Imagine, your character was just trapped in a landslide and has only three days before they will die if not rescued.  A message is sent to her family and reinforcements sent to the rescue.  Sounds great, except for one problem.  Your character is in the capital of the northern duchy and her family is in the central region’s capital and you have no idea how long it takes to travel between them.

This is a scenario that I recently read in a comic and it instantly ended my immersion.  A ‘time bomb’, i.e. something that will take place in a set amount of time with negative consequences, is a great way to ratchet up the tension in your story.  Yet it is also a very fragile thing if you do not properly handle the passage of time and distance.  The example above is far from the only time I have had this problem with time in a story.  In fact it feels as though it’s becoming a more prominent problem of late.  

My husband has been complaining about this issue for a long time.  He is very sensitive to how long things actually take and gets very distracted when time is wildly out of proportion in a movie or show.  I don’t notice it as much as he does but even I have been feeling distracted by it more often, especially as it happens more and more.  

Now, this isn’t to say that your character, if they have a ‘bomb’ that’s going to go off, has to diffuse the situation in exactly that amount of time ‘on screen’.  In a movie or show there is a certain amount of leeway for a difference in time on the screen and the time passing in the story in order to properly show events and what’s happening.  Especially if you have multiple points of view that are taking place simultaneously.   The trick in that case is to make sure that either the visual or audio clues are clear enough, or it’s been established previously in other scenes, that you have multiple simultaneous viewpoints and that the actions from each separate viewpoint would not break the time limit of your ‘bomb’. 

In books we have more freedom.  You can write a scene that might take pages to read because of the detail laid into it but clearly only takes a matter of minutes, or seconds, in ‘real’ time.  While another passage might skip over months or years with only a paragraph or two.  This flexibility however can also be problematic.  It can be easy to get caught up in the description or the emotional impact of what we are writing and forget that this is supposed to be a real world in which time passes at a steady rate and people must travel from place to place at a set speed.  It’s all too easy to forget the little details that denote time and space to the reader.  

Sometimes the problem is solved simply.  A sentence here or there about how far away a city is or how long it will take a character to return from their shopping trip.  However, this is not such a simple task if you have neglected your worldbuilding.  You can’t in one chapter say city x is a day’s ride from city y and then later in chapter 30 have your character make the trip in one hour in order to diffuse the ‘time bomb’.  At least, not unless they have, say, a magical horse that flies through the sky.  But here again if you’ve neglected your worldbuilding this answer to your problem would still be problematic.  

The first, where the distance is inconsistent, shows that you do not know your world.  While it takes a writer months, if not years, to write a book, the reader is devouring it in a week or less, sometimes a single day.  While the writer may miss such an error in the long writing process the reader will not!   Now, you don’t have to deepdive into making maps or knowing every single city or landmark in your world right from the start in order to never make this mistake.  The simplest solution is to . . . take notes.  Whether it’s in a notebook, the notepad on the pc, or a writing program such as Campfire or a wiki type program like World Anvil you need to keep track of the basic ideas of where your cities are and how long it takes to travel to and from different locations.  On that note many programs also include a timeline feature.  If you have multiple characters in multiple locations this can be great to help you keep track of who is where and doing what.  Also you can have a beta reader or editor whose sole job is to make sure there are no continuity problems.  

Now to the second problem, let’s call it, pulling a flying horse from the magic hat.  Now, if you’ve set up that your character has access to said horse or gaining access to said horse, that we already know about, and it’s part of what the MC needs to do in order to diffuse the ‘bomb’ then that’s fine.  What’s not okay is suddenly ‘pulling it out of a magic hat’, cause magic.  In fact, while I love asian dramas this is one issue I have with a lot of them.  They are constantly introducing new spells, medicines, and artifacts as they are needed on the spot with no previous showing or explanation.  

Introducing something new without set-up or foreshadowing can be fine, depending on how it’s done.  Say you have character A and B.  B is poisoned and A goes to a knowledgeable healer who tells him that he has to go gather such and such herbs so that healer can make a pill to cure them.  That’s fine.  Character A wouldn’t have had this knowledge but the healer would.  We don’t need to know before the poisoning happens that the healer knows how to cure this particular poison.  In fact we don’t even have to know the healer until the poisoning happens as long as it’s explained that this character is a healer and therefore would likely, or for sure, have knowledge about how to cure poison. 

The other option though, that character A themselves would have a solution, does need some set-up.  Maybe not even much.  Something simple such as, one of his knights or his sister had been poisoned before and it’s the same poison.  Character A could have been poisoned himself.  Or he could have dabbled in medicine and this type of poison had intrigued him and so he knows the cure.  We don’t even need to know the full story up front, just that he had dabbled in medicine.  Then when the poisoning occurs he explains how his dabbling in medicine led him to know the cure.  The problem I have is when the situation, the poisoning, occurs and then suddenly character A says, “Aha.  I used to dabble in medicine and I know how to cure this.”  Wait?  What?  Too many coincidental things happening makes the resolution of the situation feel unearned and cheap.  Make sure that we have some set up and pay off, not just coincidences.    

Also, make sure this type of solution doesn’t instantly solve your ‘time bomb’.  Don’t have character B be poisoned with a deadly rare poison that takes three days to kill them but character A has the solution on hand and cures them within the hour.  The whole point of a ‘time bomb’ in a story is to increase tension, which doesn’t happen if the problem is solved instantly.  Unless that’s what you’re really going for and that particular problem is really a red herring.  

Of course you don’t have to diffuse the ‘bomb’ at the last second.  In the Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest Tim Allen’s character has to run through a deadly gauntlet to get to a big red button and press it before the ship self-destructs.  He accomplishes his goal, only to have the countdown continue.  He concludes that it must be broken and he’s about to die, until at the very last second the self-destruct desingages.  The joke, of course, being that in the in-world show Galaxy Quest the crew always saves the day at the last second.  

Now you can let your ‘time bomb’ run down to the last second.  The whole reason the joke is there in the movie is because this is done masterfully in so many shows and movies that it became its own trope.  Which also means that it’s been done badly in just as many stories.  So, if you wish for the ‘bomb’ to only be diffused at the last second then do so.  Just be aware of the trope and make sure that your method of running out the clock works well and accomplishes the goal you want.  Otherwise, don’t feel pressured to run out the clock to the last moment.  As long as your ‘time bomb’ is raising the stakes and increasing the tension in the way and to the degree that works for your story then it’s a success.  

To recap, first make sure you are aware of the places in your story and the distances and travel times between them.  Whether it’s city’s, continents, or buildings within a city, we need at least a sense of how far apart these places are, even if you don’t use a ‘time bomb’ in your story.  

Second, be aware of any time you are using an element that is a ‘time bomb’ and make sure you understand for yourself how each element will play into your time frame and that the audience can understand how easy or difficult your ‘time bomb’ will be to solve.  In general the less concrete the information your audience has the lower the tension will be and vice versa.  And your goal as a writer is to keep the reader engaged and immersed.

Third, you can make this information known however you want.  There’s no one and hard fast way to relay this information.  Do it in a way that works for your story and feels natural to your characters and voice, just make sure you do it.  Maybe it feels inconsequential to the actual plot or characters when you’re not using a ‘time bomb’ but it’s one of the details that can help make or break a breathing, living world.  

For making sure that you feel the scope and grandeur of a world The Lord of The Rings does an amazing job of helping you to feel the passage of time in subtle ways that build up the world, both in the books and the movies.  Brandon Sanderson’s, Way of Kings and Will Wights, Cradle series also do a good job of showing their respective worlds and the scope of them.  Way of Kings is an epic with maps and all while Cradle is more action oriented, yet you still have good tension from ‘time bomb’s’ as the world is well built in scope and methods of travel.    

As for time bombs, Silverthorn from the Riftwar Saga is set around a ‘time bomb’ from the very beginning and is an excellent read.  Little Fuzzy, which I recommended earlier in one of my gems, has an ending that revolves around a ‘time bomb’ and handles it very well.  For movies The Secret of Nimh does a great job of being a story set around a ‘time bomb’ as well as the field mouse Mr.s Frisby desperately searches for a way to save her family.

This issue is one that has been building in me for a while.  I hope that this little tirade may be helpful or at least stress reducing for anyone who has noticed the same problem as I have.  Thank you to any who read and have fun exploring or making new worlds.