[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

[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.