[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.

[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.