There are plenty of ways to finish off a chapter, but not all of them are good.
Try these:
Clear out early
If you happen to wake up with drool seeping into your keyboard and the final words still struggling to bubble to the surface, you’ve probably gone on for too long.
Spare your readers the pain and cut the chapter the moment the scene’s had its moment.
In short, clear out as soon as possible.
Cliffhangers
Gone are the days of television when you’d be asked to ‘tune in next week’ to find out how the hero, dangling from a cliff with no hope of surviving, gets out of their predicament.
Despite being overused, cliffhangers still have a place in a good story.
They’re a great way to build tension and draw the reader on, and are most effective when used sparingly.
A good cliffhanger creates that ‘can’t stop reading’ factor – an irresistible need to know what happens next.
Reveals and twists
Secrets are the lifeblood of a good story, and revealing them at the right time is an art that will ultimately take your story in a new direction or completely alter a reader’s perceptions of it.
Can you imagine how Star Wars would have panned out if Obi Wan, upon first meeting Luke, had said, “Guess what kid – Darth Vader’s your old man!”
It wouldn’t have mattered to anyone then – the significance hadn’t been built up and it would have blown a great reveal later on.
The same goes for your own story.
The more important a secret is, the longer you need to hold it – but don’t hold it forever.
Revealing it at the right moment (preferably at the end of a chapter) is where the magic comes from.
Buttons
Now there’s a term you don’t hear every day.
When you don’t have secret to reveal, there are no obvious twists, and your protagonist is refusing to climb out onto a thin branch above a river full of hungry piranhas, then you need something else.
So use a button.
A button is:
- a wise-crack
- a joke
- a sentence summing up how horrible the situation is
- an insight into a character’s perspective
- a hint there are worse things to come
- a question
- anything that neatly rounds off a scene (you don’t even have to save them for chapters).
Those are my favourite ways to end a chapter. What works for you?