"Cliffhanger: Meaning, Examples and How to Write One"

A cliffhanger is a story ending, usually of a chapter, an episode or a book, that stops at a moment of danger or suspense before the outcome is known, so the reader has to go on to find out what happens. The name is literal: in early film serials, an episode could end with the hero hanging from the edge of a cliff, and the audience came back the next week to see whether he fell.

A cliffhanger works because a question has been asked and not answered. It can be a physical danger, a shocking piece of news, a choice a character must make, or a knock at the door. The answer comes at the start of the next chapter, the next episode or the next book. Used well, it is the reason a reader says "one more chapter" at midnight. Used badly, it feels like a trick.

What Does Cliffhanger Mean?

The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines a cliffhanger as "a situation in a story, film, competition, etc. that is very exciting because you cannot guess what will happen next, or you do not find out immediately what happens next". In fiction, the word has two common uses:

• The ending itself: the last moment of a chapter or episode, cut off before the danger is resolved. "The chapter ends on a cliffhanger."
• A whole story built that way: a serial, film or novel full of such moments. Sport and politics borrow it for any contest that stays uncertain until the end, such as a close vote.

A cliffhanger is a kind of hook. A hook is anything that makes a reader want to keep going, and it can sit anywhere: a strange first line, a mystery in chapter one. A cliffhanger is a hook placed at a break, where the reader could stop and is given a reason not to.

Where Does the Word Cliffhanger Come From?

The device is old; the word is not. Oxford gives the word's origin as "1930s: from early film serials in which episodes ended with characters in desperate situations such as hanging off the edge of a cliff." Dictionary.com calls it an Americanism and dates it to 1935 to 1940.

The film historian Roy Kinnard, in an essay for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, describes how the movie serial gained popularity in the silent era with productions like The Perils of Pauline (Pathé, 1914). The serials were "Often called 'cliffhangers' because the hero or heroine was placed in mortal danger to bring the audience back for next week's installment".

The technique is far older than cinema:

• The Thousand and One Nights. Shahrazad stays alive by telling the king a story each night and stopping at dawn, before the end. In Richard Burton's translation, the first night breaks off as a man "went up to the calf, knife in hand", and the king decides: "By Allah, I will not slay her, until I shall have heard the rest of her tale."
• Victorian serial novels. Novels by Dickens, Collins and Hardy came out in monthly or weekly parts, and each part had to sell the next.
• Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. In chapter 21, the critic Henry Knight slips over the edge of a sea cliff, and "Knight was now literally suspended by his arms". Elfride runs off, and the chapter ends with him alone: "Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness." The novel ran in Tinsley's Magazine from September 1872 to July 1873, and that chapter closed the February 1873 instalment. Readers waited a month for chapter 22.

Did Thomas Hardy Invent the Cliffhanger?

No, though his scene is the most famous literal one. Two claims get blurred:

• "Hardy coined the word." He did not. The word "cliffhanger" does not appear in the novel, and dictionaries date it to the 1930s and American film serials, sixty years after A Pair of Blue Eyes. Linguists who looked into the claim on the American Dialect Society's mailing list in 2016 found no example of the word earlier than the 1930s.
• "Hardy invented the device." He did not do that either. Shahrazad's nightly stopping point is centuries older, and every serial novelist before Hardy ended parts on suspense. What Hardy gave the device is its best picture: a man, literally, hanging from a cliff at the end of an instalment.

The scene and the instalment break are real. Philip V. Allingham's notes on the serial for the Victorian Web, drawing on J. Don Vann's Victorian Novels in Serial, list the February 1873 part as chapters 19 to 21 and the March part as chapters 22 to 25. So the "Hardy origin" story is right about the picture and wrong about the word.

What Are the Types of Cliffhanger?

Cliffhangers differ in what is left open and where the break falls.

Arthur Conan Doyle's revelation cliffhanger is a model of economy. Dr Mortimer tells Holmes about the footprints near Sir Charles Baskerville's body, and the chapter ends on his answer: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Nobody is in danger in that room. The danger has moved into the reader's head.

By position, the main kinds are:

• Scene break: the story cuts away from one storyline at a tense moment and goes to another. Common in books with several points of view.
• Chapter end: the everyday cliffhanger of thrillers and page-turners.
• Episode or instalment end: the original kind, in serial fiction, television and web serials.
• Book end: the last page leaves a major question open for the next book in a series. This is what people usually mean by a "cliffhanger ending".

What Is a Cliffhanger Ending?

A cliffhanger ending is the ending of a whole book, film or season that leaves a major question unanswered for the next instalment. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is the classic film case: it ends with Han Solo frozen and carried off, and the audience waited three years for the answer. The Italian Job (1969) ends with the most literal cliffhanger in film: a coach full of gold balanced over the edge of a mountain road. The best-known television case is Dallas, which ended its third season on 21 March 1980 with J.R. Ewing shot by an unseen attacker, and viewers waited until 21 November 1980 to learn who had done it.

A cliffhanger ending divides readers more than any other kind. The rule that keeps it fair is about which question is left open. A novel in a series makes two promises: a question for this book and a question for the whole series. Answer the book's question. Leave the series question open, or open a new one in the last pages. A reader who finishes a book with its own story unresolved feels cheated, however good the hook. The difference between the two questions is set out in how to write a book series.

How Do You Write a Cliffhanger?

1. Make the reader care first. A cliff only matters if the reader minds who falls. Stakes come from character, not from the size of the danger.
2. Ask a clear question. The reader should know exactly what is unresolved: will she open the door, is he alive, who sent the letter. A vague unease is not a cliffhanger.
3. Cut at the peak, a beat before the answer. End on the line that raises the question, not on the paragraph after it that explains it. Most weak chapter endings are good cliffhangers with one paragraph too many.
4. Let the reader see the danger. Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut (Hitchcock, 1967) that a bomb going off under a table, unseen, gives the audience "fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion". Show the bomb first, and "we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense." A cliffhanger is suspense, so the reader needs to know what is at stake.
5. Make the next chapter pay. The answer must be honest. If the danger was real, the escape must be earned, not "it was only a dream". The best answers raise a new question as they settle the old one.
6. Vary them. Peril, revelation, decision and arrival feel different. Twenty chapter endings in a row of the same kind teach the reader the trick.
7. Use the disaster you already have. In Dwight V. Swain's scene and sequel pattern, every scene ends in a disaster, and Swain says plainly: "Disaster is a hook." Ending a chapter on a scene's disaster, before the sequel, is the most natural cliffhanger there is.

Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher novels, reduced suspense to one principle in a 2012 essay for The New York Times: "As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer." He learned it in television, when the remote control arrived: "We started asking questions before the commercials, and answering them afterward." A cliffhanger is that principle at the chapter break.

When Do Cliffhangers Annoy Readers?

• The false cliffhanger. The chapter ends on a scream, and the next chapter reveals it was a cat. Do it once and readers stop trusting every ending after.
• The withheld answer. The point of view jumps to another storyline for five chapters, and by the time it comes back the reader has stopped caring. A cutaway should be short.
• The unfinished book. A novel that stops in the middle of its main plot, to sell the sequel, reads as a broken promise.
• The cheat. The character could only survive by luck, or by a rescue from nowhere, which is the problem described in deus ex machina.
• Every chapter, every time. A book of nothing but cliffhangers is tiring. Quiet chapter endings give the loud ones their force.

A Worked Example

The Night Ferry is a short novel about Ana, a nurse crossing to an island to take up a job, who learns a passenger has gone missing on board. The first draft of chapter 4 ends like this:

Ana searched the lower deck with the purser. At the far end, behind the lifeboat lockers, they found a woman's coat folded on a bench, and in the pocket, a ticket in Ana's own name. She stared at it. It was dated tomorrow. The purser said there must be a mistake with the booking, and Ana agreed, though she didn't believe it. She went back to her cabin and tried to sleep.

The question is there, but the chapter talks it to death. The purser explains it away, Ana goes to bed, and the reader can go to bed too. The fix is to cut at the peak:

At the far end, behind the lifeboat lockers, they found a woman's coat folded on a bench. In the pocket was a ticket.

It was in Ana's name. And it was dated tomorrow.

The same material, ending two lines earlier, now leaves the reader with a question (who bought it, and why tomorrow?) and no permission to stop. Chapter 5 then answers part of it at once, the booking office has no record of the ticket, and in doing so raises a sharper question.

Looking at the whole draft, chapters 1 to 6 all ended on a revelation. So chapter 2 was changed to end on a decision (Ana choosing whether to tell the captain) and chapter 6 on an arrival (a man at her cabin door who knows her name). The tension stays high, but no two breaks in a row work the same way.

How Do You Review Chapter Endings in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Outliner shows the book as cards and as a list, and its Continuous View shows several documents as one scroll, so you can read every chapter break the way a reader meets it.

1. Open the Outliner from its button in the menu bar, on the Draft. Each chapter is a card with a synopsis. Write the question each chapter ends on in its synopsis: "Ends on: the ticket dated tomorrow."
2. Click Grid View to switch to List View. Every chapter is a row with its Synopsis and Words.
3. Click the + at the end of the list's header row (Add custom column). In Add Field, type "Ending" as the Field name, choose Dropdown as the Field type, add the options "Peril", "Revelation", "Decision", "Arrival" and "Quiet", then click Add Field.
4. Set each chapter's ending from its row. Read down the column: a long run of the same type, or no quiet endings at all, shows at once.
5. To read the breaks themselves, click Continuous View in the menu bar. Click a chapter in the Binder, then Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) the next one. Both chapters, with their scenes, appear as one scroll, each section under its own name.
6. Read across the join. The last lines of one chapter and the first lines of the next should hand the question over cleanly. Use Jump to in the header to move between sections. Edit there and the change is saved to the chapter itself.

If the endings sit at the wrong points, the fix is often structural. The Outliner's board lets you drag scenes so a chapter ends on its strongest moment, and how long your chapters are decides how often the reader meets a break at all.

Common Mistakes

• One paragraph too many. The most common weak ending: the question is raised, then softened. Cut back to the line that asks it.
• A cliffhanger with no stakes. A dramatic last line about a character the reader hasn't met yet doesn't pull.
• Cheating in the next chapter. If the answer undoes the danger by a trick, readers notice, and they remember.
• Leaving the book's main question open. A series can end each book on a hook, but the book's own story has to finish.
• The same kind of ending every time. Rotate peril, revelation, decision and arrival, and leave some chapters quiet.
• Starting the next chapter somewhere else for too long. A short cutaway builds tension. A long one lets it drain away.

Sources

Retrieved 1 November 2026.

• cliffhanger, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, definition and word origin.
• cliffhanger, Dictionary.com, origin "An Americanism dating back to 1935–40".
• Roy Kinnard, Flash Gordon, essay for the National Film Registry, Library of Congress.
• Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), chapters 21 and 22 (Project Gutenberg).
• Philip V. Allingham, instalments of A Pair of Blue Eyes in Tinsley's Magazine, the Victorian Web, after J. Don Vann, Victorian Novels in Serial (1985), p. 82.
• Discussion of the earliest uses of "cliffhanger", American Dialect Society mailing list, April 2016.
• Richard F. Burton (tr.), The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, volume 1, the first night (Project Gutenberg).
• Who shot J.R.?, Wikipedia, air dates of the Dallas episodes "A House Divided" and "Who Done It".
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), end of chapter 2 (Project Gutenberg).
• Lee Child, A Simple Way to Create Suspense, The New York Times, 8 December 2012.
• François Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster, 1967) (Internet Archive).
• Dwight V. Swain, Techniques of the Selling Writer (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973; first published in 1965 as Tricks & Techniques of the Selling Writer) (Internet Archive).