When on deadline, I try to keep up with the minutia of life. I’m successful for a time, but then ‘deadline brain’ sets in. I am told that this is the creative cousin, if you will, of ‘stress brain.’ It’s when a writer’s ability to focus on anything but writing and editing the current book shrinks to minus thirty.
Being chained to your desk until you churn out a work of creative artistry feels like a contradiction. Shouldn’t creativity fly free with no constraints? Well, yes, at one point in the process. Once that mark passes, it becomes imperative simply to create. An author must somehow turn her artistic self into a time-bound artisan without moving into writer’s-angst territory.
Hindsight is wonderful. I’d be further along if I had ignored the clutter in my home, sacrificed sleep earlier, and booked a writing retreat away from life’s strains. Neither self-reproach nor despair are useful, as I can attest. The only thing to cure what ails me is old-fashioned self-discipline empowering a healthy work ethic. You will perhaps note that creative artistry doesn’t enter the equation.
I don’t mean to decry daydreams. They are the frosting on the cake for a novelist. Without the cake (go with me here) frosting seems (arguably) like fluff with no substance. A story begins and ends with creativity, but mastery of the writing craft and of the self are needed also.
“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,” as Mary Heaton Vorse so famously said.
I may have painted the writing life differently than you imagined. The truth lies somewhere between the passion of a starving artist in a garret and the jaded outlook of a mega-bestselling author. Authors write because we must, but that is for more than the romanticized reason. Since becoming a contracted author writing to deadline, I view books as something greater than spine and pages. In them, I see an author on the brink of exhaustion, writing anyway. Who am I to break this unspoken contract with those who have written before me?
And so, I ply my trade when I would rather be anywhere else but at my desk. Ignoring the siren song of a fine spring day, the self-doubt of impostor syndrome, phone calls to make, and errands to run – I write.
