Urgency

Now that I’ve completed my effort of revising the beginning of each chapter in Assignment Day, I’m reading through it again to see how it flows. Once again, that got me to thinking about a few things. Is the climax of the book good enough? I’ve worked on it quite a bit and I think it’s almost there. However, I also wondered if the book is missing something, namely urgency. One way to create urgency and an extra sense of danger is to make the threat timebound. Threat might be too strong a word, but think of the conflict, the force against which the protagonist is waging his effort. If that conflict is up against a ticking clock (not always a literal clock), then the reader feels the tension as well. I think that’s what’s missing from the book. A few weeks ago I added an event that means something, but it’s not clear that’s a hard and fast deadline. For a book I thought was close to being in shape to publish, this is taking a lot of work. That’s a good thing, though. Better to figure it out now than after it’s published.