PAGE-TURNING CHAPTER ENDINGS
Natalie Bright
Here’s a list of ideas on how you can entice readers to keep turning the pages, even when they reach the end of a chapter.
Sharon Dunn, in her article from the book A NOVEL IDEA, recommends splitting a scene into multiple chapters to hold the reader’s interest. She explains, “…look for the moment in the story when there would be a question planted in the reader’s mind.”
Here are other ways to end your chapter:
- With a cliffhanger
- Your main character has been harmed. The reader is concerned and keeps reading.
- End with dialogue and a question.
- Create an Arrival. A perfect example posted in a previous blog from Charlaine Harris’ EASY DEATH: The sight of two strangers sitting on the bench outside my front door seemed so wrong and bad I had to blink to make sure they were really there.
- Reveal something new.
- End at the beginning of the next scene and carry on in the next chapter.
- Add to the theme or setting with description.
- Insight, flashbacks or internal struggles relating to your main character with internal dialogue.
May 2020 be a productive one!
Natalie Bright is the author of the upcoming KEEP ‘EM FULL AND KEEP ‘EM ROLLIN’: The All-American Chuck Wagon Cookbook, soon to be released September 1, 2020. She is also the author of the Trouble in Texas Series, adventure stories for middle grade.
Wordsmith Six 