Deadline-Driven Drama: How Time Pressure Shapes Story Stakes
I’ve written plenty of scenes that felt technically perfect. I’m not patting myself on the back, but they had good pacing, good dialogue, perfect structure, and everything progressed and developed as it should. And the scene still didn’t work.
I used to try to fix this with action to get something moving forward. That didn’t seem to work. Then I realized what was missing.
Urgency.
Not action; urgency.
One of the most powerful tools a writer can use to pull his story out of neutral and into high gear, even out of boring Perfect Land, is to throw in an impending deadline. This is one of the basics of all thriller writing.
Impending deadlines make readers sit up and pay attention. Why? Because looming deadlines reshape every decision a character makes. It’s like that old thing my friend Wayne Dyer used to say: what do you get when you squeeze an orange? You get orange juice because that is what is inside. Now, with an impending deadline, we know what is essential to the character because they will do all they can to beat it. Impending deadlines don’t just drive the plot (or scene) forward; they force the character to evolve as a character in real-time. The reader can watch it. It, rather than action, is action.
Here’s today’s Success Point.
If your scene feels slow, no matter how perfectly it is written, give it a deadline. Then, let that deadline shape the character’s actions and escalate the stakes. Infuse the scene with that sense of urgency.
Can it be any deadline? No. There’s no sit-up-and-listen with a “Hey, Virginia, gotta go now and pick up my kid at school.” Nothing there.
You have to have a deadline with some heavy meaning. It must be a deadline that, if missed, causes the character to lose something vital, e.g., a thing, identity, chance, opportunity, goal, justice, life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
Suddenly, when the stakes are high, and the deadline is looming, it’s not so much about what happens next as what must happen before it is too late.
Now the scene feels right.
Urgency creates energy. Time compression intensifies conflict. When a reader knows a bomb is about to go off—literally or emotionally—that reader will keep turning the pages, moving from scene to scene. Give that kind of urgency, and stopping is not an option.
If you’ve got a perfect scene today, but it doesn’t seem to work, don’t add more words. Instead, try adding a proverbial clock. In doing so, see how the scene changes along with the involvement of your reader.
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