Early draft: counting the seconds

It's interesting to look back at early drafts of a finished work. A key part of the plot of The Record Count of Westminster, about a British Prime Minister who travels back in time to try to prevent the prostitute scandal that ruins him, is the role of the Private Secretary.

This character is called Stephen Montgomery and I note his name never changed at all from my first keyboard scribblings to the final published book. I wanted him to be someone who liked to tell stories - or, perhaps more accurately, to gossip - about the behind-the-scenes goings on in Westminster.

A part of that storytelling concept for this character was that he liked to time the discomfort a politician openly suffered when confronted with bad news. The politician's mask would fall and he'd time how long the look of panic stayed on their face before their political training kicked back in and they once again hid their true emotions.

Obviously Stephen couldn't bring out a stopwatch and time them, so he developed a skill of "silently counting the seconds" and, we discover, it's something he "took great pride in doing accurately." This key part of the plot is introduced in Chapter 1.

In my first few drafts, where I'm more concerned about putting down the overall plot structure (or skeletal framework) of the story, I left it as I had first written it:

The prime minister closed his eyes.
Stephen stood counting the seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six…
He opened them.
Stephen continued to count. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve…
“Damn,” he said.

But once I'd got the rough plotting complete, I went back over the story to flesh it out properly and re-write it in a more engaging way. For a while, I was wedded to the idea of showing Stephen counting the seconds because I thought it forced the reader to count the seconds with Stephen, thus 'drawing you in' to the story and making you physically experience the same wait as Stephen.

However, I ditched that idea for three reasons:

1. The story is always told from the point of view of the main character: the Prime Minister, Edward Marsh. We see inside his head and feel his emotions; every other character is purely revealed through their words and actions, never their inner thoughts. Having Stephen mentally count the seconds in this explicit way takes us inside Stephen's head, taking the focus away from the person the story is about: the Prime Minister. 
2. I wanted to show more of what the Prime Minister was thinking while Stephen was counting.
3. You don't need a reader to experience real-time waits in order to convey the atmosphere and tension of what is happening to the characters.

The final version of that scene is around 300 words long. Its intent is to show just how much the Prime Minister dreads Stephen's skill now being turned on him. Here is the opening paragraph from that scene in Chapter 1:

The Prime Minister slowly sank backwards into his chair and closed his eyes. He knew Stephen would be silently counting the seconds; it was something he took great pride in doing accurately. His favourite boast was still Katrin Garcia’s record count. He’d informed her, “The PM is concerned your personal troubles have become a distraction and would like to discuss your options.” It had taken her a whole fourteen seconds to finally nod an acknowledgement. By the time she’d appeared in his office, she’d regained her composure and had taken her sudden resignation from the cabinet well. But within two days, thanks to Stephen’s storytelling, Katrin was left with no option but to humiliatingly announce her resignation from politics.

I hope you agree that the final version has more power than my initial recording of the idea of the scene in that opening draft.

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