How long does it take to finish a writing project?
Whether you’re a writer or the last time you wrote was for school, you may be familiar with the following scenario:
You’re given three weeks to complete a writing assignment. When do you start it? The night before it’s due. Do you win a passing grade? Quite probably.
So how long did it take? All up, less than 12 hours. Would it have affected the quality of your work if the teacher had only given you two days to do it? Not at all.
Someone said, “Work expands to fill the time available.”
Now to connect this to memoir writing, work on a memoir with only a vague sense of the finish line – when it’s perfect – means that the work expands to fill the indefinite time. No matter how many improvements are made, you can always see more that could be done. New techniques to try, which end up with revisions to the book from start to finish.
An insight I gained recently was to treat book chapters as articles, rather than daunting 100,000 word behemoths. I’ve set a deadline to quit reading other people’s memoirs and creative nonfiction (30 June), and start the physical task of editing my manuscript. Once I begin that task, I give myself a deadline of completing one chapter a week.
And if I cram, I just may get it done.
[...] matter how big or small – ad infinitum. How do we avoid this trap? Set a due date, as I spoke about here, or on a big project a series of [...]