[PUBLIC POST] Deadlines and other pressures

[ljwrites]

I am heartily sorry for skipping the public post last week, I was writing a story under a deadline and the weekend has been a blur. To make up for it I'll write two public posts this week.

So, to turn my excuse into an actual discussion subject, do you do well with deadlines and other types of pressure when you write fiction? How does it help you? How does it hurt? Do different kinds of pressure work differently on your writing?

Comments

[warqueenfuriosa]

It sort of depends. Sometimes I do better with a deadline. Other times, I don't like the pressure, especially when a piece of writing just isn't working and I really need to spend time outlining/editing rather than forcing out whatever.

For rough drafts, I definitely need a deadline, like NaNoWriMo. With rough drafts, I will keep restarting or going back to fix little things and I won't get very far very fast so I need that constant push to keep going forward.

For more detailed writing, I don't like deadlines. I want to be able to take my time with it and get it just right.

[inevitableentresol]

I agree about deadlines being really helpful for rough drafts. That's the only time I self-impose a daily wordcount. It feels so good every day I hit that target. It's really motivating.

After the first draft is done, I find deadlines or quotas really unhelpful. It's a pity. I wish I could find something similar for the editing/polishing stage of writing, as deadlines are so effective at that first draft stage.

[inkdust]

That's exactly how I feel. Daily word counts worked great for my initial novel draft, but once I got into the editing stages I've struggled to find a concrete marker. I hold out hope that eventually I'll work something out.

[ljwrites]

(Just throwing out ideas) Maybe editing a given unit, such as a scene or a chapter? It may also help to break the job into stages, such as high-level, chapter-level, scene-level and so on.

[ljwrites]

I think the founder of NaNoWriMo himself doesn't recommend it for anything but pushing out a first draft. I have a very mixed history with NaNo-style challenges myself (tried it, won it, burned out), I think as far as deadlines go I'm happier when they're reasonable enough for me to actually think about what I'm writing and turn out at least a semi-polished product.

[lizbee]

I find deadlines very useful -- they force me to stop procrastinating, get out of bed and just write.

On the other hand, I've never had an externally-imposed deadline for a novel -- only short stories and essays. So I don't know how I'd cope with something like that. I'm on a writers retreat right now, and one of my friends is saying, "Oh yes, I need to write four chapters of this book today, and then I have until next Wednesday to finish the edits on that other book..." It's a full-time job for her. But she's the first to admit she's an outlier.

[inevitableentresol]

I do well with deadlines for shorter pieces of writing, up to about 6 weeks and 15,000 words. For longer work, it doesn't help me at all and any deadline makes things a lot worse. But without deadlines, I tend to never finish anything, so I obviously need something.

I'm trying to cut my longer pieces of writing down to smaller chunks, so I can self-impose deadlines on these smaller pieces and then stitch them together later. But I haven't yet properly got the hang of how to do that.

[warqueenfuriosa]

I hear you on handling those longer pieces. I got started writing with short stories and fanfiction one shots so the transition to writing novels has been hellish.
I've been struggling with a novel for several years, never making it past the first couple of chapters, because I lose motivation or I want to change something or I just keep kicking myself back to rewrite the first chapter or two. I have absolutely no idea how people write 1,000 page novels.

[inevitableentresol]

Rewriting the first few chapters over and over again is my huge weakness. The number of times I've done that is incredible. I can never seem to move on, even when I have my direction clear in my head.

I think my problem is that I see a novel as whole entity. When you read one, you relate to it like that. Writing one can take years. So it has to be a different task.

With a short story, it's possible to re-read the start quickly before settling down again to that day's writing, just to get my place again. With a novel, that's impossible. Yet I can't break myself from the habit. And so the tinkering.

Making notes for what happens in each chapter would probably be a much better idea, and then forbidding myself from re-reading the start at all... which will probably be a lot easier said than done. It's so hard to break the habit.

I know at least writers who sends their books chapter by chapter to their editors (Maeve Binchy, according to her editor), so she's forced to continually move on and not re-write previous chapters. Apparently Binchy also has the most appalling spelling according to her editor, which is an amusing side-fact. Of course, once all the chapters are done the whole thing still has to be edited. It's the editing that gets me stuck.

[ljwrites]

That makes sense--the pieces that I wrote this time around with deadlines were fairly short at a few thousand words, which probably helped them be manageable. With my novel project, which is potentially hundreds of thousands of words long, it's hard to schedule or plan the work.

Your idea of breaking a large task into smaller ones is a good one, and something I'm trying to do myself. Ideally it would be something like outlining the whole thing and then working on a scene a day, but the outlining itself is a slow process when I have so many ideas to juggle and the story seems to change every time I return to it.

[inevitableentresol]

the story seems to change every time I return to it

This is my big problem too. Sometimes that can be fantastic and a small change can make a story a lot better. Other times (unfortunately most times) it just depresses me that changing it is going to mean a lot of work, I know I won't be happy unless I do it, and I'll probably ditch the whole thing if I don't because then the whole story will be stupid.

There's also the problem of feature creep.

At the moment, I'm going by a star system where each part of a small writing task gains me so many stars (planning, writing that day, getting advice or feedback, acting on the feedback, etc) and I have to hit so many stars per week. I try to keep the star tasks themselves really easy because the sole purpose of it is motivation.

I do need some kind of framework. If I don't, I know from experience that I'll be super excited about that particular project and do a lot of writing for a couple of weeks on it, perhaps a couple of months. And then one day I'll just stop dead on it, no reason.

I have some first drafting to do coming up, so I'll go back to my daily wordcount targets when I get to those. They're really effective for rough drafts.

[ljwrites]

Looks like you have a great system going there! I should set up something like that, too. Do you reward yourself when you reach the requisite number of stars?

[inevitableentresol]

Rewards are the most important part of the process. :)

The reward that works the best for me is comics. I've used them for about three years now as a motivation tool. The first year I used them as rewards, I wrote the most I ever had in one year.

Comics are a complete indulgence for me, not too expensive, and if I meet my writing quota then I get to read another chapter that week. I'm reading Saga right now, and it's incredible, but I didn't make my writing goal last week, so I don't get to read the next chapter yet.

The hardest part for me is setting my weekly goal target. It can take a lot of tweaking to get right.

If I make my writing goal on just over half the weeks, I figure I've set it about right. It has to be easy enough to encourage me, but not easy enough to take no effort at all.

[ljwrites]

You have awesome willpower to be able to withhold comics from yourself. I've heard good things about Saga, and may check it out myself. I had mixed reactions to Vaughan's writing in Y: The Last Man, but it's fully possible that Saga is more to my tastes.

I think setting realistic goals is the hardest part of the process, too, and it's a skill I'm still trying to master.