People, meet Alvin, Simon, and Theodore's party cousin.




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"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." Douglas Adams

I'm not a particularly organized person. Actually, that's not completely true. I do have a very loose kind of mental organization, but it's something which I'm not sure anyone else can understand. I honestly don't think I completely understand it myself.

As you can probably deduce, this aforementioned "loose kind of mental organization" doesn't really apply to deadlines. I'm a buddha level master-procrastinator to the nth degree. That's not to say that deadlines are of no use to me though, because they are. I love jotting them down on calendars. I love writing them in date books. And I have often been firmly convinced that whatever it is I'm working on will be done by the deadline. It seldom ever happens, but I am always firmly convinced all the same.

It's not that I'm lazy (although I sort of am, truth be told) or that I don't want to write. It's just that a lot of external factors come into play in the process of writing. It's not like math, where the numbers are already there and all you have to do is play with them. It's not like making a report, or doing a presentation, where the basic thing, the thing to be reported or presented, actually already exists. You are guaranteed that if you plug away at it long enough, you will eventually find your one perfect numerical answer. Or if you research hard enough, you will eventually have all the facts you need for your report. It's a linear kind of thing. Work equals results.

Sadly, there are no such guarantees in writing. Inspiration doesn't automatically mean a good story. Hard Work doesn't automatically mean a good story. Talent doesn't even automatically mean a good story. The fact that a story, by its very nature, will eventually have to be read by others (and judged by others, because let's face it, we do write for an audeience after all), means that there's always an element somewhere that's out of your hands.

And naturally, we want to write as good a story as we can. The thing is, sometimes it feels that a deadline just has no place in the labyrinth of possibilities inherent in a story-in-progress. Or in the the lack of any shred of possibility thereof.

When you're coming up empty, a deadline won't magically make the thoughts come out of thin air. And when you're wrestling with overgrown plot twists, a deadline won't automatically untangle the knots. You just have to work through it, and working through it, boy and girls, can take a hell of A LOT of time.

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I think writing, at least fiction writing, is best represented by that moment when writer comes face to face with a blank sheet of paper. That's really what it is, isn't it? Facing that blank sheet of paper and filling it up with pieces of yourself in the most coherent, most satisfying, most beautiful way possible. Creating a story. Making it all up. There are no real guidelines, no patterns, no formulas to follow. There is only your imagination and the need to fill the space in the best way that you can.

And sometimes, there's just nothing to fill it up with. Try as you might. Even if you squeeze every single agonizing suicidal memory from your brain. Even after wrestling with all your demons. Day in and day out. Even after staring at that single sheet of paper (which has now suddenly become the biggest source of your self-doubt) all day, for a frighteningly substantial number of days. Just complete nothing. It happens. But that's another story.

Writing is a little like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, I guess. Or making water into wine. Or, dare I say it, falling in love. It's a bit of a mysterious, magical, unexplainable process. And you can't really put a deadline on that, can you?

Agh. This is going to be a long, hard road, dearies. A long, hard road indeed.