I haven’t written anything on the blog this week. Instead, I’ve been working on outlining a series of stories, which as it turns out, is very hard for me to do.
But outlines are important, for the same reason that having lines on a highway is important. When you start drifting, you can look over, see the line, and prevent yourself from plummeting off a cliff (or in my case, plunging into a swamp).
Similarly, deadlines are a necessary evil. If left to my own schedule, I would toodle around on a couple of scenes for months, and never get anything completed. I need a deadline to move forward, because it causes me to push aside the perfectionism and distractions long enough to start moving forward again.
But Outlines and Deadlines?
Ouch.
I’ll admit it, I use every trick in the book (pun intended) to get through writing something. In order to edit a book, it has to actually be written, and so without the two “lines” I would go nowhere.
You have to embrace them.
But, you don’t have to like, or even enjoy them. In fact, deadlines work better for me if I despise them. I will rush to finish ahead of time, just to get it off my back. The problem is, I have to make my own deadlines.
My thought process looks something like this:
I want to write a book. So, that means I have to convince myself that I have to write a book. It has to become a matter of life and death, because I won’t make time for it otherwise. I’ll just sit and play Splice or Forza or something.
Now that I have this life-or-death thing, I have to figure out how long I can give myself before it “explodes.” Because, obviously, if I tell myself nothing bad will happen if I don’t do it, then it’s not going to get done.
How many words? Okay… how long is long enough to possibly do it, but short enough to still cause fear-induced panic? Okay. Yeah, two months. Wait… no, I know I can do that. Let’s make it 6 weeks, so that I’m good and panicked right before the end, and I’ll have to do a massive coffee binge to make the deadline.
It’s okay, my wife will forgive me, because I’ll have written a book darn it, and that’s worth throwing your sanity to the wind.
And of course, it only gets worse from there. It’s tortuous by nature, and completely artificial. But that’s what it takes to make myself grind through a manuscript.
And of course, it’s really exciting and fun, and I get to relax for a few weeks in the afterglow.
So, don’t be afraid to impose things on yourself artificially for the sake of creativity. It’s a method that works well for some people, and the truth is, if something were to really happen and you couldn’t finish on time, well… it was all just a game, right?
Right?