A clear example is the play One Thousand and One Nights . There, Scheherazade used this device every night to tell stories to the king, leaving him in the middle of his plot, and avoiding execution.
We can translate the word cliffhanger as "hanging from amom database precipice" or "on the edge of the abyss." The term first appeared in the Oxford Dictionary in 1937. Its origin dates back to the English novel A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy, which was published in installments. Toward the end of one of the serials, the author decided to leave the protagonist dangling from the edge of a cliff, and that scene gave its name to this popular device.
In the 1970s, American television presented the series Batman . So many episodes ended with a character on the edge of a cliff that the concept of the cliffhanger gained prominence again.
Today, this technique can be found in print media, both in the body of news stories and in headlines. Cliffhangers are used in all types of narratives , are applied in multiple formats, and act as a hook to generate tension and maintain the audience's attention.
This resource serves to attract the reader's or viewer's attention and create expectations so that they seek out subsequent content with the answer or outcome.
There's no set length for creating a cliffhanger. It can take up an entire chapter, an epilogue, or simply be a single sentence. The goal is for the protagonist to face a crossroads that must be resolved.