Introducing the narrative time crunch, and how it can add urgency + intrigue to your writing

Part 1 of 2. Plus an invitation to share examples of your favorite times constraints.

Hello writer friends, and happy Wednesday.

In May, I shared my Glossary of Craft Terms: the words and terms I’ve invented to make teaching writing less opaque.

In that article, I talk about “The Time Crunch”: a timeframe within which someone (or multiple people) need to accomplish something by.

Today, I want to look at a variety of narrative time crunches from both literature and film and attempt to prove three things:

1. Time crunches don’t need to feel arbitrary, dramatic, or cheesy to convince the reader that they are real and are important.

2. Time crunches are just as necessary in memoir as they are in fiction.

3. Memoirs can be considered travel fiction.

To do this, we’ll be looking at the following time crunches with their respective examples in fiction, nonfiction, and film.

PART ONE

• The road trip (destination time crunch)

• Protect the person (imminent danger for one person time crunch)

• Protect the people (imminent danger for humanity time crunch)

• The Inheritance Shitstorm

PART TWO:¹

• Possible firing (the hourly wage time crunch)

• The death plot (epic time crunch)

• Love story (“I keep falling in and out of love” time crunch)²

• Arrival of something new (Instability time crunch)

Ready to talk time crunches? Let’s get on the road.

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Time crunch #1: The Road Trip (for fiction and nonfiction)

In which we plan to go from Point A to Point B. Will Point B be reached?

Photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash

“The Road Trip” time crunch presents us with a person or group of people who have to travel to a destination. Bonus points if they have to get to that destination within a certain amount of time and on a certain budget.

Novel example: “All Fours” by Miranda July³

In this book (which I am currently reading and adoring), the main character has given herself a two-week period to drive from Los Angeles to New York City and a generous amount of money to spend during the trip, thanks to a whiskey company who paid her 20K to use something from her Instagram in one of their advertisements.

It should be noted that the main character in “All Fours” does not reach their destination. (This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the premise of the book.) In this breed of time crunch, sometimes it’s more interesting if the characters don’t reach their destinations. (See

Catherine Lacey

’s “Nobody is Ever Missing” and Deb Olin Unferth’s “Vacation” for inspiration, two of my all time favorite books.) These “Failed destination” road-trip books are the ones I’m thinking of when I say that time crunches don’t have to be dramatic or cheesy to be effective. They don’t even have to be adhered to. But the intended destination does need to be stated from the get-go so that we, the reader, can track whether the main character is succeeding or failing at their goals (which is usually more interesting than the character achieving their goals, unless we are in the genre of crime, thriller, or action in which case, watching the hero achieve their goals—fight the enemy, solve the crime, find the missing body— is the entire point.)

Regarding “The road trip” time crunch in memoir:

In memoir, destinations can be metaphysical. Getting married is a destination. Staying married is a destination. In this vein of thinking, you can understand why I think of divorce memoirs as travel fiction. Whether we are considering Kelly McMasters stunning “The Leaving Season” or Leslie Jamison’s “Splinters,” we are hearing the account of someone who wanted to go somewhere or stay somewhere in a relationship, and did not achieve their goal.

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Time Crunch #2: Protect the person (imminent danger for one person)

In novels that use this time constraint, one person is in danger, and one or multiple people must come together to get that person out of danger.

Novel example 1: Most mystery and crime novels fit into this time crunch. One that does this beautifully is “The Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris.

In this book, a serial killer named Buffalo Bill has done exactly that: murdered multiple people. But the book kicks into gear when the killer captures one specific woman (a Very Important Person, politically), and an FBI chief summons the brilliant FBI trainee, Clarice Starling, to interview an incarcerated killer and former psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to get into the killer’s head so that the rescue team can find Buffalo Bill’s captive before she becomes a victim. “The Silence of the Lambs” is a perfect example of multiple people coming together to save one person in a specific amount of time. (In the book, the team has three days to find the kidnapped woman before she’s killed.)

The “Protect the Person” time constraint when applied to memoir: