The Cruelty of Deadlines

I've had two important observations I'd like to share with you tonight, gleaned from my experience as I lay in bed coughing and hacking and wondering if I was cursed, or just very unlucky.

Why do I think I'm cursed? Hexed? Bewitched? Well, because it was my brother's birthday a few weeks ago, on Halloween. It was my mother's birthday last Friday, on the 13th. Yeah, I know, totally weird. But both days, while I was spending time with my family, I came down with an excruciatingly unpleasant illness that left me bedridden for at least a day. I thought at first I was allergic to my family, but I see them lots of times, and it only seems to be on birthdays that I get sick.

Ergo, it's a curse.

My second observation came from my experience last night as I tried to muster up the will to keep on writing, so that I didn't fall behind on my deadline. I just have this tremendous fear that if I skip a day, it will start the chain reaction that leads to "oh, I don't feel like it tonight, maybe tomorrow." I don't want to go back to that; I want to be able to say that I wrote even when I was lying in bed coughing out my lungs. Even though the writing probably wasn't very good and even though I didn't get very far, the fact was that I still forced myself to do it.

But goddamn, it was hard. I had a lot of time to reflect, throughout the day, during moments of lucidity, on this whole "should I, shouldn't I" thought process. I came to realize, as I said somewhere in an earlier post, that when you make a deadline, when you really, finally, truly commit to one, it becomes the most cruel and unforgiving task master you can possibly imagine.

There was nothing forcing me to work yesterday, except for me. Me, and the fact that if I didn't work yesterday, I'd have to do twice as much writing today just to get caught up. How many days could I allow myself to skip before the deficit became too much and I gave up hope of the project? I don't know and I don't really think I want to know.

My point is that writing is not easy. It's not always fun and it's not something that just "happens." For all the moments where we feel divine inspiration, all the times where it just seems to "flow," there are a whole lot more times where it's working even though you have a wonderful migraine and the thought of staring at a computer screen is as appealing as eating hot shards of glass.

I will admit, fully aware of my own pride in saying so, that I consider myself to be at least a little bit talented. But more and more, I realize that talent is something that's nice to have, it's a good place to start, but it doesn't really mean anything if you just wait around for it to kick in and do its thing. It'll just sit there, inert.

It's only after you've forced yourself to your keyboard and fought for every measly word over the course of two hours that you realize you have to do the work all of your own; that there's no muse to carry you. The muse only shows up to take everything you'd done on your own, and made it into something special.