5 things that work for me

When I'm on deadline

A page from my diary and my LAMY Safari.)

Hey y’all,

Last summer I was selling the book. Next summer I’ll be promoting the book. This summer I’m on deadline, actually making the book.

Here’s what’s working for me right now:

A page from Oliver Sacks’ On The Move

1. Keeping the calendar clear.

You spend most of your life as a writer being misunderstood by the people around you, but the one thing people seem to respect is when you say, “Sorry. I can’t. I’m on deadline.”

Almost without fail, I keep Monday and Thursday mornings clear to write this very newsletter. When I have a book deadline, I just pretend like I have a newsletter to write every single day.

Summer is a good time, actually, to get a lot of work done. It’s too hot after about 10AM to do much of anything else. Also: My inbox calms down a bit and people, in general, want fewer things from me and expect less. Hurrah.

Get a copy of this poster to hang in your workspace

2. Open the document, stay in the document.

There are two primary ways to hit deadlines. One is page-oriented and one is time-oriented.

I used to be page-oriented: I would divide how many words or pages I needed by the number of days until the deadline, and then give myself a target to hit at the end of every day.

Now I’m time-oriented: I still work every day, but instead of having a page or word target, I simply tell myself I have to open the document and stay in it for a certain amount of time. Some days I’ll get almost nothing, and some days I’ll get 10 pages worth.

Either method works, eventually, as long as you show up every day and put your time in, but I find that the time-oriented method is a little easier on my soul, somehow, and that helps me stick with the project long enough to see it through.

3. Try to make one thing that doesn’t suck.

“All I try to do is get one good song… and then another one that doesn’t suck, and then get another song that doesn’t suck,” says Kim Deal of making an album. ”So I’m just trying to get one song together and when I get enough, then it’s an album.” 

Making illustrations is a little different than writing, because it’s more modular. I can think in terms of one single page at a time and what I want it to do and what I want it to look like.

I think of each illustration as a “nest egg.” When you say “nest egg” many think of money saved and put away, but a literal “nest egg” is a real or fake egg that you put in a nest to encourage a bird or a hen to lay more eggs there.

I learned this from Thoreau, who said that writing in his journals was like laying nest eggs:

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited… Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.

So when I have an empty folder, I just try to lay one nest egg — one single illustration that I know is decent and will go in the book — and that nest egg will invite other eggs, and soon, if I show up enough, the folder will look something like this:

I just keep laying eggs, knowing once I get a big pile I’m going to toss a few out.

4. The best editor is me… tomorrow.