How much can you really accomplish in two minutes?

This week on Writing Break, I share a simple exercise I call The Two-Minute Wait, which can help you better understand your relationship with time and improve the way you manage it.

We also discuss this year's International Booker Prize news before exploring storytelling traditions from around the world, including Nordic noir, magical realism, Gothic horror fiction, wuxia, Japanese literary fiction, West African oral storytelling, and the art of translation.

Whether you're looking to become more productive or broaden your understanding of storytelling, this episode offers practical ideas you can apply immediately.

✨ Support Writing Break

Rate, review, and share with a fellow writer. Every kind word helps keep the show going.

• International Booker Prize Doubles Purse, Changes Name
• International Booker Prize winner
• Home : America's Editor - Let's work together.
• More Writing Tips

Music licensed from Storyblocks

If you have plot bunnies coming out of your plot holes, it's time for a writing break.

Hi. Today we are talking about time management as well as storytelling around the world.

When it comes to time management, we seem to forget that everyone moves at a different pace for different activities, but once you know how long something takes you when you're focused and putting in the appropriate amount of effort, you can no longer be pushed around by someone else's time calculus.

So, I'm sharing a two-minute exercise that could have a big impact on how you manage your time. It does not involve an app or a notebook, just you and two minutes. This is something that theater kids have done many times, as have people who work in broadcast television or radio.

I am mixing that in with a bit of news this week. The Writing Break café is open, so let's grab a table and something refreshing, and I'll fill you in.

Next year, the Booker prize will have a different name and a larger prize. Bukhman Philanthropies just signed on as a new backer. Next year the prize will be called the Bukhman International Booker Prize and the prize money will increase from 50K pounds to 100k pounds. Good luck.

Links to these articles can be found in the show notes, as usual.

Now, before we head into the writing tip segment, I want to talk about time management. Some people have what's referred to as "time blindness" but I like to call "lack of time awareness" because it feels like it falls under the same category as "lack of spatial awareness."

This morning, I listened to a podcast wherein a person with ADHD was discussing a new time management system they're using. That's not what I'm doing, by the way, no new systems here. I think whatever is working for you is fine, and sometimes something stops working for you simply because it becomes boring. But anyway, I'm getting to my point, I swear. As I listened to this person talk about how their new time management system, which uses tiles and magnets, helps them better understand what can get done in an hour, I thought, 'I have 99 problems, but lack of time awareness ain't one. Why is that?'

Well, for starters, dance was my first language, and I learned 5, 6, 7, 8 before learning 1, 2, 3, 4. When you're anxious about any live performance, 2 minutes spent waiting in the wings can feel like twenty minutes, and 2 minutes on stage can feel like 20 seconds. But the more you perform, the more 2 minutes feel like 2 minutes, no matter what you're doing. One minute to change backstage? Plenty of time.

Then, in what feels like another lifetime in another galaxy, I started at a law firm when I was 16, and I had to keep track of my billable time in 6-minute increments. If it turns out replying to the client's email took 30 seconds, you better find another billable task to take up the other 5 and a half minutes. If your time entries are unreasonable, the client can push back or the court can reduce what the client is expected to pay.

As for the publishing house in which I started my editorial career, time was tracked in 15-minute increments. And as a freelancer, I still track my time in order to keep myself on task and to see where time is being mismanaged.

OK, so maybe you haven't had the joy of tracking your life in 6-minute increments. Lucky you. But if you'd like to managing your time more efficiently, I suggest a simple two-step process.

First, be honest with yourself. There might be some areas of your life that will surprise you when you realize how much of a time suck they are, but you know know at least some areas where you can improve. Doom scrolling, spying on the neighbors, re-revising your zombie apocalypse emergency evacuation plan, you know, the usual time wasters. You don't have to tell me or anyone else where you're mismanaging your time, but you do have to admit it to yourself.

Don't do it. Just imagine that you're doing it. You'll see that two minutes can be a really long time. The reason I don't say to do it is because you might get distracted if you're doing it in real life. A piece of mail is actually important for once, your neighbor comes to talk to you while you're taking out the trash, or the lightbulbs aren't where they're supposed to be and you have to launch an investigation to shed some light on the situation. Things happen.

So, just imagine that you're completing a task and that everything is going normally. If you usually use a certain knife from the kitchen to open mail or hold the burned out bulb up to your ear and shake it to hear that freefalling filament, imagine it during those two minutes. Despite all the jokes to the contrary, it takes one person to change a lightbulb; however, it does take some people longer than others. The important thing is understanding how long you take when you're actually focused and you're putting in the appropriate amount of effort. What do I mean by appropriate? Sometimes we don't try as hard as we should, and sometimes we try harder than we should. So, imagine yourself doing an ordinary task in your ordinary way.

You might feel restless during those two minutes, like, damn, I could have gotten so much much done. Use that. When you catch yourself doing those time wasters you listed in step one, you'll have a better understanding of how much time you're stealing from yourself.

Stage actors, broadcast journalists, and prison inmates are exempt from this exercise.

Now, let's settle onto the Overthinking Couch to discuss modern storytelling around the world.

Modern-day novels originally written in English often open with action, resolve every thread by the last page, and have protagonists that experience a full dramatic arc. It's what the readers want. But what about modern-day novels that are not originally written in English? Well, as you might imagine, they're different.

Take Nordic noir, for example. If you've read Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy or Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole novels, you've probably noticed these crime fiction books run colder than a lot of American crime fiction. The landscapes are sparse, the institutions are obviously flawed, and the detectives are damaged. These books look at what's cracking underneath a society that likes to think of itself as stable. The mystery matters, but the society matters just as much, and that balance is a direct result of the specific political conversations Scandinavian countries have been having with themselves for decades. Even Fredrik Backman's heartwarming novels, orignally written in Swedish, do the same thing.

Now go to Latin America, the birthplace of magical realism. And just like magical realism masterpieces, if yoiu read contemporary Latin American fiction, especially Gothic horror fiction, you'll experience a world where history, memory, and myth, are part of daily life, which is what you'll find in many Latin American homes.

Move to East Asia and pick up Jin Yong, whose wuxia novels serve as the modern template for the genre. Sword fights, wandering heroes, rival martial arts schools, feats of superhuman physical skill, all of that is entertaining on its own, but the physical journey in a wuxia novel is never separate from an ethical one. Mastering a fighting style becomes inseparable from mastering your temper, your loyalty, and your sense of duty.

Japanese literary fiction does something almost opposite with pacing. Writers like Yasunari Kawabata and Sayaka Murata will let a narrative sit inside an ordinary moment for pages at a time. A tradition built on forward momentum would cut that scene, and a tradition built on observation and introspection knows the emotional weight is there if you slow down enough to notice it. 

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart brings oral storytelling onto the page: proverbs, deliberate repetition, and a sense that the story is being told to a community rather than one reader.

Traditions have always borrowed from each, and it's more visible to us now because we have more access to translated work than any generation before us.

When you read a translated novel, you're never reading just the original author. You're also reading the translator. A translator makes dozens of decisions on every page. I work on the Spanish translations of Fredrik Backman's novels. I'm given the English translation should I have questions about the Spanish translation. However, they're translated by two different translators, both translating directly from the orignal Swedish. While I don't know Swedish, I can see the difference in the English and Spanish, like which idiom survived and which joke was rebuilt.

So, what does any have to do with your writing?

If you've only ever read stories built on rising, escalating conflict, a novel built on endurance instead of conquest will teach you that tension doesn't have to spike to be real. If you've only ever read dialogue shaped by one culture's conversational rhythms, a play or novel from somewhere else will show you an entirely different way people avoid saying what they mean. If you've always assumed a story owes its reader a fully resolved ending, a novel that leaves you sitting in ambiguity will teach you that uncertainty can be its own kind of satisfying. Yes, it can. Don't argue with me.

Every culture has been asking roughly the same handful of questions for thousands of years. Who are we? What is our duty as people? How should a person respond to challenges? What happens when people change?

So here's your overthinking prompt for the week. Think about the books that shaped you most as a writer, and count how many countries, languages, and storytelling traditions are actually represented on that list. Then read or listen to a contemportary novel or short story translated from a storytelling tradition unfamiliar to you. Notice how the writer introduces a character, where they choose to linger, and what's assumed and never explained.

I'm sure you know to go in with respect and humility. There's a difference between learning from a tradition and raiding it for decoration; a few unfamiliar names and a borrowed setting don't add up to real engagement with a literary tradition.

Next time we're ending the two-season genre series discussing how genres change over time and the future of storytelling.

Until then, thank you so much for listening, and remember, you deserved this break.