The next topic in my series about tropes and archetypes is not specific to the sci-fi and fantasy genres. It can be found in all sorts of stories. Before I go into the details, I'd like to cover some ground on the basic fabric of a short story.

Short stories are a bit like jokes. They have a setup, a punchline and a twist. Other than a novel, they don't go into detail on the characters or the back story, but they still have to build up connection, tension and suspense. Very often, they deliver their punchline in the very last sentence.

And that's where counting comes into play. It's a very simple trick that shows the reader what to expect and when to expect it, especially when you use it as a countdown. One of the clearest examples might be the Tarantino movie "Kill Bill". The protagonist has a list of people she wants to kill and the last one is Bill himself, of course.

The movie already shows two important aspects.

Firstly, by having a countdown running, the plot becomes automatically less important and the way how the task is executed is in the lead.

And secondly, a reliable rule is there to be broken. What if the protagonist dies before they finish the list? Or what if the movie ends with a cliffhanger before finishing off the list and the audience has to wait another year to get the final punchline?

Need more examples? Here you go:

• The Fifth Element (the plot twist is the fifth element itself)
• Seven (it quickly becomes clear that there will be seven murders)
• Oldboy (with a setup very similar to Kill Bill)
• Foundation from Isaac Asimov (which deals with a series of special time based contdowns until Hari Seldon re-appears)
• The Long Earth from Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (where the countdown is the number of parallel earths that are still unexplored)

Of course there are hundreds - even more when you also add stories where the amount of tasks is not yet clear from the beginning. So it's about time for me to use this tool in one of my stories as well.