IWSG: last IWSG of the year

 

    There's a creative title for ya.  😰

    Uh.  Anyway.  This month's discussion question is

December 4 question - Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

    And my answer is "No, I do not."  (To the first question.)

    I'm not a fan of cliffhangers in general; I like to wrap up the major story threads or it doesn't feel like it's actually finished.  Even in my series of seven novels (of which only three have been polished up for any kind of release, despite that I wrote the first drafts ten years ago 😭), I never had cliffhangers.  There were times after the leads had started learning about the overarching plot of the series that story threads from the larger plot were necessarily left unresolved, but the story of the individual novel was still neatly concluded.

    As a reader, I've mostly been fortunate enough not to run into them.  (Cannot say the same thing about as a watcher, but that's another question entirely.)  I think a particular novel I read last year that I really didn't like had something of a cliffhanger ending, but I disliked the whole work so much that I couldn't care in the slightest about the cliffhanger in that context.

    The closest I can think of to encountering a considerable number of cliffhangers as a reader is that I've been reading a lot of danmei novels (Chinese web novels featuring romances between men) in translation, and most of the chapters tend to end on cliffhangers, meaning that typically each volume of the novel ends on a cliffhanger, and that can be insanely frustrating.  Mitigated by the fact that there are mere months between volumes (since the novels are not licensed for translated publication until after they are complete) instead of the potential years there would be if one was waiting for a full novel to be written from scratch.  (Also if one is confident one will like the novel, one can buy all the volumes and not read it until it's complete.  At this point, I have decided not to do that unless I'm already familiar with the author's work.)

    I think if I did come across a writer who consistently preferred to end their works with cliffhangers, I would probably avoid their work, because yes, that would definitely be a turn-off to me as a reader.  Doing so once in a while because the larger plot of the series required it, that much I could live with, but doing it every time...I'd nope outta there.

    Changing the subject radically and probably pointlessly, there was a long discussion in a discord channel that got deleted the other day because it was instigated by someone being a bad actor.  Which is a pity, because the conversation started out with some really useful comments and suggestions by regular users of the channel.  I bring it up because one thing that someone said was so brilliant that it must be recorded somewhere for posterity, and this isn't the greatest of places, but...it's what I've got.

    They suggested that someone could write a character who knits socks with designs inspired by their favorite heavy metal bands.

    That would be epic.  Someone needs to write a character like that.

    (Unfortunately, I typically do not write in a modern setting these days, so it's unlikely to be me.)