Tick…Tick…Tick…Using Time to Make a Hit Novel

So, last week was Shaun’s birthday. Yay, Shaun! We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. And today, we’re talking about a main element in writing a hit novel. Some people call it The Big Clock. Some people call it a Ticking Clock. Some people call it The Timer. Dramatic theory is fancy and calls it a Timelock, but basically, it’s the ticking bomb, a known and harsh deadline that your character has before it all explodes in her face. Glen C. Strathy explains, “The technique is to give the protagonist a set amount of time by which to achieve the Story Goal or else suffer the consequence. Generally, you create tension by not allowing your protagonist to achieve the goal until the very last second (which is also the crisis of the story). We call this type of limit a ticking clock.” So, examples might be: You only have until 4 p.m. to get the antidote to your zombie hamster Ham-Hammy-Ham-Ham before he is a zombie forever. An evil group of cheese-loving bunnies will eat ALL THE CHEESE IN THE WORLD if they don’t receive 3,000 pounds of gouda by nightfall. A puppy-nado is coming in three hours and you have to evacuate the town of Bar Harbor before then. WILL YOU MAKE IT IN TIME? Actually, do you want to? Strathy also calls this “an excellent way to keep your plot under control. For instance, if you give your characters a 24-hour ticking clock, you know all the events of your story must take place within that timeframe.” It’s a way to keep your plot from going all wild and willy-nilly. Cool, right? James W. Hall calls it an “ever moving second hand” that “raises the anxiety level.” DOG TIP FOR LIFE Dogs use the time element constantly. Whining and returning to your goal, always upping the want and stakes help. PLACE TO SUBMIT INSTANT NOODLES! Holiday Issue (V4 I3): Holiday Noods HOLIDAY NOODS is our 2024 winter holiday theme. Give us your best holiday fails (any December holiday, from Hannukah, to Solstice, to NYE, etc.) or your best funny work about noodles that happens to ALSO be holiday-themed in some way. The point of the end-of-year issue is always to be light-hearted to downright silly. Submissions close OCTOBER 15, 2024 and the issue publishes DECEMBER 1, 2024. INSTANT NOODLES IS CURATED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE OLD SCRATCH PRESS COLLECTIVE Submission link is here. COOL WRITING EXERCISE: THE STATUS QUO What is the status quo as your novel starts? Got it? What changes it? RANDOM THOUGHT LINK Got it from here. SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.  Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free. WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome. We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here. Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot! Subscribe