Cliff-hangers and resonators in The Favorites by Layne Fargo

SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses the full plot of The Favorites, including the ending.

The Favorites is a long novel—over four hundred pages, stretching across five parts—and it is packed with drama: ten different competitions over fifteen years, plus breakups, betrayals, reconciliations, and life-threatening injuries. Layne Fargo orchestrates the intensity and pacing quite carefully across this long, complex plot, which follows the romantic and ice-dancing partnership of Kat and Heath. She uses her chapter endings to telegraph that intensity to her readers, and that's what I'll be examining here.

Fargo's endings are rarely quiet or neutral. Across the novel's chapters and documentary interludes, only twelve have a neutral ending, while forty-five chapters end with cliff-hangers, and the remaining eighty-seven chapters end with what I call "resonators."

To start, let's look briefly at the overall structure of the novel. The novel has five parts—1: The Hopefuls, 2: The Rivals, 3: The Champions, 4: The Game, and 5: The Last Time. A different novel with simpler themes and goals might have followed the classic three-act structure we think we see named in The Hopefuls (rising action), The Rivals (complication), and The Champions (the triumphant climax), but Fargo offers up a more complex, nuanced plot in which all of the major characters must reconcile what they think they want with what they really need—and do so under relentless scrutiny from one another, as well as from the press and the public. This is especially true of the protagonist Kat, and Fargo uses part breaks to name and mark important shifts in Kat's character arc as well as her shifting goals and alliances.

As you can see from the chart above, The Favorites follows a pattern we've seen in all of the novels we've charted except What We Can Know: a high-intensity start, followed by a lower-intensity middle stretch, and then higher intensity again through the climax. The Favorites has higher internal intensity than external intensity, a balance that matches its genre—this is women's fiction rather than a thriller. Kat is our POV character throughout and her emotions and experiences are rarely quiet.

If a cliff-hanger is defined by withholding information readers want to know, a resonator is defined by crystallizing information readers already know. A cliff-hanger offers a pulse of tension and pulls a reader forward into the story. A resonator offers a moment of quieter but still satisfying resolution as some important realization about theme or character falls into place.

Here's a classic cliff-hanger from the end of chapter two of The Favorites. Kat is in the midst of a fight with her drunken older brother Lee, who is throwing Heath out of the house. The final lines: "With one hand, he slammed the door and threw the deadbolt. With the other, he pressed the blade to my neck." Fargo gives us the resolution of the tense scene at the beginning of chapter three—Lee throws Kat into her bedroom, where she reflects on her relationship with Heath and her ice-dancing ambitions. At the end of this chapter, we get a resonator: "Nationals was the first step, the beginning of everything. Soon, I told myself, staring into the shadows beyond my bedroom window, Heath and I would be free of this place. And no matter what, we would be together." With the blank space of the chapter break following them, these lines have a chance to echo in the reader's mind. The placement itself gives them more weight and meaning.

To create an effective cliff-hanger, you simply cut a scene in the middle of a tense action. But what makes a good resonator? Here are some options:

Not all stories need a high percentage of resonator endings. For example, Emily Henry's Great Big Beautiful Life, which has almost as much drama as The Favorites, uses chapter endings more as a transition from one plot component to another. Here's an example of a neutral ending from that novel: "I close out of the window, tie my hair into a stubby little ponytail, and pick up transcribing Margaret's story from earlier." When we turn the page we get, as promised, more of Margaret's story.

Let's start our analysis by looking at where cliff-hangers and resonators are positioned across the five parts of the novel.

The chart above shows the total intensity and ending type for every chapter of The Favorites. Cliff-hanger chapters are more often focused on the external plot—what's happening—while resonator chapters are more often focused on the internal plot—how it feels, what it means. As we would expect, there are more cliff-hangers in the final acts than in the first acts. Cliff-hanger endings roughly double their share from the first part to the last, from about a fifth to about two fifths, while resonators stay dominant throughout. (Note that I've scored the documentary chapters at the lowest intensity throughout. As I discussed in my post on the opening of The Favorites, the 2024 frame brings us closer to the telling but farther from the events themselves; we feel the gap between the retelling and the moment, which keeps the intensity low even when the events being described are dramatic.)

You can see that Fargo is careful not to overuse cliff-hangers, even in the higher-intensity final parts. While many chapters in a row have resonator endings, cliff-hangers are most often singletons, with a few pairs, and only two triplets, both of them in the final parts. Readers love the energizing jolt of a cliff-hanger, but they can lose their effect if used too often. Novels are long, and readers crave variety—not constant hyperstimulation.

Let's look more closely now at a few sequences of The Favorites to see exactly how cliff-hangers and resonators work and find out how Fargo varies the patterns of her endings to achieve specific goals.

Fargo is juggling a number of plot and character elements around the midpoint of the novel, in part three. Middles are a notoriously tricky section for novelists to manage because the initial novelty of the premise has worn off, but it's too soon to start ramping up towards the climax. Fargo must also solve the problem of how to keep her competition scenes—the backbone of a novel focused on competitive skaters—feeling fresh and new. Using a cliff-hanger at the end of the performance as the skaters wait for their scores is a natural move, but she's already done it once in chapter eight and will do it again in chapter sixty. In the sequence we're about to see, she finds a different strategy.

As part three opens, Kat has switched partners to skate with Garrett, while Heath has returned from training in Russia as Bella's new partner—so all four skaters are chasing the same 2006 Olympic spots, all of them coached by Sheila Lin, who is Bella and Garrett's mother as well as the ice-dancing champion who inspired Kat to begin skating in the first place. Chapter thirty-nine takes us to the 2006 Nationals, where Kat suffers a mild concussion, possibly due to a deliberate hit from Bella on the ice, but decides to skate anyway. She knows that Sheila "wouldn't withdraw from a competition unless she was stone-cold dead" and she's also motivated by her fury at Heath's disappearance and new partnership with Bella. The chapter ends with a resonator: "Watch me now, I thought. Watch me win. Without you." Fargo rarely uses direct interior monologue in italics like this, and it's a device best used sparingly, but it works here to underscore that Kat is directing her energy outward, at Heath, rather than looking inside.

In the next chapter, we are in one of the documentary excerpts that punctuate the novel, which allows Fargo to narrate the events efficiently and show multiple characters reacting to the drama of Garrett losing his hold on Kat, who hits her head again on the ice. Garrett: "I thought I could save her." Kirk Lockwood, the TV commentator: "There was so much blood." Ellis Dean, skating blogger: "Everyone was freaking out." Garrett: "I thought she was dead. I thought I'd killed her." The chapter ends on a cliff-hanger as someone runs onto the ice. This cliff-hanger pulls us forward purely by withholding—we don't learn who has run onto the ice until the next chapter, when Kat comes to holding Heath's hand. She wants to know who is going to the Olympics, and he tells her it doesn't matter, ending the chapter with a resonator: "All that matters is you're all right." So the two chapters surrounding the cliff-hanger carry the emotional weight of the sequence, not the cliff-hanger itself.

This pattern of emotional set-up, followed by a cliff-hanger, then emotional resonance and release is one to note and use yourself. It's also a structure that dovetails beautifully with Jack Bickham's scene and sequel pattern of action followed by reflection.

Competitions make for natural cliff-hangers but Fargo shows us that you can generate cliff-hangers out of quieter surprises too. We can see an example in chapters forty-three and forty-four. After Kat's fall, Fargo needs to accomplish three things at once: rapidly cover the several months that elapse before the next competition sequence, give Kat and Heath the motivation to compete again, and inject a bit of drama into a slow section of the plot.

Chapters forty-three and forty-four accomplish all three: We jump forward in time ten weeks. Kat is allowed to do her first workout after her concussion. She and Heath are romantically involved again but he's avoiding the topic of whether they'll return to skating. Bella and Garrett show up at Kat's remote childhood home—and the chapter ends on the surprise. Chapter forty-four reveals that Bella is there to apologize and also to talk Kat into coming back to competing. But we get another cliff-hanger first as she reveals there is something Kat and Heath don't know about in their self-imposed isolation, some reason that the public is now "obsessed" with them. The back-to-back cliff-hangers increase tension for readers, offer the final motivation Kat needs to persuade Heath to compete again, and provide the momentum that carries the story forward to the next high-stakes competition.

Jumping ahead now to the end of part four, let's look at the sequence that sets up Kat's crucial character arc development, when she finally realizes there is more to life than winning.

The sequence is kicked off in chapter fifty-nine when Kat learns from Ellis's gossip blog that Heath had been training with the Russians during his disappearance—and revealed everything he knew about his fellow US competitors. Kat is furious and her performance with Heath is "unhinged"; chapter sixty ends on a cliff-hanger as they wait for their scores. But, interestingly, the higher intensity chapters come in the aftermath of their disappointing third-place finish. Kat and Heath have a bitter fight about whether she cares more about winning than about him, setting up a messy confrontation that plays out in an Olympic Village party during which Kat accuses Bella of undermining her, carelessly outs Garrett, gets drunk, and finally takes Ellis's advice to work things out with Heath only to discover him having sex with Bella—that high-intensity cliff-hanger spike you see at chapter sixty-two.

But it's the sequel of this scene spike, to use Bickham's terms, that is even more important. In the resonator ending of the documentary chapter that follows, Garrett reveals that Kat drops out of skating. The following pair of chapters show us why. Here Fargo splits a single conversation between Kat and Sheila Lin into two separate chapters so she can end the first (chapter sixty-three) with a cliff-hanger revelation—Kat's realization that Sheila had been the one to send Heath to Russia—and the second (chapter sixty-four) with the resonator realization that the single-minded focus on winning gold is harming her. In both chapters we get dialogue between Sheila and Kat that modulates into interiority as Kat processes what she's heard. Here are the final lines of the chapter marking her character arc turn: "I'd finally had enough, of the striving and the pain and the heartbreak. I didn't want to be Sheila Lin anymore. I didn't want to be Katarina Shaw either. I wanted to disappear." Ending the chapter with this moment allows it to resonate across the white space of the break, meaning it will stick with readers longer.

When we jump ahead to part five, Kat has come out of her self-imposed retirement: she attends Sheila Lin's funeral, and Bella—now coaching rather than competing—persuades her to reunite with Heath for one last run at Olympic gold. Let's now take a look at a triplet of cliff-hanger chapters Fargo uses at the climax of the novel in part five. These chapters cover the final competition of the novel, the 2014 Olympics in Sochi that was named in the prologue by Kat as the worst day of her life and is the main subject of the documentary chapters. It's fitting then that this is one of only two spots in the novel where Fargo positions three cliff-hangers in a row.

The competition performance itself (chapter eighty-two) has a medium intensity and a resonator ending. Kat feels their performance "was the story of us: Heath and me, spinning away from each other one second, only to clutch each other close the next. Never still, never simple, always pushing and pulling, shattering each other and putting the pieces back together again." As with the scene I studied, we get very few actions here—we are mostly in Kat's interiority until a final, resonant action: "I kissed him." In the next chapter the documentary ends with a cliff-hanger; all of the 2014 commentators are sure that Kat and Heath have won gold but without yet knowing the scores.

But instead of the expected triumph, Fargo has one dramatic surprise in store and this is where she launches it. In the next brief chapter, Kat deepens the kiss and then delivers another, higher-stakes cliff-hanger in the last sentence: "By the time I tasted the blood, he was already falling." We cut back to the documentary briefly to get reactions from Garrett and the other commentators, as well as glimpses of the scene in the rink. Ellis leaves us with another cliff-hanger: "There was nothing anyone could have done." The next chapter brings us back to Kat. As the medics rush in, we still don't know what will happen to Heath at the end of the chapter but we get this high-intensity resonator ending via Kat's interiority: "We couldn't end like this."

Fargo wrings maximum drama out of this sequence using short chapters and a series of cliff-hangers followed by a resonant ending. She makes clever use of the documentary interludes through here. As the stakes rise, she increasingly hands the cliff-hangers to the documentary frame (seven of her eleven documentary cliff-hangers fall in part five). These cliff-hangers relate to the external story. Fargo instead wants us to pay attention to Kat's internal story. The cliff-hangers pull us forward through the story, but the resonators are what give the story meaning.

The final words of your manuscript will almost always be a resonator. Here's where Fargo leaves us, by returning to the frame narrative of the prologue, with 2024 Kat addressing 2024 readers and documentary viewers directly:

In novel after novel, we've seen how much intensity—both external and internal—shapes the experience readers have of a novel. Chapter endings are one of the most effective dials you can turn to control that intensity.