Why I never miss a deadline (unless the dishwasher needs emptying)

I pride myself on never missing the deadline on a freelance project. It’s a competitive world out there for freelancers and nobody wants to be known for being unreliable. Yes, sometimes that might mean getting up at six in the morning to get started or working all day on a Sunday, but hey, that’s the flexibility of freelancing, right?

But deadlines or no deadlines, freelance life can be erratic. Feast or famine, I joke, when people ask how work’s going, silently hoping that the current famine won’t last too long. As I take the dog for an extra-long walk to fill another work-free morning, I try and reframe the dearth of current work projects in my head. Not a famine then, but bonus free time. Time to catch up on the things that get pushed aside when it’s more feast, like clearing out the under stairs cupboard; making a dent in the tottering ironing pile; filing several years’ worth of paperwork... anything except the one thing I never seem to get around to because I apparently don’t have time: writing my own projects.

In a supreme act of procrastination, I once listed all the works in progress (or WIPs) currently languishing unfinished on my laptop. A middle grade novel and the first rough outline for another; a few chapters of an adult novel, the outline of a second novel and the preliminary rough notes for a third (these notes transcribed from a voice note on my phone eagerly dictated during a dog walk because I was so enthused I couldn’t wait to get home and start writing it...until I got home and the enthusiasm waned alongside a need to hose off the muddy dog, deal with a leak in the kitchen ceiling and make a start on dinner); the full text for two picture books and early drafts for a couple of others. And then there’s the memoir. Over 40,000 words written, with a commitment to a friend (similarly stalled on her own writing project) to finish it by September 2023 long passed. The memoir is my big WIP project, the one that lived in my head for several years and has now lived, half-written, on my laptop for several more. The memoir is the WIP I feel most compelled to actually finish. Allegedly. It’s also the one on which I’ve missed almost every deadline I’ve ever set for myself.

So why the procrastination? When the freelance projects are scarce, I have, on paper, all the things a writer needs: with all three kids now almost grown and semi-flown, I have a mostly empty house and a repurposed room of my own that Virginia Woolf would surely envy. But what I have on paper is at odds with what I have on screen: those unfinished WIPS, bookmarked writing competitions with missed closing dates in the distant past; beautifully curated and colour coded writing schedules with all the tick boxes still unticked. When mentoring other authors I’m full of tips and ideas to help them focus on their writing; I’ve attended and occasionally presented workshops on writing children’s books, on writing memoirs, on writing just about anything. I even belong to a small and supportive writer’s group that meets monthly to share our WIPs. I know that the one thing I need to do is just sit at my desk and write, so why do I find it so hard?

I could say it’s because nobody is relying on me to finish my WIPs and the projects carry no financial reward either (unless one of the WIPs happens to become a bestseller but I’ve been in publishing long enough to not let that particular fantasy linger in my mind too long). Perhaps the truth is that writing my own stuff is just hard. There’s no brief from a commissioning editor to follow, nobody to drop a quick email to when I need a bit of clarification or confirmation that I’m on the right track. Whilst I frame a freelance commission as work, it’s easy to think of my own writing as a hobby, which can make it harder to justify taking the time to do it. And like any hobby, sometimes I’m not really in the mood for it, just as on a cold, frosty morning, it’s hard to convince myself to go for my usual early swim. But as author Anne Tyler says, ‘If I waited until I felt like writing I’d never write at all.’

Of course I know what I need to do. Just do it. Just sit at my desk and write. A few lines, a paragraph, a page, a whole chapter, whatever I can achieve on one of those famine days. Yesterday I listened to an interview with the author Robert Harris where he was asked how he writes such long books so quickly. 'I write around 800 words a day,' he replied. 'Writing six or seven days a week adds up to around 5000 words a week, 20,000 words a month, 120,000 words in six months – and the book’s finished.'

I may not have the available writing time that a bestselling author does, or the incentive of their huge advances, but 800 words really isn’t that much to write in a day. I’ve decided I’m going to set it as my goal in this traditionally more famine than feast month of January. And I’m going to start today – just as soon as I’ve sorted the car insurance renewal, walked the dog and unloaded the dishwasher.