I recently met a friend of a friend interested in writing her first book – a children’s novel. She asked for advice on how to get started. Apart from a scribble of notes, she hadn’t taken her kernel of an idea forward in eight years. She had the idea, quite a good one in fact, but without words on the page, even a shoddy first draft, it was impossible to move the needle.
She needed a deadline, but without having set one up herself, she needed someone else to step in and set it up for her.
Sometimes, if we’re feeling a block, or need a push in the right direction, self-discipline, self-motivation, and self-deadline setting isn’t enough. You need someone else to do it, taking your accountability into the public sphere. You must wear the deadline on your sleeve. You must answer to someone. It can be a little intimidating knowing that someone else knows you plan to do the thing, but it might just be the spark that you need.
When I set a deadline for this new, budding writer, it was almost a relief for her. It seemed that she really needed someone to give her a hard deadline to meet, rather than her fence-sitting approach, which had been the case for many years. With this deadline now set, she came away feeling more determined, and with a desire to create. She felt she could accept the risk of feedback and could put her work out there for someone else to read. For the most part, this was because a deadline had been set by someone else.
So, here’s my writing prompt for you, if you so happen to need it. If you are struggling to create a deadline or motivate yourself to finish a piece of work, have someone else set a deadline for you.
Another very helpful way to motivate yourself, Michael, is to have a writing buddy to pep you along … as you and I during NaNo ’23. I found reporting my word score to you more or less daily, and getting your encouragement – and repaying in kind – gave me a great boost. It got me over the 50,000-words-in-a-month line and gave me a zero draft I’m still working on. I’m very grateful!
My step-granddaughter kept me writing by demanding a chapter when she got up at 9am each day, so she could ‘edit’ it for me during the day. I got up by 6 am and wrote until 9 when I woke her with a cuppa. It kept me writing, so that I finished an entire novel in six weeks. However I’ve spent ten years now not getting around to going through it and seeing if it’s worth sending to a publisher, due to computer deaths and hard-drive malfunctions which mean I have only one paper copy and no other copy of it now.
But the challenge of having to produce a chapter each day, as well as any rewriting needed, was a good spur.