Writing with Deadlines: How to Stay in High Gear After Write Nonfiction in November Challenge Ends

All month you've been marking the days off on the calendar, and since last night or early this morning you've been watching the clock knowing your deadline was fast approaching. The Write Nonfiction in November challenge was coming to an end. Indeed, at midnight tonight, you must make the last changes to your WNFiN project for 2009, and say, "Finished." You must complete your project and meet your deadline.

In fact, unlike National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), to participate in WNFiN you don't actually have to turn your project in for a word count. Nor will I be checking to see if you have actually submitted it. No editor, agent or publisher is waiting to find it in their email in-box by midnight either. The WNFiN deadline represents a self-imposed one. Yet, it's a useful one all the same.

Deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise, provide writers with great incentives to complete their work. Without deadlines, it's easy to simply muddle along producing only a little bit of writing here and there but never finishing a project. Without a deadline, you also could continue writing, editing or generally fiddling with your project forever, never getting it to a point where you deem it "finished."

As a journalist, I have a love/hate relationship with deadlines. I dread them as they approach, but they force me to get my work done. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and deadlines make me stop and turn my work in. They allow me to go on to the next project, even if I think I could continue working on the last one and improve upon it. They make me a productive writer.

When it comes to my own books, articles and essays, if I'm not feeling inspired to write, a self-imposed deadline helps. If I attach it to something that feels more concrete -- like having to tell my writers' group if I met my goal in terms of time line -- I tend to follow through more often. Thus, if you, like me, work alone and don't have an editor or publisher actually waiting for your work, having an "accountability partner" helps gives you the incentive to meet your self-imposed deadlines.

So, while deadlines may not feel like positive things, they actually constitute gifts. Therefore, I'd like to encourage you to give yourself the gift this holiday season -- and all year long -- of self-imposed writing deadlines. I suggest that each month you have a goal of finishing some writing project or at least some phase of a writing project. Maybe you complete one section of your book proposals, write two chapters of your book, finish three interviews for an article, or write the first draft for an e-book. You also can have a deadline a week rather than a deadline each month, or you can chunk it down further to a daily deadline, such as writing 500 words or one blog post per day. This will keep you moving towards your writing goals without the need for the WNFiN challenge or any other contest.

Here are a few tips for working with writing deadlines:

1. Chunk tasks down so you have smaller deadlines within your larger deadline.
2. Use a calendar to keep track of your progress.
3. If you have a word count to meet, figure out how many words you must write per day.
4. Set up interviews early in the deadline period; email or call interviewees and let them know specifically your deadline--then give them their deadline, so they know that if they don't meet their deadline they affect your deadline.
5. Finish your piece of writing at least two days prior to the deadline to allow time to edit; this gives you ample time to get "distance" from the piece for a few hours or a day between editing phases. It also allows time to get additional or missing  information for articles.
6. Re-evaluate your progress half way through the deadline period, so you can make adjustments to how you are handling the project. Assess if you must speed up your work schedule.
7. As soon as you compete one deadline, begin work on the next. If you have more than one writing