When someone watches your film or play, reads your book or short story, listens to your audio drama or podcast, they are making an investment of time. Every minute could be spent on something else: their family, the washing up, playing computer games, or god-forbid another writer’s work. Every minute they give you must give them more than they’ll get from getting up and going somewhere else. Otherwise, guess what they’ll?
Yet writers rarely think in terms of time. We talk about word limits, when we have one, or target word counts, when we’re trying to convince ourselves we can sell our 150,000-word teen thriller. But time eludes us. In this article I’m going to talk about how to think about your writing in terms of the readers use of time, and points in your story where time is especially important.
Not all stories are born equal
Every minute of your work is in competition with literally everything else your reader or viewer could be doing. But not all works are equal. If someone has travelled to the cinema to watch a film, the film must be pretty bad before they walk out and get on the metro. Equally, people aren’t likely to walk out of a theatre until the interval. In both these mediums you have a little more room to play, a little more opportunity to experiment with, well, the risk that you might bore the audience.
By contrast, books and worst of all TV always have to grab audience attention . There’s nothing easier than putting down a book or flicking the channel. Every word counts when writing for these mediums. The moment you bore them, they’re gone.
There is a proviso to this, and it works for all forms of story: audiences are as subject to sunk costs as everyone else. The more time they have spent reading/watching, the harder it is for them to stop: the time they’ve already spent makes them want to finish. Which is the only reason anybody ever finishes War and Peace (or, for the real masochist, Atlas Shrugged)
What are our take homes from these differences?
- Every second counts for the first five minutes of a book, short story or TV show. If you don’t grab them then, they won’t bother with the rest.
- For theatre and film, you’ve got some time to play with. Unusual structures, delayed hooks: try them out – the audience are stuck. But remember, risky and shit are not the same thing. Most importantly, if there’s an interval give them a question that will only be answered if they come back. Because that bar across the street is mighty tempting.
- The overall length of the piece counts for how long you have to get them hooked, and how much you can play later. If the first couple of minutes of a thousand-page novel are shit they reader is dumping it next to Ulysses on the shelf of unread books. But get them past the first hundred pages and the poor buggers are stuck with you.
- Similarly, a fairly ordinary short story will take about ten minutes to read, which makes the overall cost of reading seem small – paradoxically, a short story or novella doesn’t necessarily have to grab a reader in the opening page quite as hard as a novel, because the reader knows it will be over quick anyway (kind of like going to the dentist.)
- One last proviso: it’s always better to be interesting than boring. The difference is whether to be high octane or slow burn interesting, not whether you can afford to be rubbish.
So how long is a piece of string?
A script will play at 160 words per minute. Forget all the minute a page crap you’ve heard. 160 words per minute works. Add into that estimated times for silent action scenes (why are you having silent action scenes?) and you’re good.
The average reading speed is 200-250 words per minute. It’s reasonable to think about this as a page every two minutes, although formatting will count for a lot here.
A three-hundred-page novel is going to take about eight hours to read for the average reader. That’s a pretty big investment of time. I suspect most readers don’t think about it that way, or there would a lot less readers! Novelists, however, rarely think in terms of how they work exists in time
Let me put it this way. If you like rollercoasters and someone offers you a ride on a five-minute roller-coaster, you’ll say yes. If some offers you a forty-hour ride, you’ll say no, I don’t care how much you like rollercoasters.
If your story relies on thrills and spills, action and adventure, that’s great! But don’t offer them a forty-hour ride. It’s not what they want. Similarly, if your story relies on emersion and world building, on taking the reader somewhere new that they want to experience and explore, then give them the time to do that. I’m not necessarily talking GRR Martin time here, but this is the reason why thrillers tend to be around 70,000 words and epic fantasy’s twice that length.
TV and Cinema tend to work the other way around – especially TV – you have an idea of the length of time/length of script and you work to that. I ask my radio play writers for a script between 1600-2000 words long because I know it’ll come out between ten to fifteen minutes long, which is perfect for our podcast.
The same rules apply, however. If you’re writing for standard TV show, you’d better keep things moving. If you’re writing a 90-minute film lean towards action and motion, a three-hour film then you can just give us hobbits walking, and walking, and walking….
What happens when and for how long
We’ve identified elsewhere the key points in your story. You should be able to see by now that pinning them to word counts is just the same as thinking about them as time. The added value is thinking in terms of length.
A classic story arc goes: Call to action, refusal of the call, the second chance, the mid-point, the darkest hour and the conclusion. There are lots of different ways to describe this arc – we’ve talked about it before.
The call to action/raising of the question: Every story needs to begin with someone being asked a question about their ordinary life. Something that challenges them, that threatens to redefine them, and should be as exciting as possible (remembering that not all excitement requires a roller-coaster)
This bit needs to happen BEFORE the audience gives up. It’s this question that will make your reader decide whether to bother (especially if the book is long). In a short script, it should happen on the first minute – that’s the first 160 words. TV shows are well known for throwing the question up as early as possible, classically in the pre-credit teaser. The basic rule is that the easier the text is to put down, the faster you need to grab the reader’s/viewer’s attention.
A book gives you a little more time, but I know that (with kids and wife and work and life) if it doesn’t grab me in the first five minutes, I’m probably going to put it down. That’s 1250 words. If you’re writing complicated literary fiction for people with more time, you might be forgiven ten minutes. But it’s a big might. You’d can’t mess around. If in any doubt, get the question in early.
Why might you delay? In a movie or theatre where the audience are less likely to leave, you can spend more time before the call to action to explore the character’s everyday life: to build empathy with them, to illustrate that something is missing, to have them save a cat or whatever.
Refusal of the call and the second chance: Obi Wan Kenobi says, “you must come with me to Alderan” and Luke says, “but Uncle Owen needs me on the farm.” Traditionally the protagonist refuses the first opportunity to change their life. Why? You certainly don’t need to do this. But the refusal raises the stakes – it shows their attachment to their current life and makes the challenge feel more difficult.
You still need to be getting a move on here. The story doesn’t really get going until the protagonists confront the source of change. Keep in mind that the moment the protagonist accepts the call, they are hurtling towards the mid-point where their failures will be exposed. The sooner you get going the sooner you can start shooting stormtroopers and dodging star destroyers.
Balancing the mid-point
So, where’s the balance of your story? Do you want to spend more time building empathy or having adventures?
The mid-point: The mid-point should be, approximately, the middle. The revelation that the hero has to change to meet the challenges of the story should be the big reveal, the thing that fills the theatre after the interval, that wakes up the cinema audience, that keeps the reader hooked when they suddenly realise they should probably make the tea.
What this means for timing is particularly important for the darkest hour.
The darkest hour: More adventures, but these adventures have the added emotional impact of the hero trying to overcome the inner weakness. This should take up almost half the story. It is a common fault to find the midpoint slipping into the second half: this is because you haven’t given your protagonist enough problems in the first. The darkest hour is the real meat: if the dish you serve is all salad sand green beans then you either need to cut down the adventures before the mid-point, or give the hero bigger problems (more bad guys often works) to deal with.
The conclusion: I’m not trying to be down on Peter Jackson, but don’t go all Return of the King. The exciting stuff is all the stuff that happens before the conclusion. Get the job done, get out, fall asleep. Wait, what are talking about? Oh, yeah, once again genre counts: if your story is all about emersion your audience might be more willing to spend time with the characters after all the dramatic questions are answered. But in almost every case, ever word written after the story is finished should be a strong candidate for the cutting room floor.
The most important and interesting stuff in your story should be taking up the most time
Time to be brutal. Now that we know that words=time, block out your draft and look at where there are the most words.
If your call to action hasn’t happened ten minutes into your film script, ask yourself if that conversation about cats is necessary? Yes, it makes the players more likeable. But it’s the only part of the episode anybody will hang around to watch.
If your mid-point is happening a third of the way into the book, consider if you are giving you reader enough time to get to know and like (or at least feel attracted to) your characters. Can they have more adventures together before the flaw is exposed? Do we need to see more of their real life? Alternatively, check through the darkest hour (basically the second half of the book) and look for what you can tighten, what can live without a blow by blow description.
Most of all, remember that your reader/viewers time is valuable. Don’t waste a second of it. Unless you’re writing blog posts in your reflective journal, in which case you can rabbit on and on and on and on…
