Writing on Wednesday – Creating Deadlines

Deadlines.

Not a pleasant word. Just hearing it might bring you back to high school days when a project was coming due and you weren’t even close to being finished. Or maybe you think about your working career when your boss handed you a project and you were only given half the amount of time that project required.

A lot of negative connections to that word.

However, for some crazy reason, I’ve decided to give myself a bunch of deadlines.

Earlier in the year I was querying for my latest novel. And every time I got to the part where you’re supposed to talk about your writing accolades, I had nothing to include. “A plucky attitude” isn’t going to fly with most literary agents.

So I decided to take a step back, stop the querying, and focus on getting some short stories market ready and see if I could get some of those published. So I worked on shorts. Wrote a few. Then wrote a few more. And a few more. I quickly realized that I had no problem hammering out 1,000 words of a new story, but I wasn’t taking the time to return to anything I’d already written to take another pass. I was working my plan, but the plan was flawed. Lots of things were happening, but none of them were getting done.

In comes a deadline. I gave myself until the end of this week to have a short story ready to send out to literary magazines and anthologies. And every week after that will see another short at one of two stages:

First draft written or Edited to the point of: publishable.

Without a deadline, people like me see a project getting done on that magical date of the 3rd of Eventually. Will it get done eventually? Probably. Maybe not, though. Putting a date on something makes you accountable. You might only be accountable to yourself, but that’s better than nothing, isn’t it?

I’m still pretty new to the world of short stories, so who knows if this plan will work or if I’m just dreaming. But I have to try, don’t I?

Leave me some advice in the comments below. Do you think my plan will work or is there a much better way to do this?