When D-Day looms

It’s a point I used to dread in a book’s journey: the pressure, the weight of expectations settling in as Deadline Day looms ahead, neatly dividing things into ‘before’ and ‘after’. Mercifully, life is but one (steep) learning curve and three books in I’ve grown to appreciate the finer points of staring down the barrel of a deadline. Yes, I am the sort of person who likes their bags packed two days before a trip. And yes, I might have been heard to describe deadlines as a slow-seeping poison or like being hounded by a horseman of the apocalypse through a forest a midnight. What can I say, imagination is the only thing I have going for myself during deadline-time! But it’s undeniable that the initial panic eventually turns into a steely sort of resolve, a hunkering down to get stuff done, and with it comes a sudden clarity on many a previously murky issue. As your senses heighten and your perception sharpens, you can connect with the book in a new and often quite amazing way. 

What it’s really about

I think a lot of deadline fear isn’t, perhaps, as much about having something to show on the day, but that that something won’t be perfect. For months, it’s just been you and your story, and all of a sudden you have to let it go, and it won’t, by the very nature of the writing process, be right yet. In fact, the finished book might look completely different. It’s a comforting realisation that any deadline is, yes, a point when something comes to a close, but it’s also one of many along a story’s continuous journey of change and growth. 

The good news: there’s always a happy end!

But the most beautiful thing about deadlines is that even if you think you’ll never make it and the world will run out of hot beverages long before you’ve typed The End, they will pass. And when they do, you’ll be holding a fully-fledged story in your hand, with a beginning and end, with quests and heroines, triumphs and failures in between, a whole big world that you’ve created out of absolutely nothing. It’s then, at the very latest, that I forget all about poisons and horsemen and hellhounds (did I mention those?) — because right there, it’s all been worth it.