When deadlines don't work

I think deadlines are a great tool. A tight deadline forces you to focus on the few vital things to get done and to ignore the rest. Without the goal of publishing one post per week, I would have never gotten started writing. But deadlines have a downside, that, prior to this week, I haven't really thought about.

Looking at the issue in terms of creative constraints, my constraint so far was to write about anything I want, if I can finish it in less than a week. If you don't know what to write about, this works great. But when I started writing the new story, and it didn't go anywhere by Wednesday, I started to panic. I wasn't sure that by the end of the week I would have written something I would want to publish. So I started to work on this post instead.

I want to experiment more with writing fiction. But the goal of every experiment is to simply see what happens. And this means, it's possible for an experiment to fail in the sense, that you won't have anything to publish. With writing under a weekly deadline, I don't feel like I have enough room to fail and tend to write something safe each week. I basically stopped experimenting with this blog.

And especially concerning fiction, I have no idea, how to create a gripping story. There are so many different things that I have to learn. I don't know how long it will take, but one week per story simply isn't enough for the deep dive that is necessary.

From mid-July, I did take a four-week break from writing, mainly because I started a new job and wanted to focus only on this. And while I wrote less in these weeks, I also started to experiment again. The result of this was "And then he slipped". Yes, it's awful, but I got to try something different. And I want to do more of this.

Deadlines are one of the most effective tools when you want to get more productive. But at the moment, productivity isn't the bottleneck. Creative exploration is. So I will stop publishing a weekly post, to start experimenting again. I will still write daily. But now, if after a week of writing, I have only produced five sentences that are usable, it will be fine.