about the situation.

Multi-viewpoint books lend themselves to constructing a cascade of cliffhangers, and I'm finding that I've increased the jeopardy and tension massively in my ending by writing from one cliffhanger to the next.