Try Accurate Estimates

People are too quick to jump to extremes. Specifically, any time we have to give a large number, it's usually "a million". Run into your old friend and you say "I haven't seen you in a million years."

Yeah, I get it. You're expressing that it has been a long period of time, but it's so generic. It's bland. Try something different to spice your language up. In this case, you might be more interesting by being more accurate.

Try an experiment. Turn off your music. Turn off your TV. Turn off everything that produces sound or images. Just sit or stand and count off 20 seconds. Don't say them. Don't even think them. If you happen to have a clock with a second hand (which, terrifyingly, is becoming very uncommon), just keep tabs on it. sit around and look at nothing and periodically look to see how long it's been.

Try to understand how incredibly long 20 seconds of nothing feels like. It can be an eternity. Heck, even 5 seconds can be shockingly long.

If you are watching a TV show and nobody talks or moves for five seconds, you'll think it was a minute. If your radio is silent for 5 seconds, you'd start to wonder if your device was broken. It's hard to comprehend how unnerving dead air can be, but it's a real thing (and it is an atrocity so awful people can get fired for letting it happen).

If you told a joke so funny that people laughed for twenty seconds, people would be turning red. They would be struggling to breathe. It doesn't sound like a long time, but to be accurate with it, you can potentially make the audience far more impressed than a generic "long time" quantity.

I understand the problem here. I do. The problem is that you have to deal with how the audience interprets your words. 20 seconds sounds like a small period of time. And depending on what you're doing (like jogging or writing), it is a short time. But you can overcome this issue in a couple different ways.

For one thing, try writing a piece that exclusively uses accurate descriptions of time. They're weird. If you do it only once, people will shrug it off. But if you are always accurate with your time descriptions, you kind of force the audience to consider how long these times really are.

That is an ideal circumstance, having your audience pick up on something relatively subtle like that. The other thing you can do is have your characters react the way you want to accurate time descriptions. If Mikayla is telling her friends that she just held her breath for 40 seconds, it's by no means a world record, but her friends could be truly astounded that she was able to hold it "for so long." In this case, it's one step under directly bashing your audience over the head in getting them to understand what you want, but I bet you could find a way to justify it.

I tend to be a realist. No matter what genre I'm in, I want things to make sense. I can accept the ludicrous, so long as it makes sense within the rules of the world I'm in. To that end, I prefer accuracy as much as possible. I want to know what matters in a story, and I want to experience it as though I am those characters. The best way to create that is to accurately describe what is going on in every way.

People can be pretty accurate in describing movements and colors and especially feelings (both emotional and physical), but time is often overlooked. I'm not saying everybody should do it, nor do I believe that it will make writing inherently better, but if you haven't done it before, try using accurate estimates and see how you like it.

As a closing note, I want to mention that the title of the post is "Try Accurate Estimates". This ended up talking about time specifically, but it is a principle that can apply to basically anything where a quantity is estimated. Use it for distance traveled, amount of material sifted through, number of pages written, temperature, possible outcomes to a situation, and so on. Write something up and try it out on your reader. See what kind of reaction you get, and progress from there.