There’s a reason it’s called a deadline; you die if you miss it. And for someone who chooses to write for recreation, and hopefully, make a living from it, the deadline is your Master. I’ve set myself a deadline of posting every Saturday, thus far it’s worked. However, this will only be my third post, and I have failed.
My writing process is unrefined, and generally relies on whatever I’m thinking for my writing week, which starts on a Tuesday evening. It kicks off with agonizing over relevance, and “can I articulate this thought into something comprehensive and witty?”
This is invariably followed by a scene from the television series, Black Books. Fran has a new job, but doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be doing. This is how she deals with it:
Whenever I’m at a loss for words, which is often, that scene, with Fran’s desperate typing, pops into my head, and then it’s okay.
And it’s cathartic somehow; that frantic typing, that utter wank on the screen. It helps unclog the passage from the brain to the fingers.
However, keeping a clear head while on deadline is an art in itself. You have so many ideas, and no coherent way of articulating them. Yet the ever ominous deadline is there as a reminder that things need to be done. It’s a frame within which to work, a measure of your abilities, and a test of your creativity.
Ask any procrastinator, and they’d tell you that their best work is produced when they’re staring down the barrel of a deadline. Heart racing, fingers and mind working furiously to complete the task on time and you hand it over; in the mad hope that no one catches on that your end product would have been perfect, had you just managed yourself better.
Ask any writer, and they’d wax lyrical about their relationship with the spear-like cursor on their blank computer screens. It’s repetitive blinking a visual metaphor for the throbbing in your head. Filled to the brim with half-baked ideas, all unworthy of making it onto the screen. Yet we persevere despite that little blinking spear, and let it jab its way across the monitor as we force meaning onto the blank canvas.
We all have different relationships with deadlines. The late Douglas Adams famously wrote:
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly by.
Adams famously, or infamously, depending on whether you were him or his publisher, was a procrastinator of note. His excuse was that he always found other things more interesting. But his published works show that his process, however irritating to those around him, was worth the wait (read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy of Four, Last Chance to See, The Dirk Gently books).
Adams has proven through his articles, books, and radio plays, that cut off times are not roadblocks curbing your creativity. There is life after the deadline; but it’s bracketed by a legion of other deadlines.
And you’re only armed with a blinking spear.