Fiction, from the First Draft Forward: Deadlines, Not Just for the Published

By L.L. McKinney

I am happy to announce that, by the time this article is published, I will only have five days remaining until my self-imposed breather is over. By August 22nd, six whole weeks will have come and gone since I last worked on Swayed. Thankfully, I was able to fill the duration of my break by attending writers group meetings and working on another book, or I would have lost my mind. I’m the type of person that needs something to focus on—you can’t just sit me somewhere with a lot of time to kill and nothing to do. I get antsy and my anal retentiveness kicks in. (I rearranged a four-bedroom house once, it wasn’t pretty). August 22nd will not only bring an end to my hiatus, but it will be a crucial milestone in the completion of my second major project, as well as the topic of this week’s article: the deadline.

The historical definition of a deadline is a line drawn around a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot. Fairly to the point, isn’t it? You go past a certain point, you die. While deadlines at work, at school and in life aren’t quite so literal (at least I hope not) they are a very serious matter. If you don’t finish that report for your boss when s/he says s/he wants it, you could lose your job. If you don’t turn in your homework on the date it’s due, your grades suffer. If you haven’t completed a set number of pages/chapters in a timely manner, you throw off your entire schedule. For some writers, that alone is consequence enough.

People often times ask why I work so hard to meet the deadlines I put in place for myself. They don’t understand the reason I lock myself away, forgoing outings to dinner and a movie in favor of spending the night hunched over my computer. Their argument is that, as an unpublished writer, I don’t have an agent or editor to answer to. There’s no production line to botch up if I’m a little late, so I don’t have to take the fact that I have “finish HB first draft” scribbled on my calendar seriously. I must admit they’re right. There’s no risk that can be measured in the physical world if I miss a deadline that’s only in my head, but that does not mean there are no consequences.

When beginning a career as a writer, there is no one else involved with your project. The only person you have to answer to is yourself. Sure there is some measure of accountability to be found in a writers group, the rules say members have to bring a certain number of pages to every meeting, but if there isn’t a threat of being kicked out for forgetting those pages, there’s nothing lose. Unless you say so. Just like you’ve got to be your own cheerleader (we’ll touch on that in depth next week) you’ve got to be your own taskmaster. Unfortunately, your book isn’t important to anyone except you just yet, so you are the only person you have in your corner on this. That means you treat your deadline like it’s the real deal.

I have deadlines in place as checkpoints to the completion of my manuscript in order to enter it into a contest. The competition does have its own cutoff date, but it’s so far off that I run the risk of telling myself there’s no need to worry because I’ve got time. Show of hands, how many people have fallen into the “I’ve got time” sinkhole? (I know I can’t see them, but chances are everyone raised their hand. If you haven’t, bravo!) If I’m not careful, the contest will sneak up on me, so I set my own dates that lead up to the competition. It’s looks sort of like this:

• Finish chapters 18-20 by May 31st
• Tie loose ends into solid conclusion by June 14th
• Break until first draft June 15th – July 31st
• First draft edited by August 5th
• Begin rewrites August 7th

Those aren’t the actual dates, but that’s the idea. So far I’m on task, but if I miss just one of my markers I could throw the whole thing out of whack and not finish in time for the contest. There’s so much we can accomplish if we set and hold our own personal deadlines.

What happens if we don’t take our own deadlines seriously? We start slacking off. Precious time is wasted. One of the worst feelings in the world is the one that accompanies the realization that we could have achieved so much more, been so much further along than we are right now, if we’d just gotten up and gotten things done. I know I’m not the only one that has those moments late at night where I go “man, if I only I had stuck to it, I could be on chapter 20 right now instead of 10.”

A writer writes. That is the simplest truth of our world, and if you don’t write then what does that make you? Okay, okay, I can hear the indignant huffs of those who think about writing every second of every day. They formulate plots and brainstorm scenarios, they give birth to countless characters, original ones no less. They can pluck a great idea for a story out of the archives of their brain and rattle it off on command. It’s all stored upstairs; just waiting for the perfect moment to come pouring out, but agents can’t shop what’s still in your head. I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t want them to, and all that thinking doesn’t make a person a writer, it makes them a plotter. I was a plotter for a good five years before I started giving myself deadlines to bring my thinking to life. It was slow going at first; three pages over the next three days, a whole chapter by next month, but I did it. To be a writer you must be a person of action, and sometimes you have to goad yourself into it by giving yourself targets to hit.

I understand that there are people so bogged down by life that they barely manage to get away for fifteen minutes in the course of an entire day to write. There are also people who can’t write more than once a week. Those folks are writers because they still manage to put pen to paper, or fingers to keys. Someone who goes for weeks, even months without stringing together a single sentence is not, and nothing short of grave illness or tragedy is reason enough to say otherwise. Dream big, draw out surprising plots of wild and fantastic people, places and things, and then capture it all with words. Until you do, you’ll remain an uninvolved idealist. No, not the good kind.

“The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It's the lack of a DEADLINE.” Chris Baty

Happy writing.

L.L. McKinney is a freelance writer, a published poet and a playwright. As an active member of First Tuesdays and YA Lit Chat, she is currently seeking representation for her young adult paranormal urban fantasy, Swayed.