For about two weeks this massive drift of snow and ice has been steadily drooping lower and lower some twenty feet above our back porch. As the brutal weather warmed, the overhang grew icicle teeth and dripped, menacing us below with a sheet of ice on the porch steps while we wondered when the frozen hulk above would finally come crashing down, hopefully not while someone was on the landing.
Our personal Sword of Damocles is a perfect illustration of one of the primary elements of story-telling, that of the ticking time bomb, the deadline, the we-have-to-fix-the-dam-before-it-breaks or the proverbial Sword of Damocles falls. It’s the stakes plus a time-table. And it’s the staple of all kinds of fiction, from mystery to romance to fantasy and sci-fi.
Think The Martian, Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter series, Jayne Ann Krentz's romantic suspense, Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die among many, many others. The characters come together to face a threat, and they can’t dilly dally because time is literally of the essence.
Even comedy is built on this. Think of a character trying to
avoid an impending situation and failing with panache, such as the Big Bang
episode where Sheldon comes down with a cold and everyone flees—or tries to.
What’s at
stake + an important, unavoidable deadline = the kind of pacing that keeps a
reader glued to a book, turning pages.
Or keeps us
checking the roof to see if it’s safe to go out yet.
