How to Speed Without Crashing—Or, The Art of the Truly Breathless Scene

This week’s prompt explores the superpower of time control, the pitfalls of losing control of time, and the value of escalating pace in order to build momentum, compress time, and amplify meaning

Before I dive into this week’s prompt, an important announcement: if you are (or want to be) a zero-waste writer like me, we have just three last spots in a fabulous upcoming workshop for breathing new life into any project you’ve set aside or even given up on. This two-hour session will help you resurrect a discard, and, in so doing, learn to recognize “the one good sentence” we need to keep going.

"Resurrecting the Dead … Files"

• 2hr Workshop with Rebecca Gummer

• Date: Sunday, June 11

• Time: 1-3pm CT

• Tuition: $79

• Description: Join author Rebecca Gummere in this insightful workshop, where you'll learn how to view rejection as an opportunity for growth. Through practical strategies and creative exercises, you'll resurrect discarded pieces and explore ways to breathe new life into them. Embrace the power of reimagining and find inspiration in what was once considered lost. You can get more info & sign up here.

And now, this week’s writing prompt.

One particularly essential, potent, and even, in my mind, miraculous thing about writing—and you’ve definitely heard me talk about this if you have ever taken one of my courses—is time control. As writers, we can do truly magical things with time. We can fast forward, slow down, jump back and forth, or even write in totally nonlinear ways that collapse and defy time, as I did in The Part That Burns. These time travel superpowers allow us to access and sometimes even expand and elevate a profound kind of “trueness” about how we as humans perceive and experience time. 

Of course, as with all superpowers, this one must be used with extreme caution and intentionality. If we are not diligent about time control, readers may grow confused and frustrated. They may quickly lose the thread of the story and, in quick succession, lose interest in our writing. 

They may put our work down and not pick it back up again.

And there are other lesser—yet still very important—stakes to consider when it comes to time control in our work. When handled with skill and grace, time control can deepen the meaning and emotion in our work. But when handled clumsily or, worse yet, not given any thought at all, time control (or, more specifically, lack thereof) can reduce our work to a string of missed opportunities. In contrast, skillful time control can reveal and underscore certain elements of our story at exactly the right moments and in exactly the right order.

Here, though, I want to back up a moment and break this whole concept down a bit more by looking for a moment at what, precisely, I mean when I say “time control.” Because we’ve got a few different levels of questions we can ask to better understand this essential element of craft which, depending on how we wield it, can so easily improve (or degrade) the effects of our work.

First, we have questions/issues of time control at the container level, or, in architectural terms, the framing level:

1. Span: This is literally about how much time—what span of time—does the story cover? A year? A decade? A day? An hour? A moment? Another way to think about this is to ask and answer the question of when does the story start and when does it end (remembering, of course, that almost all stories have at least some backfill that lands outside the main narrative time span, and a good many stories also use at least some flash forward that moves us beyond the scope of the main time span).

2. Chronology: Is the story told in chronological order or does it move around in time? 

Second, we have issues/questions at the level of the line and scene, which is the content level:

1. Tempo/Pace: Is the story being told at an appropriate and effective pace? Is the pace being modulated smoothly and intentionally to reflect the story’s events and their meaning?

2. Momentum: How is pace being manipulated to build a sense of urgency? 

Another important time-control issue (that I will not address in detail today) is something I call time-stamping, by which I mean simply using words, where necessary, to alert the reader to exactly where we are in time, how much time has passed or is passing, and so forth. This is a technical issue that is also an art, and something I’ll expand on in another post.

For now, I’ll say simply that in order to begin wrapping your mind around time control and start practicing it to best effect in your own work, it’s helpful to wrangle with the above questions in relation to work that is not your own. Why? Well, because we are notoriously bad at objectively reviewing our own projects because they are too close for us to properly deconstruct (which is why revision is such an important skill to practice if you want to get good at the craft of writing, but more on that another day). 

Meanwhile, let’s first briefly consider one of the most accessible examples of time control and storytelling, which comes to us in the form of TV series writing, where conventions and even formulas tend to be super clear and easy to identify and, therefore, replicable. Gray’s Anatomy offers an excellent example. So does Succession. How do these wildly different shows both reveal something similarly useful with regard to time control? Yes, the two shows are wildly, vastly, almost inexpressibly different. And, yes, I loved watching Gray’s with my kids back in the day—it was wonderful and fun and fulfilling in very specific ways. But Succession represents, hands down, one of the most brilliant pieces of storytelling as art that we’ve seen in recent history, and does so in a way that differs profoundly from Gray’s, so, the two shows are indeed hugely divergent both on a content and craft level.

However, both shows offer us a similarly clear model when it comes to time control, which begs the question of what we can take away from the patterns in these shows in order to quickly and easily help us tackle time much more beautifully (and powerfully) in our own writing. The strategy is actually simpler than it sounds, so simple it looks downright easy (but isn’t, at all!), and it’s impossible to unsee once you see it. Let’s take a close look.