It’s important to listen to this podcast right away. Don’t wait, hit that play button! Why? Urgency, presumably. In fiction, this is the quality that determines which conflicts must be resolved right away and which can wait until later. If a conflict is to be tense, then it must have urgency. Otherwise, readers will know your hero has all the time in the world to figure out a solution.

Generously transcribed by Ace of Hearts. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

Oren:  Welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Quick! We gotta get through this topic before our half hour time limit runs out. It’s a challenge, but hour-long episodes make some topics kind of untenable anyway, so we really have no choice.

Chris: Yeah, we actually had somebody recently request that we do hour-long podcasts like we used to. I think the assumption there is that if our podcast keeps going and doesn’t have a time limit, that we will continue to say insightful things. The reality is that we’ll probably just start talking about the weather after the half hour mark.

Oren: There are just a lot of topics that there’s not enough to say on them to fill an hour.

Chris: We had such a limited pool of topics when we were talking for an hour, and then when we moved to half an hour, it opened up so many that we could talk to for, you know, a shorter period of time. So not eager…

Oren: We do sometimes get topics that are too big for half an hour, but we split them up then. We focus on a smaller part of them, which I guess actually decreases urgency and that’s bad because we’re talking about urgency in fiction today.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, how are our podcast episodes gonna be exciting if we have all the time in the world?

Oren: Yeah, we could just talk forever, which would be boring. You wouldn’t want that, trust me. 

Chris: Well, don’t tell our listeners that. I’m pretty sure some of them do think they want that. 

Oren: They think that then they would get it and they would realize the curse, the monkey’s paw that they have called upon themselves. So what is urgency in fiction, Chris?

Chris: I would say it’s a feeling of time pressure. I’ve heard it referred to by others many times as a ticking clock. So, and this is specifically for creating tension in the story. I suppose urgency might have some other uses for things besides tension occasionally, but almost always we’re talking about tension, so we’ve got a problem with stakes and the protagonist has a limited amount of time to solve the problem or else all is lost.

Oren: There are sort of the three basic elements for creating tension in most circumstances. Stakes: something needs to matter. Difficulty: it needs to be hard to solve the problem. And then urgency: it needs to be done in an amount of time. ‘Cause if you can just take forever, then you’ll figure it out eventually.

Chris: I mean, I’ve often grouped together urgency and uncertainty, which is basically our difficulty factor, where it has to feel like the problem might not actually be solved. Because it’s difficult to solve, etc. And what happens is if we have a hundred years to figure out this problem, even if it seems impossible to solve, it just feels like, “eh, we’ve got a century. We’ll think of something if there’s no time limit.” But at the end of the day, if you never have the uncertainty requirement met without urgency, it’s for all intents and purposes its own requirement.

Oren: I think of it as a difference between what are your chances on the die roll you’re about to make versus how many die rolls you can make, is the way I think of it, because I’m a weird nerd.

Chris: That’s a good way of looking at it because that does happen in stories where you realize that the character might try to solve a problem and then fail, and then they just can keep trying again and again, and that is a big problem. It means there is no urgency if we can just trial and error our way out of this problem. I also think, again, for uncertainty purposes, it’s nice if you have a character fail to solve the problem. If the time is really precious, having it just be like, “okay, well not only did we fail to solve the problem, but we wasted all this time.” Usually you also want some additional reason why, okay, now it’s gonna be harder ’cause I failed to solve the problem and broke my equipment, or something like that. But urgency by itself can potentially, you know, like every time loop episode has some way of figuring this out.

Oren: [sarcastic] So that means that more urgency, more better. Right? We just always have the highest urgency. Every problem should need to be solved in the next like two seconds.

Chris: Sure. That’s why every story takes only two seconds. Stories are so short these days ’cause it’s just better that way.

Oren: We solved it. There we go.

Chris: No, I mean, I do think it’s worth asking, how tight should the timeline be? And the answer, of course, is: it depends. Although it depends on something very specific, right? It depends on what you are trying to do in that time. And a goal – again with anything about uncertainty with solving problems – is always to make it feel like it’s a bit of an uphill battle without making it impossible. So if you have to, you know, evacuate the planet, one year could be a very, very tight timeline for that and feel very urgent, even though you have an entire year. Whereas giving somebody a year to clean their bedroom is not a tight timeline.

Oren: Yeah. The question is gonna be one of scale. You’re gonna need more time to deal with a problem of moving a bunch of people. That’s not something that you can do shortly. So if you say, well, we have to move 500 people in the next five minutes, it’s like, well that is impossible. So tension is effectively zero now because the chances of success are also zero. Whereas if a guy’s coming to kill you and you give them a year, well, that’s not very tense. Even though those are very high stakes, it’s not a high scale problem. It’s very personal. A year is probably way too much time.

Chris: It’s also worth thinking about you as a storyteller. There’s a problem. Do you have a way for the protagonist to solve it in the deadline you set? Which can be really tricky sometimes because again, for it to be tense, we want the reader to perceive that this is gonna be an uphill battle, shall we say, to solve the problem in this time. But then you as a storyteller also need enough time for excitement and stuff to happen. And sometimes what happens is you get weird time dilation problems. And this particularly happens in action scenes. So for instance, you’ve got your protagonists out in the woods, say, and you’ve got an enemy that is closing in. Now you get to choose, where does that enemy appear? Do they appear right in the tree above? Do you see them over the next hill? And wherever you place the enemy, there’s gonna be a certain amount of suggested time until they reach your protagonist. And then your protagonist might need to do something like get up and run. They might need to help somebody else escape. Maybe they need to solve a puzzle, I don’t know. There could be all sorts of things that you have here. Get their weapon, which is stuck in their sheath in that timeline. What I see sometimes in various situations is you got to make this exciting. Because we want this sequence to be exciting, we make the enemy really close. Or we could have a situation that’s similar to cleaning the bedroom. “Oh no! Parents are about to come home, they’re gonna ground me. I have to clean my bedroom in just five minutes.” But it’s really hard to actually depict the protagonist doing what they need to do in that time. And then somehow, you know, our enemy that was supposed to be right up in the treetops just takes a really long time to fall. While the protagonist does half a dozen things, the enemy jumps from the tree and the protagonist sets up an entire trap in that time somehow. I thought of this ’cause we’ve been watching Scooby Doo.

Oren: Yeah, they do that a lot.

Chris: They make a joke out of the incredibly implausible traps. The more recent Scooby Doo show.

Oren: Yeah. Although even the outline that I’m working on, you noted that I had a sequence where my protagonist is running away from a monster and it really seems like the monster probably should have just caught her already and uh, it hasn’t. “What’s going on with that, Oren? Did you say that the monster was really close to create urgency but then not want to deal with that because you didn’t want your protagonist to get eaten?” No comment.

Chris: But also sometimes you wanna create a conflict and the conflict shouldn’t be over immediately. So you need time for the protagonist to dodge around things and make moves. But for that to happen, the enemy has to be farther away to allow more time.

Oren: Yeah. Thinking about it in terms of moves helps a lot because again, different conflicts are gonna happen at different speeds. Cleaning your room, if the room is dirty enough for that to be an issue, you’re probably not gonna be able to take care of it in two minutes. That’s just unlikely. It just doesn’t make sense. Moves in terms of cleaning your room take 10 minutes each at least, ’cause you’ve gotta sweep or put things away or whatever. And if it’s serious, that’s gonna take a little bit. Whereas in a fight, fights move very quickly. In that situation, you can very easily have it be a few minutes, unless you need them to do something really elaborate, like set up a trap, which… that’s just not gonna work. You’re gonna need to plan the story differently if you want that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could have your protagonist make a move that gives them a little more time. We’re gonna distract the parents somehow. Or let’s say we’re being chased down. We’re gonna try to throw something that creates a sound somewhere else and delays the attacker for a couple moments or something like that. You could do that, but at some point in time you kind of have to look at what’s realistic in addition to what is tense.

Oren: Right, and usually if you were gonna make cleaning the room into a fictional conflict, you would probably have the turning point be something other than the physical cleaning of the room, just because that’s not for most characters going to be a particularly skill difficult endeavor. Most characters are gonna be capable of doing that, but at the same time, it’s very unlikely most characters could rush it to be done in a couple minutes. So you would usually have the turning point be something like, can I convince my parents to stay out for another hour? Or can I have the willpower to actually clean my room and not watch TV all day? Something like that is usually what I think you would go for in that situation.

Chris: I think the characters should just stuff a bunch of garbage up their shirt and then have to stay still without moving so that the parent doesn’t see.

Oren: Yeah. You can get into more creative solutions. If it’s a magic story, your character could cast a quick illusion to make it look like the room is clean and then struggle to maintain it without any telltale shimmer as the parent inspects to see if the room’s actually clean.

Chris: So, yeah, there’s lots of things you can do there, but in any case, how far away the timeline is, again, the whole idea is that you need time pressure and it’s just proportional. If it’s something that’s a year away, of course you want your protagonist to be able to sleep and have meals, but if it’s something that’s an hour away, they’re not gonna take a meal break. They’re not gonna take a nap. And having your character also act as though it’s urgent, because again, remember that people follow the lead of your protagonist by default, unless you do something to suggest otherwise. They assume the protagonist was right, and that’s just because 99% of the time in stories, that is in fact true and so therefore that is naturally what they are used to. Generally, your protagonist also has to act like it’s urgent, which leads me to talking about urgency fading, which is a big issue.

When we’re talking about urgency as a requirement for tension, it’s worth thinking, “okay, when do I actually have to do something to make the situation more urgent? And when will it inherently feel urgent?” And in a lot of cases what we see is that problems initially have a feeling of urgency, but it quickly dies as story time passes. How this works is because nothing bad happens. So if you were driving your car and you realize your gas tank has been leaking and then you realize this leak has been happening for the last week and you’ve been driving your car around, that must be a very slow leak because it’s been going on for quite a while and you haven’t noticed any bad effects. And so that also suggests to you that, oh, well, you can finish your errand and drive it to the mechanic without worrying about running empty on your gas tank. It’s just like that with all sorts of problems in stories. A character going missing is a huge one. Anytime a character has maybe been kidnapped or has just simply disappeared, it feels urgent initially, very urgent, because there’s a big risk that they are in mortal danger. They might be in a really dangerous situation. What if they fell down the well or something like that? They might be injured, or if they were kidnapped, maybe the kidnapper will kill them in the first few hours.

Oren: I mean, I was watching a show the other day and the first three episodes at least, are about trying to find this missing kid. And it’s like, well, after the second episode, I’m just starting to think he’s either fine or dead. If he was in immediate danger, then that has already had time to pass. And if he wasn’t, then it doesn’t feel particularly urgent. I’m sure we’ll get to it eventually. And you can counteract that. An interesting example is Will Byers in Stranger Things season 1, by which I mean the only season. [sarcastic] They never made any more, thankfully. But he goes missing in the first episode and it’s like, “oh wow, what happened? That’s scary!” But you know, as time passes, you would normally start to think, well, either he’s dead or he’s fine, but they keep that alive by having him be able to communicate and drop hints that something’s still happening. Not only that he is alive, but he’s still in danger, and that keeps the tension up and reestablishes urgency because you get some actual info about what’s happening. This is a thing that I’ve seen some authors struggle with. It is true that keeping a threat mysterious often increases tension, but it can’t be 100% mysterious. You need to give something, otherwise readers have no reason to worry at all.

Chris: If you have a mysterious threat, you still need some sign that it could cause harm after a while. In stories, one we’ve talked about before is the beginning of The Name of the Wind. We have these spider demons that are threatening the town in the beginning prologue part, and that seems like a really bad problem. But then Kvothe just hangs out cleaning bottles at his inn for a while. And it starts to feel like, okay, maybe this isn’t a big deal, because nothing bad has happened yet. That’s why if you have a lot happening and a lot of activity, especially if you have an unfolding conflict, it already feels immediate. So if you’re showing your hero and villain dueling with blades, you don’t have to do anything special to create urgency because we can see things change and every time the villain lunges for the hero, we know that they’re in immediate danger. But if you have any long-running problem especially, a lot of times you do have to do something special in order to make sure that there is tension in that situation.

Oren: It’s interesting because we’re talking about how to establish urgency. The obvious solution is to use an actual clock. You have an actual timer that is counting down, and that might be a kitchen timer or a calendar or whatever, but often you’re not gonna have something that precise. So you have to give a rough idea, and that is where the danger of “well too much time has elapsed, now it feels boring” [comes in]. If you say the castle’s gonna be attacked soon, what does soon mean? Does it mean within a scene, within a chapter? If it goes more than that, I don’t really believe you that it’s gonna be attacked soon anymore.

Chris: Yeah. We get back into that same issue of urgency dying the more time passes. So you could have a thing where it’s like, “oh, at any time, the enemy will attack.” And that will work. But again, the more time passes, the more that starts to fade. Unless you do something to have, again, your mysterious enemy start making some moves and start harming people. If you have a serial killer out there, for instance, who is in the regular habit of killing people. You can make that work because you know another person, the longer you wait, the more people are gonna die. Or similarly, you can show a trend heading in a bad direction. Like the fire is consuming more and more of the city. And so we need to stop it before it gets more. The main thing with when you’re observing repeated bad things happening or a problem getting worse, is to just make milestones and the difference feel concrete. ‘Cause if you emotionally distance yourself, let’s say like you’ve got a plague in the city. And every day you wait, more people are technically dying, but they’re dying somewhere else. Right? And all the main characters are fine. After a while, it just may feel like it doesn’t matter because you’re not putting the story behind making it matter. You kind of have to have the plague come closer to where the characters that readers like are. Have somebody the readers actually know come down with the plague. You know, maybe it’s spreading to more people they care about more and have concrete milestones so that they still feel like, okay, it matters. These aren’t just nameless people in the background. You want it to matter. 

And that also is important if you have any ongoing problems. A character being imprisoned, for instance, is another one where like that will feel less urgent as the character hangs out in prison. Even if they’re miserable, we need to make it emotionally impactful that they’re miserable.

Oren: Right. We’ve talked in other places about how tension is usually the result of the status quo going to change for the negative. Once a new negative status quo takes over and it seems to be going like it’s just gonna continue… even if it sucks, that’s not gonna be super tense ’cause it’s just the same.

Chris: In those cases, again, it’s really helpful to just add some stakes with a deadline. They’re easy to add together, which is nice. So like we have our prisoner and, “okay, if I don’t escape from this prison before such and such date, they’re all gonna brand us with a branding iron, and then everybody will know that I’m a slave and I’ll never get free again” or something. We have a specific situation that is like a point of no return that adds a new deadline to this situation. Adding new stakes and a new timeline can be really helpful in the situations where after a while, okay, this feels like the new status quo. Or we have nameless people dying and it’s not emotionally hitting home anymore. That kind of thing.

Oren: Using different levels of urgency is also how you build plots that are either immediate and need to be dealt with right now versus plots that are building and will become a bigger deal later. This is how you create a story where we have to escape Tatooine right now because there’s stormtroopers and they’re closing in, they’re gonna get us, but we know that the Death Star is out there and we’re gonna have to deal with it eventually. You want the urgency to be balanced correctly. You don’t want it to be like, well, we gotta escape Tatooine, but the Death Star’s attacking us right now. So that kind of makes escaping Tatooine kind of a moot point.

Chris: This is just a great thing for anytime you have like your first story in a series, for instance, but it also applies to a child arc in a bigger story, your child arc versus your throughline, book one versus your series arc. You attach the biggest stakes to the longer overarching story, and then the immediate problem that you’re dealing with right now can have lower stakes, but higher urgency, and that will make it more exciting right now while still making that bigger story really important. So yeah, the Death Star is like the higher stakes problem because it can destroy whole planets. But like right now, we urgently need to escape from Tatooine.

Oren: I mean, of course you could need to escape because the Death Star is gonna blow up Tatooine, but I was imagining the death star is gonna destroy the rebel base or something. That’s an urgent problem, but it’s not something we’re dealing with right now

Chris: Right. We wanna make it less urgent and then whatever the current arc is more urgent. And then the nice thing is that when it’s time to tackle the big series throughline, book throughline, whatever, you can usually increase the urgency and can add a new deadline that wasn’t there before in order to bring that plotline to the forefront.

Oren: Yeah. One thing that I found interesting is that some authors just take for granted that nothing is gonna change in a long period of time, and I don’t know, I just don’t believe them. I was so confused by the book Three Body Problem, where at the end of it, aliens are on their way, and I thought they were gonna be here in 40 years, because it said they’re traveling at 1/10th, the speed of light from four light years away. And I was like, that’s actually pretty tense, right? In 40 years we’re supposed to deal with an alien invasion. That sounds rough. But then they said no, 400 years, because apparently they’re only going at 1/10th of c for a very short part of the trip, which is like, “okay, well I’m reasonably confident that in 400 years we’ll have a solution.” Like, I don’t know. Apparently the author thought I wasn’t supposed to think that.

Chris: Yeah, let’s just pass some funding bills on space defense, I guess.

Oren: Or who knows? Maybe they’ll get here and we’ll all be dead, right? That’s another possibility. Barring any other explanation, technology tends to improve pretty quickly. Now, again, I’m not guaranteeing that would continue, but I have no reason to think it wouldn’t in this particular case. And the book certainly hasn’t done any work to make it look like 400 years isn’t gonna be a long enough time.

Chris: Yeah, no.

Oren: So yeah, it was just very strange.

Chris: That’s pretty impractically long. I guess if you have a really long-lived or immortal protagonist, it’s not impossible to do something on a 400 year timeline.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, that’s a different issue, right? It’s like, okay, well in 400 years all the characters are gonna be dead anyway, so it’s basically gonna be a different story. That doesn’t really matter that much to me in Three Body Problem, because I couldn’t have cared less about any of the characters, which is a different third problem that I had with that book. But in this case, it was just simply, the book ends with like, “you gotta be scared ’cause of the aliens” and I don’t know. I think we’ll manage. Which of course is not what happens because it’s not my book. I didn’t write it, the author did. And so he writes the aliens showing up and completely dominating, ’cause he can just decide to do that. It’s his book. But I don’t believe him.

Chris: I mean, there are very few things that can’t be solved in 400 years.

Oren: You could say whatever you want in the story. The question is, will your reader believe you?

Chris: Even if something is supposed to be technically impossible, I just think in 400 years you’ll be like, “eh, we’ll figure it out.” Or like, “it’s not my problem right now, ’cause it’s too far away.”

Oren: Right, it’s so far into the future, it just doesn’t feel like a real problem. I’m not a, oh gosh, what do they, what do they call themselves? The Sam Bankman-Fried people. I’m not an effective altruist, okay? I care about people who are alive today.

Chris: Uh, yeah, I’m pretty sure effective altruism is just an excuse to do whatever they want. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure out there, there is some effective altruist who really means well. Is doing some good work, but I think for most of them… Let’s talk about too much urgency, because that happens.

Oren: [sarcastic] Well, we can’t, ’cause the episode’s gonna end pretty soon here.

Chris: Oh no! It’s almost like we don’t have time to have a conversation to sit down and talk about things for a while.

Oren: I mean, if you give me the inverse of the 400 year problems, if you tell me like, “well, you have to build a car and you have an hour, and you have to build it from scratch.” It’s like, well, that’s just not possible. I’m sorry.

Chris: We talked about it being unrealistic, but there’s also the issue of are the protagonists using their time effectively, and are we getting frustrated with them? Like A Study in Drowning. We talked about the scene in A Study in Drowning in which there’s a big storm that’s about to hit and the lovebirds of the story have been hanging out in this creepy mansion that’s falling apart, and there’s a good chance the storm will completely demolish the mansion, and they have their research materials in there. So they really need to just grab the research materials and get out. Instead… bow chicka wow wow.

Oren: Yeah. They gotta, you know, gotta go have sexy time instead!

Chris: Sexy time! It’s like, no, this situation is too urgent for you to have a slow scene where you have sex and then fall asleep together. That’s frustrating. And this, again, happens where you want your characters to have a little downtime, you want them to have some relationship time, but you’ve created a problem that is too urgent. And so realistically, they should not be doing that. Generally in this case, you just wanna create some kind of waiting step for them where like, sorry, we can’t do anything until such and such calls us back. Or the storm in this case can already have hit and now they’re stuck in the house, just the two of them and it’s the perfect time for them to… you know.

Oren: You gotta create the flow of time in such a way that it doesn’t feel like they should be doing something other than what you want them to do right now.

Chris: Or another thing that can happen that is an interesting challenge is when you have a story that takes place over a long time period. And we had, I think, a recent podcast episode on this. For that one you need to do like, we set a deadline that’s really far away, and now we’re going to summarize all the time passing really fast. So now that event that was far away is suddenly really close and now it’s urgent, and then the event is over. You do your falling action scenes and then fast forward again.

Oren: Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t like when stories just summarize huge swaths of time like that. I find it disorienting, it takes me out of the story, it makes me less likely to care about it. I’m constantly wondering, “okay, a year has passed. Are these characters the same? Did they change in that year?” I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me. Other people don’t seem to have a problem with it.

Chris: Got a grumpy magic school hater here.

Oren: Yeah, it’s weird. I mean, at least a magic school usually only fast-forwards a couple months at a time. It’d be weird to fast forward through an entire school year, although Babel did that.

Chris: Yeah, Babel is not really an example that people should follow.

Oren: Babel has so many other problems that it’s really hard to disentangle the passage of time issue.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: All right. Well, I think with that, our urgency has run out and now we will have to call this episode to a close.

Chris: Since our time is running low, listeners, you have only minutes to support us on Patreon before this podcast self-destructs.

Oren: Kaboom!

Chris: Do you feel motivated now, eh? Feeling the tension? Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants before it’s too late.

Oren: [dramatic music tone] dun dun dun! And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.