Well, I finally met my goal of writing a post-Clarion story. No, it isn’t the one I was working on when I wrote my last post. Yes, it’s flash fiction. And it’s more than a week late for the deadline. (I think the deadline went by so fast that there was a doppler effect on the whooshing noise it made!) As a result, I find myself questioning the utility of self-imposed deadlines as a motivational tool — they just don’t have the bite of real deadlines. So I think I’ll try writing without deadlines for a bit and see how that goes.
deadlines help if you have some other people involved – which is why writing circles help and/or an online group of friends who have specific deadlines for prompted pieces etc…
are the tigers portraying the deadline biting?
Hehe. They are now :)
Other options
You may just want to try writing with daily word count goals instead of “finish by this date” deadlines. Unless your goal for some reason is to finish a certain number of stories by a set date, it’s probably more useful to just have that daily goal, so that you are getting some writing done every day. Stories take however long they take–you don’t want to rush them out before they’re ready. But that doesn’t need to prevent you from honing some storytelling or writing skills daily.
I’ll let you know if I ever manage to put this into practice for myself. ;-)
–Tinatsu
Re: Other options
Ah yes, the word counts. I try that periodically, but it goes against my natural writing habits. I tend to write in bursts, so I’ll have massively productive days and days where I have to beat my head against the wall to get any words out at all (I still write on those days, but the word count doesn’t ever get up to a decent level).