Part II: How to Write on a Deadline
without losing your mind
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a free newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
Last time, I received a question chock full of great stuff to dig into, so I opted to divide it into three parts.
You can read Part I: How to Write Faster (without sacrificing quality) here.
This is Part II: How to Write on a Deadline (without panicking).
Part III: How to Tackle Large Projects (and see them through) is coming next week, so make sure you’re subscribed and stay tuned!
The original question:
Do you have any tips for how to write faster, or make myself write on a deadline? I find I struggle with bigger projects that take longer to complete. I get overwhelmed, change my mind about what I’m working on or what I want it to be, and often wind up walking away. I want to understand my own writing process better, so that I can try to create some systems that I hope will work for me.
- Under Pressure
Dear Under Pressure,
Last week we looked at how to write faster, and I hope some of the tips I listed were helpful, as well as the questions, issues, and benefits/drawbacks to speeding up in the first place.
This week, I want to focus on the joy/nightmare that is the deadline.
The plus side…
…is that a deadline can give you the kick in the pants you need to get in gear and get sh*t done. Especially if that deadline is for paid work. A paycheck is a hell of a motivator, and one way I’ve practiced writing faster has been out of sheer necessity. (Writing chapters for textbooks when you get paid by the chapter is a great way to make a person want to write a lot of chapters without waiting around for inspiration to strike!)
The down side…
…is that deadlines can also be super stressful. Especially when they’re external, have no wiggle room, and have something on the line. (Like money. Blowing past a deadline for paid work sucks, there’s no other way to put it.)
Internal Deadlines
You may not have an external deadline, like an application that’s due, a publisher demanding your work, or an employer who needs to get material from you. If you find yourself floundering without a concrete deadline, consider making your own.
An internal deadline can help remind you of your goals and priorities and make it easier to focus on what you told yourself you were going get done. This is why NaNoWriMo is so popular—but you don’t have to tackle something massive like writing a novel in a month. You can give yourself deadlines that work within your schedule.
Draft a short story in a month. Revise one chapter per week. Finish line edits by the start of the new year. Put your deadline in the calendar, tell a friend, write it in the comments here so I can cheer you on. Hold yourself accountable. Not to the detriment of your health or well being — let’s keep it reasonable, friends! But making the commitment to hit a deadline can be a powerful motivator, even if the only one who’ll know is you.
The key to meeting a deadline, whether external or internal, is to set yourself up from the beginning to be on pace to finish in time. Regardless of the size of the project, this means developing a realistic sense of how long you think it will take. This itself requires understanding your project’s component parts and how long each of those will take. Ultimately, you will need to complete each of these parts, which brings us back to the thing we’re always coming back to and for which there is no workaround: butt in chair, getting words down.
Small(er) projects
These are things you can do in one go, or that only take a few rounds. For example, I can write this Substack in one sitting, revise it another day, and then hit send. I start by thinking about the day I went to get it out and then work backward. To send on a Thursday, I need to make time to write it on Wednesday, so I can read it over and revise on Thursday morning. The truth is that I’d aimed to send this post out last weekend, but I got busy with novel revisions and pushed it back. It’s my deadline, I can do that — but the key here, for me, is not to push it back again. Because then it becomes A Thing I Haven’t Done, and I’m thinking about it, and I feel bad I haven’t done it, and feeling bad makes it harder to face the thing because it also dredges up the Bad Feeling, and the cycle risks goes on and on (and on). Am I going to stay up until 4am to write an unpaid Substack post just because I’d told myself I’d get it done by a certain day? No. Am I going to neglect revisions for my agent because I “have to” do an unpaid Substack post? Also no!
But I’m still going to make sure that I DO get it done before so much time slides that I feel worse and worse. That involves an honest assessment of my time (See 6. Do a Time Audit), and a friendly chit-chat with myself about how it’s all well and good to plan to write a Substack post, but now it’s time to actually open the document and get writing.
Alas, there’s no way around that last part.
Big(ger) projects
The idea here is the same as for smaller projects, just that instead of making time to sit down and write the thing, you divide the Big, Daunting Project That Can’t Get Done In One Sitting into all its smaller, composite parts. Each of those parts should be something that you CAN accomplish in a reasonable timeframe and feel good about your progress. It doesn’t have to be what you can do in just one sitting, but something like drafting a paragraph, a page, or a chapter is a good place to start. I don’t recommend going much bigger than that.
I’ll talk about this type of breakdown more in Part III. I want to emphasize here that the point is to take the Big Deadline and create a series of mini-deadlines for each component. You can then plan backwards so that each mini-deadline sets you up to nail the big deadline in the end.
For Example:
I used to write 60,000 word romance novels that were due every three months. There’s a reason I’m not doing this anymore, so I’m not saying it’s some great goal to aspire to!!! But I did manage to finish two four-book series this way, and I think they’re pretty darn good thankyouverymuch, so I feel like something in this process works.
60,000 words and three months is too long to make sense of as a deadline. I can't wrap my head around how to approach that (besides screaming). So I would break down that huge project and huge deadline into a series of smaller projects and smaller deadlines that I could successfully complete. I like to draft quickly and messily, then spend more time on revisions. So I developed a system in which I took 30 days to finish the first draft of the novel. I made myself a calendar with a little box for “2000 words” written every day. Write the 2000 words, check off the box, know that I was on track.
The first time I did this, I quickly ran into a problem that you, brilliant reader, may have already foreseen. My calendar had me finishing the first draft in 30 days—which meant I'd left myself absolutely no downtime. No weekends. No day off. It turns out that's not the recipe for a happy Kate! After that, I adjusted so that I was writing 10,000 words a week, finishing in six weeks instead of four. That still gave me another four to six weeks to revise, and some leftover time for things to go wrong. Something ALWAYS goes wrong—but that’s why all this planning comes in handy. I built the time for problems into my schedule, so that no matter what curveballs came up in life or in my manuscript, I wasn’t left scrambling at the end or unable to meet the deadline.
You may be reading this and thinking, Kate. Be real. I can't write 2000 words a day. Let alone keep that up for six weeks at a time. It's like doing NaNoWriMo for your entire life. No thank you.
My point in sharing my own schedule isn't to say that this is the word count you should be striving for, or the speed at which you should write, or that there are any “shoulds” about it. I'm only trying to show a way of breaking one large project down into its composite parts with an eye toward the schedule, so that instead of one vague, far off, terrifying deadline, you have a manageable daily deadline that becomes a manageable weekly deadline that builds into a doable monthly deadline you think you can stick with.
A million caveats. (Or just one important one.)
This week, I had a call with my agent in which we discussed some revisions I'm still struggling with, mostly ways of tying up every last thread of what has grown into a layered and more complicated plot than I’d initially started with. I've been working on these revisions steadily for the last six months, but if you'd asked me six months ago how long I’d thought it would take, I probably would have told you four weeks. Obviously, that hasn't gone to plan! Not because I've done something wrong, but because the book has demanded more from me. More attention, more nuance, more complexity. More time.
And I'm giving it that time. I don't want to go on submission with an underbaked novel. I don't want to write something that's not the absolute best I can do. So my agent and I decided that it doesn't make sense to rush to get this book to publishers before the holidays hit. I could have given myself a deadline to finish before Thanksgiving. But in this case, I think the better decision is to let go of any sense of when the story “has” to be done, and just let myself write it. I’m learning a lot through this process, so I’m throwing the deadline out the window.
I don’t, personally, need a deadline to write, though. I tend to chafe against what I perceive to be pressure, or efforts to control me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So telling my agent that I don’t want to go on submission until the new year isn’t going to slow down my writing progress. You have to learn yourself, over time, how YOU can best set yourself up for success. If you need a deadline for motivation, don’t tell your agent (or yourself!) that you’ll finish whenever you finish. If you don’t need a deadline, or you want to see what happens to your stress and creativity and your writing without one, then checking off your daily word count in a calendar might not be for you. The only right answer is the one that gets you writing and feeds your joy.
Good luck!
Kate
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