It seemed like half of the people driving had bought the exact same make, model, color and year of the car her husband owned. With the sky's reflection bouncing off of the windshields, the identities of the drivers remained concealed until they drove past her and Melanie. She held her frustration and impatience behind a veneer of calm that was becoming harder and harder to maintain each time she mistakenly thought she had spotted him.
Description:
Everyone is a wolf.
Everyone is a wolf.
But putting the pack first can have different ramifications if you don’t really belong with the pack you’re hunting with in the first place.
In The Gospel of Wolves, you delve deep into the heads and hearts of four people who will take risks as they search for where they belong that will force them to make serious choices about the person they are willing to become as they cross paths with some of the cruelest sociopaths the world has to offer to ultimately find out if they are part of the pack or one of the prey.
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Five Steps to Your Perfect Cliffhanger
There is no denying the kind of punch a good cliffhanger can provide in a book, but there’s more to it than simply putting your character in some kind of danger and hoping your reader cares. Here are fives steps to creating a cliffhanger your readers won’t want to put down.
Step One – Build the Cliff (But Hide it For Now)
Know the danger your heroine needs to be in before you get too far in developing her. By doing this, you don’t accidently write your heroine into a corner you don’t want her to be in.
You should also have enough backstory for her that you know intuitively why she wants to climb this mountain, how she developed the skills she’ll need to climb it and what her fears are as she begins her climb.
Step Two – Place Hazards on the Path to the Cliff
Consider a few switchbacks, where she has to rethink where she is going and how she plans to get there. Properly used, these types of story devices can create a growing tension as to whether or not she will ever crest the summit of the mountain she is trying to climb.
This is where backstory becomes very important.
Your readers should feel what your heroine is feeling and providing context for them using her backstory is surefire way to engage them emotionally in your story.
Also, make sure some of the rocks are loose so that even when she does the things she is supposed to do, the ground shifts under her in unexpected ways causing her to fall down and have to pick herself back up every now and then.
As you do this, your reader should feel each bump, scrape and cut your heroine does. Their muscles should ache along with hers as the climb continues.
Step Three – Steepen the Grade
As our heroine pushes further and further up the mountain. The road should become harder to continue to climb. Here is where the air should be thin enough that some of the people who are behind her begin to fall off, forcing our heroine to make choices about carrying on that are progressively more difficult.
By the time she summits the mountain, she should in effect, be alone in her personal struggle.
Step Four – Reveal the Cliff
With the crest of the mountain looming directly in front of her, and as she gives one last effort filled push to reach it, make her fall over the edge of the cliff with only one handhold standing between her salvation or doom.
This may not be where her greatest fear comes to face her, it may be some completely unforeseen circumstance that puts everything she was hoping for in jeopardy. Either way, your story up until now should have created enough tension and made your readers care so much about the outcome, that
there is no way they can comfortably walk away from your story before finding out what happens next.
Step Five Choice A – Make Your Heroine a Mountain Climber
Here is where the subtle clues you dropped in her backstory come to their full light. This is where the skills you gave her create a toehold to join the handhold and so on, so that your heroine through one last mighty struggle, painfully regains her place safely on top of the mountain you just had her scale.
Step Five Choice B – Make the Clouds Roll In
Here, you can leave her ultimate fate up to the imaginations of your readers, pulling back from her plight until the clouds obscure her dangling form from the reader.
Step Five Choice C – Make the Handhold Give Way
About the author:
Chris Wesley is the award-winning author of the fiction book The Gospel of Wolves, the short fiction story Regret in Triptych and the poetry book Pack Animals. He uses his fine art photography as prompts for character sketches and settings in his fiction along with gallery shows. He has written for the music magazine Night Moves Magazine, acted in independent movies and plays; wrote, cast, directed, shot and edited an independent short movie, started bands and gone solo. He plays a few instruments and is generally considered a smart ass. He also has a thing for how we connect with each other and with ourselves. 
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