Campfire Story Timer
Set how long you want to tell a story for and pick a spoken pace — get clock-time checkpoints for each of five oral-storytelling beats, plus a rough word budget for each.
Checkpoint schedule
~130 words at this pace
~390 words at this pace
~195 words at this pace
~260 words at this pace
~325 words at this pace
How the schedule is built
The timer splits your total telling time across five fixed beats using the same largest-remainder apportionment as the site’s other planning tools, so the checkpoints always add up to exactly the time you entered. Each beat’s word budget then comes from multiplying its share of the time by your chosen spoken pace — words per minute, converted to a per-second rate.
The result is a rough script-length target for each beat, plus a clock-time window, so you can glance at a phone or a watch mid-story and get a feel for whether you’re running long or short before it matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from the Story Arc Plotter?
The Story Arc Plotter is a drafting tool — it splits a written word count across a narrative structure you choose, for planning a page. This timer is a live-performance tool — it splits a spoken telling TIME across a fixed five-beat oral arc, with clock-time checkpoints so you know roughly where you should be at the two-minute mark, the five-minute mark, and so on while you're telling the story out loud.
Why is the spoken pace so much slower than reading pace?
Oral storytelling isn't read at reading speed — it's performed. Pauses for suspense, voices for different characters, and letting a group of listeners react all add real seconds that plain reading skips. A "dramatic, pause-heavy" pace assumes far more of that performance time than a brisk, efficiently told version of the same tale.
Do I have to hit the checkpoints exactly?
No — they're a pacing guide, not a countdown you have to obey to the second. If your climax needs another thirty seconds because the group is leaning in, take it. The schedule is most useful as a gut check beforehand — telling you if your planned story is front-loaded or back-loaded before you're already three minutes in.
What are the five beats?
Gathering & Hook (the opening pull), Rising Action (building tension), Climax / Twist (the turn the story has been building to), Falling Action (the immediate aftermath), and Closing & Moral (how the telling wraps up). It's a compact, practical shape suited to a single sitting around a fire, not a full literary structure like the ones in the Story Arc Plotter.
Planning aid only. Live storytelling depends on your audience and delivery — treat the checkpoints as a rehearsal guide, not a strict script to read from.