The Terror and Beauty of Deadlines

Hello and Welcome to Sitting in Silence, the newsletter about writing, craft, worry, and joy.

Welcome to all the new subscribers and to the premium subscribers who keep on the lights here at the massive SIS headquarters nestled along 100 acres of prime riverfront in downtown New Orleans. I kid. Of course, there is no SIS HQ. There’s just me, a cheerful writer who sometimes has far too much coffee before I write these posts. You’ll pardon my flights of fancy, no?

Which is the constant lesson of this newsletter for writers. Always lean into the joy of what you’re creating.

To that end, I have two quick joyous announcements before we get into today’s topic. One, I’ve mentioned before that the State of Louisiana has selected me as the recipient of the 24^th Louisiana Writer Award. I receive it on this Saturday, October 28, 2023, at 9am at the Louisiana Book Festival. My best pal Tad Bartlett will moderate a discussion with me just after the ceremony. Drop in if you’re nearby. It’s always a fun and down-to-earth festival with plenty of local families showing up. Second, I’m the fall commencement speaker at my alma mater, the University of New Orleans. I’ll give the speech this December. This is an especially sweet laurel for me because without my English degree and MFA from UNO, I wouldn’t have made it very far as a writer.

And an extra special shoutout to those of you who attended the Escape the Plot Forest Summit. It was fun and informative, wasn’t it?

Today, let’s talk about The Beauty of Deadlines

Most people don’t like being told what to do. Half the reason anyone grows to adulthood is so that we can decide when to rise from sleep, whether to make our bed, who to love, and how to live. But…we’ve had times when we just wanted someone to tell us what to do.

As a lawyer, deadlines were my life. Every brief I ever turned in to court came with a non-negotiable deadline imposed by the judiciary. If I submitted anything late, I risked destroying my client’s case, losing my license, and possibly even jailtime. Yikes, right? It was a lot of pressure, but quite instructive to live under the tyranny of the clock for those 16 years.

I noticed a few things. For example, I’m a procrastinator. It wasn’t that I preferred to put things off. I sometimes started an assignment weeks in advance of a deadline. But there were always higher priorities, fires that needed to be put out immediately. So distant deadlines floated off into the future to be dealt with later.

Still, I found something truly beneficial. It was a fact about my personality that isn’t that unique. You might be the same way. It went unnoticed when I was younger: I am most inspired when I have absolutely no time left.

I remember being in law school. Picture it! Sicily. 1922…

I’m just making sure you guys are keeping up.

I had a case note due in law school. A case note is a very long-term paper that determines whether you’ll have the pleasure of graduating. This was 2002, I believe. I was good then at starting early with planning and drafting. But that semester, I was overwhelmed. Somehow, I didn’t begin until perhaps the day before it was due. I figured I was toast. Yet, I wrote for a full day and a half, churning out over 25 pages of material that required citations and special legal formatting. The finished product, which I had bound in a blue cover, wasn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material. But it was better than anything I had written to that point. I passed.

Later, I took the lesson to heart.

After years of submitting short stories that were rejected dozens of times, I gave myself an ultimatum. “Publish a handful of stories in good magazines within the next five years or hang up your laptop,” I said to myself. This was 2010 or so. In 2010, I had zero published short stories (not including one I published in high school. By 2015, I had published almost 20.

Indeed, every publication I’ve had came about because of a deadline. I’m not even talking about essay or interview assignments I’ve received from editors at magazines over the years. Though, those extremely tight deadlines are like jet fuel to me. (I’m referring to my attitude now. Back when I began writing nonfiction, I was repeatedly struck dumb by the thought of having to turn in something sensible within a week or less.)

My first book, We Cast a Shadow, was published due to several deadlines. The first was my agent asking for a copy of the manuscript within 10 days. You see, somehow, he got the idea that my manuscript was already complete. He got that idea because, well, I told him the manuscript was complete.

Dear reader, it was not complete. (I hope he’s not reading this. I love you, PJ!)

Needless to say, I spent the next ten days of my life typing like Kermit the Frog (look up the adorable gif if you’ve never seen it). I turned the manuscript in on time, delivered to his desk by a singing courier named Aeneas. The second clause in the previous sentence is fiction.

My second and third books have come to being under similar circumstances. Book three (The American Daughters, available for pre-order, and out February 27, 2024) came about because I was honored with a year-long residency in Oxford, MS. Provided a country house and bucolic patch of land on which to work, I told myself that I had to earn my stay by writing a whole book while there.

I’d never written anything that fast. Not anything I’d want to share with readers. But the magic of deadlines is that they draw something out of us that we may not have realized was there.

I’d say more about all of this, but I must prepare for the classes I teach at LSU, and a trip to Atlanta to promote The American Daughters, and that ceremony this weekend where I’m supposed to give a speech. I guess you could say this post was written under a tight deadline. You be the judge as to whether it drew anything special out of me (or you).

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