Guest Blogger: Pete Tzinski Writers Without Deadlines

I don't think that there's any way to talk about this topic without sounding like I'm complaining. And in a way, that ties in very nicely to the topic.

Deadlines are, in theory, the enemy of the working writer. As Douglas Adams so wonderfully said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.” Anyone who knows much of anything about writing – because they are a writer, or somehow managed to find themselves married to a writer – is aware that what being a successful author mostly means is, you get no sleep and you have to try to write too much, too fast, for too many people that you can't keep track of by yourself.

Only a writer looks at that and thinks “ah, bliss.”

But the tricky bit is, a career doesn't start out that way. And when it's a career in writing, it can be very hard to make a go of things, not least because of your lack of deadlines. Let me explain.

Suppose you get a job at a big company in which you want to be CEO. Everyone around you supports you. The best job you can get is working long and tiring hours in the mail room, sorting crap for the higher-ups. You go in and work eight hours every day, occasionally you go in on the weekends. And slowly, you begin to rise through the company, getting more and more work that takes more time. Your weekends are turning into funny theoretical things.

Everyone will support you in this, because it's a proper job. It's a proper work. You're getting up, getting dressed, going off to punch in and do your time and then punch out and come home for the day. This is a Real Job.

Now writing. Suppose you want to grow up to be Stephen King? Well, I don't, but you might (I want to grow up to be a weird amalgam of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury; you probably have your own amalgam). And you know that in order to reach the top, you have to write a lot and read a lot. And you do, there's no way around it. You have to write as constantly as you can manage, even sacrificing sleep sometimes. It's exhausting and frustrating and boring, sometimes, and it involves a lot of grind and self-doubt...but the surest sign of any writer is that they wouldn't trade that misery for a cushy job in the big-company-mail-room. (Look, I didn't say we were sane.)

And gradually, you begin to get some success. You're selling some short stories, now and then. You're doing some articles for a few places, if you're lucky. It's not always what you want to be doing – you want to grow up to write science fiction, but why are you now reviewing hardcore gay fiction? well, it's a gig – but it's work and it's helping.

The problem is with the people around you, in many cases.

(And I'll say from the get-go that it's just not their fault.)

The problem is that you are not going off, punching in, vanishing from their lives for a few hours as you work, then punching out and reappearing. Probably what you are doing is going into your computer room (or, in my case, your walk-in closet set up as an office) and sitting down to write. The stuff you are writing isn't guaranteed any sales. And even when you do have sales and gigs lined up...well, it's still not a time clock. The story for your personal pleasure and the story for sale are both done by you sitting around pecking at a computer, or doodling on a piece of paper.

All your writing has to be done as if it is a serious business, it is going to sell, and you are making a job out of this. Even if you're not. That means that when you go into your office, you are 'punched-in' and you are 'at work'. Your family wouldn't dream of showing up at your actual day job in the big company mail room and hanging out to chat. They wouldn't show up to ask you to knock this off and come take out the trash. And they wouldn't get grumpy that you go off to a day job every day instead of spending time with them.

We are not built to believe that This Is Real Work. Maybe it's just that funny little thing you do that your friends put up with. About on the lines of organizing your baseball cards, or going outside to shoot hoops. It's a thing you're doing to kill time, it's not much more vital than watching a lot of TV. It can be interrupted and put off and done away with, if needed. It's not serious.

Deadlines help a little bit. One gets more leeway if they say “I can't go out drinking, I have an article due tomorrow morning, I have to work on it.” Although one still doesn't get the leeway of saying “I can't go out drinking, I have to go into my job and close up shop.” At best, writing is, like, homework. “I can't go out drinking, I have to do four math problems by tomorrow.” It's along those lines.

But the young writer is writing to improve himself, to improve her work ethic, and to build up a body of work which they can then flog out to every editor in the world in the hopes that if they've worked extremely hard and built themselves up...they'll be lucky enough to send a story to an editor who has just fallen off the sobriety wagon and who buys it and sends out actual money.

It's not the fault of the people around the young writer. Even when they do understand that it's serious, it still seems like the sort of thing that you just magically do. In the movies, the guy sits down and goes clacky-clacky-clacky and the camera cuts away to him laughing and holding copies of his new book.

It would be a boring-as-hell movie if we saw the other four hundred hours he spent staring at six words on a computer screen, playing with a slinky, and ranging from cheerful to deeply depressed.

Everyone around you is not a writer and doesn't understand. And there's no reason why they should fully grasp the depths of the matter.

So what's the solution? Well, there isn't one, really. You can be firm, but it only works so much. You can tell your family to treat 6:00pm-10:00pm as if you are at your day job and not to bother you in your office, but I don't know how well that'll work for you (it's never worked for me). You can try to just write in the snatched moments between your actual job, and between when everyone in the house has fallen asleep, writing frantically up to the moment when you zonk out. A trick that used to work for me a lot when I was younger – before everyone caught onto me – was to make deadlines up for things. When I had to get out of something for a writing piece, I would have a magazine or an editor or somebody who 'was waiting' for it. It was rarely true. Ironically, these days, it is true, someone is waiting for lots of what I write. But no one listens to me anymore. So tread carefully there.

And it's even worse if you're doing web-based work. I write an internet serial (which I can't give you a link to, because I'm still writing myself ahead enough that it can launch and give me some free time to work on it more). But consider the people who also do web-comics. You say you want to make a living at it. Well sure, everyone supports that idea. And you might do it. But it doesn't happen instantly. You have to put up a comic every day for two years before you see a cent. Assuming you ever see a cent.

The bottom line is, there are no instant-stars in writing. And until the money is flowing in and you are clearly a Working Living Writer (if it happens, and I hope it does for all of you), it'll be tough to convince the world to give you space and treat you as if you're already a Working Living Writer.

Ah well. Writing isn't easy. I don't think it should be.

Besides, having to fight for writing time is a good thing. I can tell you from experience that if you suddenly have all the writing time in the world stretching out before you, what will mostly happen is...you'll spend time playing with your toddler and turn your e-mail into a social crutch that you spend all of your time in, and develop a pathological fear of telephones and never leave the house and have a head of hair that looks like it houses owls and read weird stuff and...

You get the idea.

Stephen King said something memorable on a different topic, but I think it applies here, too. So I'll leave you with his quote. “It's the grit of sand in the oyster that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.”

People not believing in you, you not making money, you not believing in yourself, you having to struggle to eke out any bit of writing time...

...that's the grit.

Swear about it quietly under your breath, and then go off and make yourself a pearl.
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Pete Tzinski also blogs at SF Signal.