Consequences

One of my favorite sayings comes from Calvin & Hobbes: "Some people work best under pressure. I work only under pressure." I find it holds very true for myself and a number of my writing friends. The scary thing about writing is that, no matter how strong your burning desire to tell a story is, it is always easy to not write. We have random time sinks on the internet, TV, video games, talking with friends, eating food, and countless other distractions. We also have to deal with obligations like going to work and doing laundry. It is far easier to not write than it is to write.

As such, the writer's best friend is the deadline. When writing becomes a requirement and not simply a hobby or a way to kill time, writers will do what needs to be done. In fact, there are those who would say that the best thing about studying writing at college is having deadlines to meet all the time. Outside of school or work, though, deadlines seem meaningless. Nobody is forcing you to produce within a time frame. They are self-imposed, which means the only way to meet them is by having a lot of will power. But if you already had a lot of will power, you wouldn't need to give yourself deadlines in the first place.

Deadlines are simply dates. Dates by themselves are powerless. What makes deadlines significant are consequences. In school, if you don't meet deadlines, you fail. In work, if you don't meet deadlines, you get fired. Self-imposed deadlines have no consequences. Granted, you could give yourself a consequence of not meeting deadlines, but that would require a lot of will power, which would better be spent just writing instead of coming up with these contingency plans.

If you want consequences, that matter, you should turn to others. Ask a friend to help you out. Set it up where if you don't meet a deadline, your friend won't talk to you until you do what you needed to do for the deadline. Or do the opposite and have your friend harass you every day after the deadline until you meet it. Whichever one is more annoying, do that. You can make up any kind of consequence that could work for you.

What is most important is that you are in a situation where not writing has a very real and significant impact on you. Ideally, we wouldn't need such situations, but when our laziness or fear or anything else takes over our desire to create, we need a swift kick in the butt to get ourselves out of such a funk and having real consequences is much more eye-opening than simply feeling bad about yourself for not meeting a self-imposed deadline.