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21 March 2004 Entry: "Deadlines"

A deadline can focus the mind wonderfully. As the 25th March creeps closer, the date appointed for submissions to the Newcastle Stories anthology by Comma Press, I suspect that writers are writing, rewriting, crossing out, tearing up and agonising over manuscripts all over Tyneside. As I have been doing. I can say this smugly as I am putting mine in the post today. But I haven't sealed the envelope yet, there's still time for me to pull it out one more time.

Over the years of running writing workshops I have found that finishing a piece is one of the major blocks to people moving forward with their work. There's a tendency to start something in a workshop with a good stimulus, surrounded by other eager writers, with encouragement from an interested tutor. And it comes out well and, with a few useful critical comments, it could really go somewhere; all the group and the tutor are advising - you must carry on with that. The writer goes home feeling positive, thinking perhaps they can write after all. Then the reality hits. You are stuck on your own with this piece that needs thinking about, shaping, needs direction and working hard over. But there's no helpful tutor and no group encouragement - this time it's just between you and the page.

Many stop at this point, good intentions ebb away and I suspect this is where many a drawer gets stuffed with the promising beginning, never to see the light of day again. I have filing cabinet slings full of first drafts of poems, stories and plays that I can't quite bring myself to throw out.
However, I always advise writers to put their first efforts into a drawer or folder: it may come in useful later as a measure of how the writer/writing has developed, but also there is always the possibility that there is a germ of an idea that can be worked on in the future.

The Comma Press invitation to write a short story made me really face something that I had been thinking about doing for a long time. I was able to set it for a writing group task (this is a perk of being a tutor, plus being able to elicit critical feedback from the group). And the deadline made me work hard to finish the story. So hurray for deadlines. The problem is, I think what I've written is actually the beginnings of a book, not a short story, but that was worth discovering. Now I'm waiting for the next deadline - to find out whether the short story has been accepted or not.
As an afterthought to my last blog, I found this Maxim Gorky quote: 'You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.'