deadline

These last few weeks, I’ve been trying to meet a deadline for a writing project I’ve been working on, off and on, for ten years. Like a piece of holiday knitting, I’ve put the project down and picked it up again, before putting it down for something more important and picking it back up, more times than I can count.

We live in a world in which a good writer can thrash out a novel in a matter of months, and it be on bookshop shelves, facing out, by Christmas. This makes admitting to a manuscript’s gestation of over a decade embarrassing, not something to boast of. I like to think I kept going with it out of solidarity with the stories people told me during it. I like to think I kept on with it in the hope that, assuming it sees the light of day, it makes the difference to readers that the stories in it have made to me. And not because I was incapable of leaving the project in a drawer, or burning it.

For me, the beauty of a deadline is that it clears my path of everything but the project that is subject to it. It’s not that everything else in my life doesn’t matter. Other things absolutely do matter. However, the force of a deadline, the sheer energy of it, pushes everything else into second place. Except, of course, when I find myself doing things I otherwise wouldn’t dream of doing, like putting three pieces of furniture that have been in the basement for years, into auction. Or clearing out the storeroom at the yoga studio, just because.

Some people elect to have several creative projects, over and above their work, on the go at the same time. I’m not one of them. It scrambles my brain to have to continually rejig my priorities amidst an already tight schedule. Recently, I’ve noticed that when I open the email app on my phone, I fear being distracted by whatever might be there, while yet longing to be distracted by it. Like Odysseus listening to the Sirens’ song, while lashed to the mast of his ship, I can feel this quiver even when the unopened email in front of me looks promising.

Last week I decided that the whole of psychology could be boiled down to a single question. ‘Is this thought or feeling helping me to live my life?’ We can, if we choose, leave the history of psychology aside, and focus instead on how the thought or feeling that we’re in the middle of having is shaping our current moment. And leave it there. This may sound a bit close to Ekhardt Tolle, and other New Agers. Although, to be fair, Ekhardt Tolle isn’t the only one to have arrived at this conclusion.

It just is hard to focus on the next thing, or next idea, and only that. It’s hard to keep your blinkers on for long enough to steep yourself in a task at hand and so to lose the self-consciousness that otherwise messes with your focus. Most of us can only do this for limited periods, before needing to rest and switch off. Distraction is our default mode, our natural response to the welter of thoughts and feelings that stream through our mind, which can only be tamed in short bursts.

Last night, with my daughter lost in an on-line course in the next room, I cooked a meal around some fish I’d bought at the docks that afternoon, two fillets that were expensive enough for me not to want to spoil them. Cooking well is hard, really hard (God knows how chefs do it for a living), and especially for home cooks. I think this is because home cooking doesn’t lend itself to a single focus. I can feed the dog and return a text and decide not to answer a call that comes through, all the while conjuring up an interesting meal in twenty minutes flat. So, not the single line of focus I see in my daughter who, to all appearances, is intent on finishing her on-line task, safe in the knowledge that dinner is happening next door.

After dinner, plus two hours, it’s a different story. The lights are low and my legs are crossed on the sofa beneath me as I flip my laptop open and start checking page numbers on the manuscript that I’m keen to send to the illustrator before going to bed. To this end, I do my utmost not to be drawn into making the corrections that announce themselves as my eyes skim the text all the way to page 187, checking for gremlins.

Finishing anything with words in it is a fantasy. Every writer knows that. This is why, even after I’ve sent the manuscript off, giving in to my need to press Send before another day dawns, I print out the text’s conclusion on the printer upstairs while brushing my teeth in the bathroom.

(Imagine, if you can, that the cost of the next book you pick up in a bookshop reflected the number of hours its author spent writing it. It would be skyrocket high and you would refuse to buy it.)

As usual, I feel relief and sadness as I release myself from the manuscript that has absorbed me for days and weeks (and years). Before long, everything that I’ve given myself permission to push to the edges (the election, housework, bills, lesson plans, gardening), comes tapping at the door and asking for attention.

I’m not done with the manuscript. There are more corrections to make, more jiggling around of paragraphs, before the text is ready for unsuspecting readers. Still, the main work is done. It will soon be ready to sink or swim on its own.

Each morning, for the months it took Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel, he said this prayer to himself: ‘Free me from myself, Oh Lord, that I may serve you better.’ I am not Michelangelo. Still, I too say a version of this prayer, silently and without addressing God, whenever I return to a piece of writing after a break from it. Saying these words, or ones like it, helps me to leave my ego in another room and to focus on whatever it is, usually a written text, which I can only work on with my whole being to the degree that I attend solely to it.

And now I’m off to the auction house with those three pieces of furniture.