When author Anthony Burgess was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and given a year to live he turned to writing to give his wife some royalties after he died.  He figured out that if he wrote just 1000 words a day, in a year he would have  3 and a half novels.* Motivated by this death sentence Anthony Burgess wrote The Doctor is Sick, Inside Mr Enderby, The Worm and the Ring, One Hand Clapping, The Eve of Saint Venus and most famously A Clockwork Orange. As you may know, Burgess defied the doctor’s diagnosis and went on to live for another 30 years, and remained a highly prolific writer.

One of the toughest things about writing the way we have is that we don’t have deadlines. There is no producer standing over our shoulder telling us we need to have a finished script done by next week. So what does it matter if next week turns into next month? It matters because we know we can do better. This week we set a goal to do a rehearsed reading; 3 weeks to get 3 scripts up to scratch.  Now we have a deadline. But is it really a deadline? We have been here before, every time we start to panic that we are taking too long, money is running short or another project looks more tempting. We know that if we miss this deadline no one will get fired, instead the deadline will be moved and we will conclude that it is in the name of quality.

So dealines have issues which brings us to fear. We can’t organise a reading in a couple of days, this takes a couple of weeks so we have to start now and with the actors in place we can’t cancel. These scripts will get read no matter what, plot holes, character inconsistencies and typos; hopefully they won’t be there, but we will have to accept it if there is.  We need to hear these scripts, have an opportunity to step back from the computer and enjoy the fruits of our labour as it is brought to life.

A deadline we cannot move should give us the fear to meet it.

Despite the death sentence looming down upon him, Burgess quickly discovered another motivator to help him get those 1000 words a day down faster.  He discovered if he set down to work first thing in the morning he could have his quota done by lunchtime, he would then head down to the pub and spend the rest of the day drinking beer. This is I a guess a really good example of “the carrot and the stick”. Fear is the stick and helps to get you off your ass, but don’t forget the rewards because we are suppose to enjoy this process.

Look out for my next blog “The Fallen Soldier”, due early next week.

* I have 3 copies of A Clockwork Orange and one copy of the play, annoyingly  the copy that has the Burgess introduction where he tells this story is missing so the 1000 words a day is from my memory, it might have been more, but 100,000 words for a novel sounds about right. It is also worth noting that while he wrote all the books during this time, he did not actually finish and publish all of them in that period and some were based on earlier works. Still, it is impressive what you can do under pressure.