Learning Your Pace to Deal with Deadlines
Recently, the NSFWords Thursday evening Twitter chat was about deadlines, and I gave a suggestion that I thought was worth expanding. The question was looking for advice for authors who struggle with deadlines, and I said “I wasn’t really good at setting and hitting deadlines until I had a good sense of how long it takes me to write and revise pieces of different lengths. Once you figure that out, it makes it a lot easier, in my experience. Outliers happen but they become rare.”
Because I’ve been writing for a while now, I’m generally able to look at a story idea and have a rough sense of how long of a story it’s going to be. This isn’t always foolproof, and sometimes I get partway into writing and realize my short story is really a novella or longer. But by and large, if I set out to write a short story, I know about how long it will be, and, more importantly in this case, about how long it will take me to write it. This means that if I have a deadline for a story, I can work backward from that deadline to figure out when I need to start it by in order to finish on time.
For me, this involves three factors: writing the story, letting it sit, and revising the story. I usually look at these in terms of weeks–it’ll likely take me X weeks to write the story and Y weeks to revise it. I want to let it sit for at least one week in between writing and revising, so my calculation is X + Y + 1. If the result of that equation is equal to or less than the amount of time before the deadline, I can do it without much difficulty. It’s when the result of that equation is greater than the amount of time before the deadline that I need to start panicking.
So if you’re an author who has difficulty meeting deadlines, the first thing you need to do is make an honest assessment of your pace for writing a story (or novel, or whatever the deadline involves). Without knowing your pace in the first place, you’re likely to run into missed deadlines and overcommitting yourself. But once you’ve got that pace in mind, you can evaluate if a proposed deadline is possible. And then, assuming that it is, you can set out to hit it.
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