"I love deadlines. I love the wooshing noise they make as they go by." — Douglas Adams (you know, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy guy?)
Eventually in life you have to make a Big Decision. This could be anything from deciding which classmate to ask to the prom or to change careers. This kind of Big Decision making happens every darn day for a writer like me. I’m not all that all that keen on making decisions, because in my past I’ve made some incredibly bad ones. So, I wind up putting off the decision for as long as humanly possible. Since I’m a writer, I call it "First Draft-itis." Last night, the Muse struck (which, in my case, is not just a pretty saying) and I wound up having to make the Big Decision to actually put pen to paper and crank out the first draft of a speculative short story. How’d I manage it?
Make a Deadline
I found that’ it’s far easier to make a choice when I feel I have no choice. For a writer, this choice is a deadline. If you have to get your taxes together and live in America, your deadline is April 15. If you are trying to decide on a college major, your deadline is when your parents threaten to kick you out of the house. You’ll know this situation when you feel it. Setting a self-imposed deadline helps you know when you have no other choice but to make a choice.
In my case, my deadline for pounding out a first draft of a short story is when I can’t sleep because the story is screaming to come out. It’s easier on my health and sanity to just write the first draft and then I can finally get some sleep. Now, I haven’t exactly set the literary world on fire with my short stories. They do not pay my bills. They usually wind up being rejection slip magnets. So you can see why I put off writing fiction as long as possible.
Play Intuition Improvement Games
In order to help you realize that the sky will not fall if you make a "wrong" decision is to play games to improve your intuition. This is gone into much greater depth in this earlier post on this site. You can play these long before your deadline to get you relaxed enough to have to face making a Big Decision.
Nothing Is Written In Stone
Decisions can be changed, whether it is with your career choice or for writing a short story. After you write the first draft, you set it aside for a couple of weeks and then look at it with fresh eyes. Then you can better see all the mistakes and inconsistencies you’ve made. Then, you get down to editing and revising your story. My stories go through an average of seven drafts before I finally send them out on their rejection slip collecting rounds.
Almost any decision you make can be reversed somehow in a form of editing, whether you are talking about a relationship, career move or any other subject of a Big Decision. You are not trapped by your decisions. You are trapped in First Draft-itis if you do nothing.
Hope this helps.
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