Writing Pet Peeves #1: Countdowns

I've heard writers give the advice that you should add a countdown to your book whenever possible because it increases the stakes and raises the tension. Readers, the argument goes, will have to keep turning pages once you've got a countdown going, because they know now that there's a deadline and the book can't go on forever. Once the countdown starts, the real climax has begun.

Well, I admit that there are certain stories in which a countdown is effective. If you're writing about a bomb going off, then yes. If you're writing a thriller in which there's a specific plot to abduct or assassinate the Prime Minister at a very particular moment, then yes, it works. But otherwise, I really think this harms your story and makes you seem like a writer who is just adding a countdown in because you think it will make readers like a story that they don't.

How many episodes of television have you watched with a countdown that seemed added because some network exec didn't trust the writers to have a good story without it? And how many times is that countdown utterly ridiculous? A countdown to death by radiation poisoning is almost always just plan silly. That's not the way radiation poisoning works. You don't suddenly die from it because it reached a toxic level, and then find yourself perfectly fine if you don't reach that level. See, that's where the whole idea of a countdown is overused. Some threats aren't on or off. Lots of threats aren't. And to use a countdown where one doesn't belong reveals to me that you think every story is the same.

Not every story is the same. A real writer knows this instinctively and accepts that every story is going to have its own threats, its own timeline. And that's the way it should be. If you are telling the story right, your readers will stay with you. There is no need to panic and start throwing in the kitchen sink with the rest of your story. Trust your characters. Trust your readers to be smart enough to see that you're telling the story the way your story needs to be told.

A countdown doesn't belong in a story about medieval England. It doesn't belong in a plot about lovers who discover the terrible secrets of the past. It doesn't belong in a story about environmental dystopia. You trying to shoehorn it in there is only going to make you look like an amateur. Or possibly like a network studio exec from TV. One of the ones who canceled Firefly because it didn't have enough countdowns in it. It would be like someone insisting that sex sells, so you should add it to every story. Well, that can result in some pretty ridiculous scenes, as well. Sex in the middle of an epic battle scene where everything stops so that the hero and heroine can get it on—well, that's not my style of writing, either.