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November 7, 2025

Illustration of Hardy’s famous cliffhanger in A Pair of Blue Eyes by James Abbot Pasquier, February 1873

Let’s commit the sin of obviousness and say that writers need to keep the attention of their readers. 

“No kidding” is the obvious response to this remark, but keeping readers’ eyes on pages is crucial to anyone who wants their message to be received. All rhetorical devices exist for this purpose, and most of these depend on activating an audience’s desire to see what comes next.

They want to know whether a pattern will repeat or change, or wonder how long an extended metaphor will continue, etc.

One of the most blatant, and the most successful example of deliberate exploitation of the human desire to know what happens next is the cliffhanger.  It has been used to create tension and keep readers’ attention for millennia. The word has been used at least since the 1930s to describe the technique of leaving a reader hanging until the publication of the next episode.

The technique was commonly used in Victorian fiction released chapter by chapter in serialized form. Authors would leave characters in dramatically dangerous situations as a way to increase sales of the next installment.  Charles Dickens is the best known Victorian author to use this method of keeping readers hooked. His cliffhanger chapter endings fueled huge popular demand for his next addition to the plot.     

A frequently attributed source of the word “cliffhanger” is Chapter 21 of  A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy’s serialized novel published between September 1872 and July 1873  in which the hero is left hanging from a cliff, fearing he’ll fall before Elfride manages to summon help, leaving the agonized reader to learn the outcome in the next installment.

“Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?”

“Three-quarters of an hour. ”That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is there nobody nearer?”“No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.”

“He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a pole or stick of any kind on the common? “

She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and grass. A minute—perhaps more time—was passed in mute thought by both. On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the bank from his sight.

Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.

By the 1930’s, movies featuring heroines in need of rescue tied to train tracks or hanging from cliffs were called cliffhangers. 

Contemporary soap operas exist because of the cliffhanger effect. Even the most transparent, predictable of plots will maintain audience share just because people must know the identity of the burglar, or whether the matriarch’s plan to tarnish her daughter in-law’s reputation will be discovered, or whether the doctor will save the mysterious accident victim who is in fact, her birth mother.

Are cliffhangers just cheap tricks? Definitely. But they’ve been entertaining people for thousands of years, and that justifies a lot of trickery.

October 27, 2025

The Witch’s Ride by William Holbrook Beard, 1870

As the end of October and Halloween approach, stories of witches come to mind, leading in turn to thoughts of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ghost stories, especially “Young Goodman  Brown”, set in a dark New England forest. 

There are huge benefits to the close observation of good writers. In addition to the possibility of picking up some good lessons in technique, there is the opportunity to learn the skill of closely analyzing texts to see their effects and how they were achieved. A reading of Hawthorne’s work can be a lesson in how to build a setting that while beautiful in its description of the mystery of a nighttime forest, creates unease by calling up basic fears.

Forests carry archetypal signals of danger concealed in unknown territory. The addition of darkness to an already dangerous environment escalates this primal anxiety. Hawthorn uses fear of dark, unknown places to build a setting suited to supernatural events.

 Notice how the excerpt from “Young Goodman Brown” uses the contrast between the well ordered, supposedly holy atmosphere of the narrator’s puritan village in the daytime with the unholy chaos of the nighttime forest. The good and the decent morph into their unholy opposites.

 From “Young Goodman Brown”

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of night There was one voice of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, “Faith! Faith!” as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness.

The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.

“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.”

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.

“Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you.”

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.

The full text of this story is available free on Project Gutenberg:

For some Halloween fun, try creating your own version of a frightening forest setting.

Happy Halloween!!

April 1, 2025

Using Dialogue To Show Setting
Imagine you’re writing radio play. The audience has no stage to look at and see actors in a kitchen or on a plane or in a restaurant or at a beach. There is no visual input. You’re writing a play, so you don’t have a narrator. Unless you’re using soliloquies, you need a way to fill in details of the setting.
In this situation, the only way to show setting is to build it into characters’ speeches. If the drama is on a sail boat, include talk about salt water spray blowing in people’s faces and sails cracking in the wind. If the setting is a factory floor, the characters talk about foremen, conveyor belts and have to yell to be heard over the noise.


Using Speech to Show Setting :

A restaurant setting:

— What are you having? I’m thinking the grilled cheese.

— I don’t know. It’s all the same old, same old menu.


Walking down a country road late at night:

— Get out of the middle of the road! 

— What? I’m gonna be hit by all the 3 am traffic to nowhere?


On a train:

— Where were you?

— Hiding from the boss. He’s in the dining car.


In a laundromat:

— Look at you staring at the dryers. You’re mesmerized.

— Quiet. Get more quarters for the next load.

Here is a link to buy a lesson in using dialogue to show setting:

February 24, 2025
What’s the difference between symbol, motif and theme?
The simplest and most accurate answer is to say that symbols represent ideas which can be repeated to create a motif which can then reinforce the theme, or big idea, of a work.

The word “symbol” comes from the Greek word “sumballo” (σῠμβάλλω), which means “I throw together”. This meaning makes use of the sense that ideas are combined, or thrown together, to show another meaning.

Symbols can be non-linguistic. The emojis used in all aspects of online life are good examples of symbols and proof of how easily and naturally people associate ideas. A laughing face emoji, 😆, can mean something is funny, or embarrassing, or ridiculous or any other characteristic that suits the context of the intended message.

In literature, words act as symbols by suggesting connected meanings. The word “heart” is linked to ideas of love, romance, devotion, affection, faith etc. and could be used to maintain a motif on any of these related ideas in order to emphasize a theme.

Motifs make use of repeated symbols to reinforce ideas related to the theme, or main idea of a work.

Here are two examples of how symbols and motifs work together to make a theme obvious:

Theme: energy

Symbol: a river current

How this symbol could work in a motif: the energy of a river current could be seen carrying boats, floating logs, creating whirlpools, eroding riverbanks.


Theme: joy

Symbol: a balloon

How this symbol could work in a motif: a colourful balloon dancing on the wind as it rises above the ground.


Theme: human potential

Symbol: a seed

How this symbol could work in a motif: a seed contains the possibility for a plant to grow and develop.

If you would like to buy a lesson on the relationship between symbol, motif and theme, here is link to a full lesson including definitions, examples and practice exercises.

A collection of ten literary device lessons is also available:

January 24, 2025
Consider using prolepsis for essay writing and generally winning arguments.
This rhetorical technique is a simple way of partly or completely reducing the effectiveness of objections to any point you use to support your thesis. It works by raising objections to your ideas before any critic has a chance to criticize them. You then proceed to explain why the criticism is wrong, and thereby potentially deflate any attempt to devalue your argument.
This is a strategy many people use naturally in their daily interactions. Think of a child who knows what their parent will say when they ask for a new game. The child will make a mental list of these familiar objections and be prepared with their own counterarguments. This is prolepsis.

For more discussion of how to use this technique in an essay, please go to the essays page:

If you would like to buy a copy of a lesson on the topic, here is link to a full lesson in writing an essay using prolepsis with step by step instructions and an organizing template.

January 2025
It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Most people love the season’s beauty. Some even like its sub-zero temperatures. The season inspires painters, poets, photographers and storytellers of all kinds to try and describe its challenging mixture of beauty and danger.
One of the most effective ways of capturing the essence of winter is through writing beautifully simple haiku.
Haiku is a three line Japanese verse form with 5 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the second line and 5 syllables in the third line, making a total of 17 syllables.
In case you don’t remember, syllables are the separate parts of the sounds of a word. “Snow” is a 1 syllable word. “Frosty” is a 2 syllable word. “Icicle” is a 3 syllable word. The two words “nighttime snowfall” together have 4 syllables.
Looking at images of winter can be an enjoyable and effective way to get started writing a haiku, or any other poem. Have a look at this example of a winter themed haiku based on an 1857 woodblock print by Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige.

For a selection of copyright free images by Japanese artists that could inspire your haiku, click on this link from the Library of Congress:
Free to Use and Reuse: Japanese Fine Prints

Winter Sonnets
If you want to take a longer look at winter, try writing a winter sonnet. Sonnets provide a means of pushing your ability to explore ideas within a prescribed form. The lesson linked in the button below includes information about sonnets and how to write them, with explanations of rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter.