Call me a slow learner, but I didn’t get it. Not until one night after workshop when I went home and turned on the television. A commercial showed an exterior view of a Skipper’s Seafood restaurant. It cut to a shot of smiling people eating fish with Skipper’s branded soda cups placed prominently on their table. Smiling and skinny, they wiped their beautiful faces with Skipper’s branded napkins. We cut to a smiling employee wearing a Skipper’s branded hat and apron…more Skipper’s packaging…steaming fried fish…just everything Skipper’s, Skipper’s, Skipper’s.
The commercial never cut to anything like, for instance, a red rose or a horse running on the beach. Here was the same message repeated in as many different forms as they could imagine.
I got it. That was Minimalism. The horizontal of the commercial told the story of a family going somewhere to eat. The vertical brought you closer and closer to their happiness and the food, quickly engaging your emotions and appetite.
So if you were my student I’d tell you to limit your elements and make certain each represents one of the horses your story is about. Find a hundred ways to say the same thing.
For example, the theme in my book Choke is “things that are not what they appear to be.” That includes the clocks that use birdcalls to tell the time, the coded public address announcements, the fake choking man, the historical theme park, the fake doctor “Paige.”
I’d tell you to watch television commercials. See how they never show you a fat person eating at Domino’s or Burger King? Watch how they ramp up the vertical in only thirty seconds. Tension: The Clock versus the Gun
If your stories tend to amble along, lose momentum, and fizzle out, I’d ask you, “What’s your clock?” And, “Where’s your gun?”
On book tours in Germany, getting a big crowd in Berlin has always been a crapshoot. The rathaus might be empty five minutes before the event is supposed to start, then—blam—everyone arrives at the last moment. The same goes for Los Angeles. In Berlin the organizers always shrug and say, “Berlin runs by many clocks,” meaning people have many options and they won’t commit to one until the last moment.
In fiction the clock I’m talking about is anything that limits the story’s length by forcing it to end at a designated time. In so many books a pregnancy is the clock. In Rosemary’s Baby and The Grapes of Wrath and Heartburn, we know the clock will run approximately nine months. When the baby is born, it’s time to wrap things up. It’s natural and organic and the pregnant character adds tension because of her vulnerability and possible harm to the unborn. So much is at stake.
But a clock can come in many forms. If memory serves, in the movie Bringing Up Baby the clock is the assembly of a dinosaur skeleton. In my novel Survivor, told aboard a jetliner that will eventually run out of fuel and crash, time is marked by each of the four engines flaming out. They mark the end of the first act, the second act, the third act, and the end of the book. Friends of mine hated how the diminishing number of pages betrayed how soon a book would end. And because I couldn’t change that aspect of a book, I chose to accentuate it. By running the page numbers in reverse I made them into another clock, increasing tension by exaggerating the sense of time passing.
Not all clocks act as countdowns. Some merely mark change. Take Scarlett O’Hara’s waist, for example. As the book begins it’s seventeen inches, the smallest waist in six counties. But as time passes, her waist size grows, becoming the method for measuring time.
And a clock can run over the full course of a book, or just a single scene. Remember my novel Snuff and the sex doll slowly leaking air? That’s a clock. A kind of air-filled hourglass. The moment the doll becomes a flat, pink ghost…time’s up.
In the film Se7en the clock is seven days. In the film Session 9 the clock is five days. Each time span is set to heighten tension by assuring the audience the story will not drag on.
As an aside, Billy Idol gave an interview wherein he commented on why so much punk music sounded the same. The typical punk song started at full throttle, ran for two and one-half minutes, and stopped abruptly. Only when I heard that did I realize how much the punk aesthetic had influenced my writing. This was the reason my best stories began with a jolt, seldom ran over ten pages, and ended by falling off a cliff. In so many ways I’d internalized the punk clock. A form as rigid as haiku.
In every story about the Titanic, the voyage is the clock. To make this clear to everyone in the audience, some stories place a thumbnail, like a summary or primer, on the front of the story. In the film Titanic, for instance, the oceanographers show a computer model of the ship sinking. They give a blow-by-blow description of what’s about to happen. That distills the horizontal of the plot so the audience won’t be distracted trying to analyze those inevitable events. Likewise in the film Citizen Kane, we see the entire plot summarized in a newsreel that plays in the beginning. We’re told what to expect and how long it will all take. This way the viewer is less distracted by what happens. The analytical mind can relax, and people can engage emotionally.
In the movie The Ring, we’re told, “You’re going to die in seven days.” And the mysterious videotape gives us the thumbnail summary of the entire discovery process. As the main character moves through the seven days we’re thrilled to recognize each
