How to add urgency to your stories
How to use the element of time to keep your readers turning the page and your audience listening.
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Hi Storytellers —
First, welcome to a slew of new subscribers! I’m so happy to have you.
One of my recent deadlines fighting for time with this newsletter was this feature story about the state of food pantries in America for The Guardian. As I wrote it, I found myself considering not just sensory details, but how to intentionally use the element of time to create urgency.
I “grew up” in audio first as a talk show producer and then as a news reporter at local NPR stations. In both formats, it’s easy to neglect the element of time.
So often, we’re presenting an argument or exploring facets of a topic (interview shows) or we have only 60 seconds to four minutes to share the news (local reporting and national radio features).
But in longer forms such as narrative feature writing, audio series, streaming video, and memoir, among others, we can use time to keep the action moving forward and the audience glued from beginning to end.
To be honest, in my many years of doing this work, I hadn’t given the element of time much thought beyond anchoring a story in time and place or showing change from one point in time to another. So I had to chew on it a while before I realized how transformative a ticking clock (literal or metaphorical) can be.
Consider a detective novel. In a good one, we’re hand-in-hand with the detective as they follow clues in a race against time. The urgency comes from the combination of high stakes and not knowing whether the detective will prevail before time runs out.
Here’s the problem I started with: I’d done a lot of reporting on federal food cuts and how food pantries work. I’d decided to profile one small food pantry facing big problems even before the administration cut more than $1 billion in federal food aid. But when I began writing, I’d visited them only twice. How could I create a sense of suspense?
My model: a This American Life story
I had a few great examples in my head: First, a terrific This American Life story, Episode 776, “I Work Better on Deadline.” Segment: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Quorum.” by NHPR Reporter Sarah Gibson and TAL Producer Chris Benderev. The story stemmed from a surprise: Overnight, a group of Free Staters had engineered a draconian budget cut to the Croydon, N.H. school system. The town stood to lose more than half of its school funding.
A pair of twin sisters, political novices, decided to mount a campaign to restore the funding. The campaign would end with a revote at a special meeting. The sisters’ task: To persuade 283 people to vote to restore funding, in a conservative-leaning town of only 800 people. The stakes were high. They faced an obvious deadline: the revote, which would take place in 40 days.
In the first half of the story, as Gibson chronicles the sisters’ door-to-door efforts to sway their neighbors, she mentions time every now and then.
But her story really heats up on the day of the revote. Here’s how Gibson introduces that section:
“Finally, the day of the vote -- May 7. Voters are lined up at the registration table by 8:00 AM. It's cold. There's no heating in the hall, but there's a fireplace roaring at one end.”
The moderator spins down-home stories, using up precious time. You can feel the sisters’ tension in Gibson’s narration:
“At first, people figure, maybe Bruce is stalling to give stragglers time to find their seats. But pretty soon, it's 9:20 AM. And people are getting antsy-- glancing at each other. Wait, this is the school budget revote, right?”
It goes on like this, with time checks coming more and more frequently. The tension ratchets up with each time check. Then Gibson says,
“And finally, 70 minutes in, it's time to vote. People form a long line to put their ballots in the box.”
We think it’s going to end, but then there’s a problem with the number of votes.
Only minutes remain before the clock will run out. We wait, breathless, for the resolution.
I won’t tell you what happened — hopefully, now you’ll have to listen for yourself. But I will say the ticking-clock structure of this story seared itself into my brain.
Importantly, the story’s organic, high-stakes deadline helped NHPR’s podcast team greenlight the pitch. “We need to be able to be there as [the story is] happening and watch it unfold,” Senior Podcast Editor Katie Colaneri told me. (Go behind the scenes of this story, and NHPR’s greenlight process, on this episode of Sound Judgment.)
Documenting events in real time helps create the sense that we, the audience, are immersed in the action, in the world that Gibson recreated in sound. It’s as if we, too, are sitting in town meeting, as that ticking clock seems to gets louder and louder. More urgent.
It’s impossible to look away.
Use cliffhangers to make the medicine go down
The piece does something else brilliantly, solving a problem that vexes any storyteller attempting to explain a thorny issue without losing our audience: it sandwiches context in between cliffhangers. We learn about an arcane rule that allowed the revote. We learn the history of the town meeting. And we learn about some of the characters in Croydon, all while the urgency to answer the central question keeps us listening.
Cliffhangers make the context medicine go down easier.
That’s a technique I remember learning from Mark Kramer, one of the luminaries of creative nonfiction, from his narrative nonfiction class at Boston University. When you need to impart context, do it after you drop a cliffhanger.* Drop it in small doses, then return again and again to your narrative journey.
I also had a raft of other great examples in my head: Every ball game anyone’s ever watched. Sports announcers have all the ingredients they need: Conflict, obvious high stakes, a deadline, and a central question that they keep returning to: “Who will win?”
You can squeeze a lot of context in between innings and quarters.
But can I do it?
So here I am, chewing over my problem with the food pantry story. I’m facing my own writing deadline: I have to solve this now, because in about 24 hours, my editor is expecting a draft, my first for The Guardian.
So I ask myself a question that turns out to be useful: What organic deadlines do my main characters face?
The answer is obvious: Every morning before the pantry opens, volunteers must complete a number of important tasks before they can open their doors. There’s never quite enough time. Simultaneously, pantry visitors are lining up outside, waiting for hours for those doors to open.
I could unfold the story over the course of a single morning, as we get closer and closer to opening time. And I could sandwich context in between time checks.
Using two contrasting measures of the same couple of hours — the tedium of visitors’ lengthy, anxious waits versus the hectic efforts of volunteers — would give me a natural structure. Suddenly I could see the whole story as if it were a movie scene.
I’ll let you decide whether the resulting feature works. I just know the structure brought me closer to the characters, the scene, the stakes and the setting, and made it far more fun to write.
How have you employed the element of time to bring motion and urgency to your work? Please share your examples in the comments!
*Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and published by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, is a classic book for creative nonfiction practitioners.
Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash
Try This in Your Studio
If you’re looking for a story to tell, test your story ideas to see what, if any, time urgency is built into them. Choose an idea with conflict, high stakes, a clear central question, and an organic deadline.
Keep in mind that you can have more than one deadline in a story. Your story could unfold in multiple scenes, with different time elements in each.
And a deadline can be subtle: A story about an impending divorce might have a small scene in which a couple is fighting while glancing occasionally at a clock, knowing the baby will wake up in ten minutes.If you’re in the midst of a draft, ask yourself: “How does time work in the lives of my main characters? Are there any natural, organic ways in which time affects them?” Plan at least one scene in which time plays a crucial role.
Take another look at a draft of a story you’ve written. Can you add a sense of urgency by inserting the element of time? Perhaps not by naming minutes, hours or days, but simply by showing a character moving quickly to accomplish something, or moving so slowly that it’s causing conflict? Perhaps something that doesn’t seem political actually is, by virtue of bureaucracy deliberately slowing down to gum up the works?
Share a story you’ve read or heard that uses time to create urgency. Please explain what struck you about its time element in the comments and share a link. I’d love to build a good database of examples. (I encourage you to share your own story!)
Sound Judgment Kudos
In most issues, I give Sound Judgment Kudos to storytellers who are making sound judgments choices that improve our craft or serve others.
I can’t write kudos without acknowledging what a stressful, almost incomprehensible month it’s been for those of us in podcasting and journalism. Pineapple Street Media, one of the best narrative storytelling podcast shops in the business, shut down.
This week came the news that Amazon would dismember merge Wondery into Audible, keeping some narrative shows but largely focusing on celebrity-driven, video-first chatcasts. More than 100 talented people lost their jobs, and countless independent podcasters and production companies are likely to be affected in the coming weeks and months.
And, of course, there was the Senate’s dreadful rescission vote and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s subsequent heartbreaking closure announcement.
I wish I had some answers, but at the moment it feels like I need to say two things.
First, I share your pain and distress over the tremendous loss of talent and outlets for audio journalism. If you’re affected and would like to talk, please reach out.
Second, no matter what happens to existing platforms, the world’s need and desire for well-crafted, effective stories isn’t abating. It may ultimately take a different form, and be supported by different kinds of organizations, but it won’t — can’t — go away.
With all this in mind, here are my kudos this week:
My first Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Alex Curley, who developed the website adoptastation.org in response to the rescission. This brilliant site helps you find and donate to stations by state — but then it encourages you to adopt another station that’s lost more than half of its funding.
My second Sound Judgment Kudo goes to the fans of Central Florida Public Media in Orlando and WUSF in Tampa. Listeners donated more than $200,000 to each station following the rescission vote. In fact, this unprecedented level of generosity helped many public radio stations throughout the country, providing both much-needed funds and a morale boost just when it was needed.
Here’s hoping that it will continue in October, when stations hold their regular annual fund drives.
My third Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Dennis Funk, who has evolved the production studio Written in Air into a full-fledged audio magazine. Using one of the best phrases I’ve ever heard to describe good audio storytelling, Funk calls it “armchair travel for the human heart.”
In a statement, he says, “With so many shows being canceled, studios closing and hundreds of audio workers under- or unemployed, this feels like the right time to be building what comes next in narrative audio.” Find more information about this international, diverse audio magazine here.
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