Most people, when they look for a story or a game or any other kind of experience, are attracted to the high points; the action, the high stakes, high risk, high reward stuff which tends to make it to the marketing blurbs: the “uptime”. This isn’t unnatural. People want stories – especially stories set in worlds other than their own – for the excitement, and for the experience of living vicariously through people with more eventful lives than them. It’s important to get the uptime right, because without it, you don’t really have a story – and although there is definitely fiction like which has very little uptime (literary fiction in particular), that isn’t the sort of thing that’s easy to pull off successfully.
But if uptime is important, than downtime is vital. While it is possible (though difficult) to create a compelling story without uptime, it is impossible to do it without downtime. Without the ability to let the audience catch a breath, calm down, and absorb the surroundings of the world the story has put them in, they’ll quickly grow fatigued and disengaged – which means they’ll quickly be putting that story down.
So what is downtime, anyway? I would describe it as any time in a story when the narrative tension isn’t intended to be in the immediate forefront of the audience’s mind. That could mean anything as minor as a momentary pause in combat, or as major as an entire section devoted to quiet introspection and low-stakes interpersonal development. Obviously, this definition is very vibes-based, and sounding out what qualifies as “downtime” requires a lot of intuitive understanding of what an audience considered high or low stakes. However, this is something I think most people are pretty good at. Generally speaking, human beings know when it’s time to square their shoulders and prepare for some kind of danger, and when to take a breath, relax, and have the time to figure things out – and downtime, in short, is anything that qualifies as the latter.
There’s two broad reasons why downtime is so valuable, and I’m going to describe these as providing contrast, and providing context.
Contrast is probably the easiest to explain. Stories suffer when subject to monotony, and that could just as easily mean a monotony of high tension as well as one of a lack of tension. While it’s pretty obvious that not providing narrative tension or stakes will eventually drive an audience away from boredom, a story which only provides high tension or stakes tends to do one of two things: it either fatigues the audience by keying them up for so long and so constantly that they simply lack the energy to keep engaging with the story (this is basically the cause of PTSD, when someone is so constantly in a state of high tension that they’re locked into that state uncontrollably) or the story becomes predictable and monotonous on its own (eventually, even sections intended to be high-stakes cease to seem that way if that’s all you’re serving the audience). Neither of these cases are particularly things you want in your narrative.
So what downtime does is provide a contrast to these moments. By lowering the tension momentarily, you let the audience catch their breath and lower their own tension. That in turn means that when you hit them with another high-tension section, the difference between the relaxed moments previous and the danger ahead will make them more excited for the latter, especially now that your downtime section has given them the time and the space to recover their energy to engage with that new high-tension section fully.
That’s why your story should have downtime, which leads us to the second question: what you should fill that downtime with. That’s where providing context comes in.
High-tension sections are bad times to provide exposition. Your audience is too focused on the immediate danger facing your characters and the play-by-play progression of narrative elements to effectively absorb any new information which isn’t immediately relevant to the crisis at hand. At the same time, the last thing you want to do is slow down a rapid-fire high-stakes action scene with exposition. That’s why you save that sort of thing for a downtime segment, when there are no immediate threats for your audience to keep track of, and no rapid-moving narrative track to derail.
Ultimately, all good exposition is setup for something else: information which might inform a decision a character makes, or provides a possible solution to a problem further down the line. Maybe it delivers a way to explain a source of new narrative tension (a threat on the horizon, so to speak) or provides insight into a source of existing tension. That’s why exposition is so important in a story – it keeps the audience informed in a way which makes the characters’ actions seem rational, or at least understandable. Without it, you don’t really have an audience which understands your story, and without understanding your story, your audience can’t really engage with it. High tension moments might keep their attention momentarily, but without the background information to set up the stakes for those moments, you’re not going to keep that attention for long.
In that sense, by exposition, I mean the delivery of context: information which serves to set the stakes and the priors of the uptime to come – and downtime is the best time to deliver that context: that could mean anything from a sentence of explanation in a lull in the fighting to a long scene where a complex theme is explored in detail. Of course, you want to match the kind of downtime to the kind of exposition you want to deliver too. A pause for breath in the middle of single combat is not a good time to delve into the history of your setting and provide context which will only be useful far deeper into the story – but it’s a great time to provide a tidbit which will be relevant to the combat the character is about to re-engage in almost immediately after.
This sort of exposition usually relies on contrast to work: it takes advantage of the relatively low stakes of the immediate moment to allow the audience to engage with new information without worrying about the threat provided by the high stakes of what comes before and after. However, the best kind of downtime is the sort which provides context while also providing contrast.
What do I mean by this?
Take for example a common staple in some forms of media: a ‘slice of life chapter’. An adventuring party on a journey in a fantasy setting stop at a town with an inn to rest before proceeding on their journey to a showdown with some kind of antagonist. The town has walls and defences, the inn is safe, the characters have a chance to relax, unwind, interact with one another and friendly locals. There’s no real chance of being attacked or being placed under any other sort of mortal peril which means the characters can let their guard down – and means that the audience can also let their guard down.
This level of relaxation opens the door to all kinds of developments which can deepen the audience’s engagement with the setting: they can learn about how towns are governed and inns are run, or how local markets work, or maybe something about social classes or religion or local politics. This could give the audience information about the world which the characters inhabit in a way which contextualises their actions and their backgrounds. If one of the characters is a noble, then maybe the audience can learn about how nobles treat those they see as their inferiors, or the standard of living those nobles are used to. If one of the characters is aligned with a local religion, that religion’s relationship with the general population can also be explored. All of this serves not only to deepen the audience’s understanding of the world, but also sets the characters places within it, by showing them interacting with the elements of day-to-day life, those characters feel more real, and more like a part of the world they live in.
All the same while, downtime gives these characters a chance to develop as individuals, and as players within the wider plot. There’s time for interaction between characters, which can inform or contextualise the ways those characters might act in a moment of higher tension. This is also a good point to deliver exposition or setup for future use. Maybe this is when a character learns of the antagonist’s vulnerabilities or is able to acquire a way to take advantage of those vulnerabilities. Maybe this is when the audience is made aware of those vulnerabilities, or some other dynamic which will become important in how a crisis in a more high-tension part of the narrative will develop later on. If these pieces of information were delivered during “uptime” instead, they might be glossed over and forgotten in favour of the immediate action. If they were introduced immediately before the payoff, then they might be considered contrived or lazy – the hallmark of a writer who makes up a solution to get their characters out of a problem they didn’t plan for.
By setting up these resolutions in downtime, the writer not only is able to introduce information in a time and place where the audience might absorb it more easily, but it also means they can do it in a way which allows the audience to accept the acquisition of that information as plausible and well-paced. In this way, downtime is the perfect way to foreshadow and prepare for uptime, in a way which ties the two phases together, and also mirrors the way that characters might themselves prepare for a crisis they know is coming – which in turn builds tension by keeping the looming threat of that crisis in the back of everyone’s heads.
This is normally where I’d hit you with a disclaimer about how this isn’t something I’m an expert on – except I won’t this time. I am an expert on writing downtime (or at least, I should be by now), so I’d like to think I’m speaking from a place of authority when I say that downtime is important: it sets pacing, lets you worldbuild, provide exposition, and set up necessary plot and character elements for following moments of uptime. It’s necessary for maintaining tension, for developing character, and for setting the tone of your setting and your narrative. Is it possible to tell a story without the context and the contrast which downtime provides? Yes – but it better be a short story or one which is hyperfocused (like, I’m talking microfiction here), or else both you and your audience are going to find yourself without the room to breathe necessary to tell a compelling narrative.
Paul Wang 