Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

We all hate them. Deadlines. They have a hardline vibe that give creative people like you and me the heebie-jeebies. But I want to speak now for deadlines, how they are valuable, how we can benefit from them, and why we really should be more excited about them in general.

This week I missed a deadline. I’m kicking myself. But I have some consolation. It reminded me that deadlines, even missed ones, serve a purpose.

I just want to point out the etymology of the word ‘deadline’ comes from the term to describe a line drawn around a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot. Bit hectic. So, no wonder people generally don’t find the word inspiring.

I also want to point out our earliest use (in the English speaking world) of the word deadline to mean a designated time for the completion of a task didn’t really take off until the early 1980s. This says rather a great deal about the rise of malicious corporate timekeeping and the agony of the working class, but I digress.

No, what I really want to point out is that deadlines help a writer no bloody end. All true artists are said to be driven to their art, compelled. Apparently we are all frantic to the point of madness by this compulsion, so much that we cannot go a day without creating. I don’t know about that. I can go days, weeks without returning to a project I claim to be working on. I kid myself that I am marinating ideas, building the world or settling on options. This is all artist code for procrastination. Most artists I know fart around quite a bit in this manner. Unless….they have a deadline.

Deadlines add structure and urgency were there once was none. Procrastination tends to go out the window when someone says something like “oh, and we’ll need that first draft by Friday’ to a writer who hasn’t even got the first scene written.

I was mad devastated when I missed the deadline this week because it was for a competition. I heard about the Richell Emerging Writer’s Prize, a wonderful opportunity for new novel writers (yes, me) offered by publishers, Hachett Australia and The Emerging Writers Festival. The competition is specifically for those new to novel writing, you only had to submit the first 20,000 words (or the equivalent of the first three chapters), a one-page synopsis, and a two page outline of the narrative after the first 20,000 words. The winner gets $10,000, a 12-month mentorship with Hachette Australia and — stunningly— first option on publishing the novel.

I heard about it on the Australian Writers Centre’s podcast, So You Want To Be A Writer, when Vanessa Radnidge, Head of Narrative Nonfiction and Literature at Hachette was encouraging listeners to submit an entry. Vanessa hit all the right notes for me; “what have you got to lose?” she admonished. She also mentioned the obvious; getting a publisher to read your work is a chance not to be sniffed at. Especially if you are a new writer. You may not win the prize but that publisher would have now at least heard your name. What do they say about selling something? It takes the average shopper to hear the name of your product three times before they pay attention.

I thought, right, bugger it. I’ll give this a crack.

I went in to an artistic fever! I had about only 17,500 words, three chapters worth of very hurried wordage completed under writer’s retreat duress. I had no synopsis or outline because I had no idea exactly how my narrative was going to go (I’d been marinating…). And I had 8 days. Boom! Wrote the outline, absolutely hard-nosed it to the grindstone, got it nailed. Wrote the synopsis, condensing story/theme/genre down to a weeny one page of ‘compelling reading’. Goddammmmm. I was flying. I worked night and day on it (pausing only for a terrible cold that laid me low for a few days). Then I went back to the first three chapters for a rewrite. Man, I was screaming toward that deadline!

And then I missed it.

HOW??? Good question. It was a midnight deadline to an online form. I had everything prepped ready to upload, I’d opened the form, worked all the questions offline (it’s an old grant writing habit to do this in case the website automatically reloads and you lose all your work.) and ….I got caught up in the work, thinking I had about an hour to simply finesse it all.

Erm….I missed it.

That clock ticked over and it was over. Not me blinking at the screen. Unbelieving.

My disappointment and self-reproach was masssssssssive. The next day, I called Hachette to beg a reprieve. I knew this was a slightly cheeky move, but I was desperate. The staff there were so nice and promised to look into it to see if it would be possible. I actually even spoke directly with Vanessa and she was genuinely sympathetic. But a deadline is a deadline. And no. I missed it. Vanessa was like, hey, there’s always next year. True.

But do you see the sunny side to this one? In a short amount of time a deadline created an opportunity for me to work hard, stop putting off what needed to be done the second I got home from Bali from my writing retreat. I might have burnt the deadline, but I’ve walked away a winner. A full outline, a considered rewrite (that yes, went up to 20,000 mark with the re-write), and a tight synopsis.

So get yourself a deadline. If no-one like a literary agent or a theatre company or a publisher is offering you one, seek out a competition or a writing course or an aggravatingly persistent writer friend who will hold you accountable. Because deadlines are the best thing that will ever happen to your writing. And “what have you got to lose?”

Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.