Art & Creativity Quote by Kevin J. Anderson

Cliffhangers aren’t just a pacing trick here; they’re a declaration of allegiance to serial pleasure. Kevin J. Anderson’s line is blunt to the point of being disarming: “because I like that” frames suspense not as a lofty artistic doctrine but as a personal appetite. That plainness is the tell. It signals a writer comfortable treating narrative as propulsion, not ornament, and it quietly invites the reader to share responsibility in the bargain: if you start, you’re consenting to be tugged forward.

The intent is commercial and communal in the best sense. Anderson has long worked in worlds where readership behaves like a fandom - science fiction franchises, shared universes, long-running series. In that context, cliffhangers function as a handshake between installments: a promise that the story won’t tidy itself up for the convenience of closure. The subtext is that the unit of satisfaction isn’t “a book,” it’s the ongoing experience of anticipation, discussion, and return.

There’s also a canny realism about attention. Modern entertainment trains audiences on episodic hooks; streaming finales and comic-book arcs normalize the idea that stopping points are artificial. Anderson’s preference reads like an embrace of that cultural rhythm, not resistance to it. The line’s smallness - no grand talk of “tension” or “craft” - is strategic: it naturalizes the technique, as if cliffhangers are simply what stories do when they respect momentum.