Deadline Schmedline

Alright. So September is almost over and I am not done. Life did, indeed, get in the way. In particular, my chronic headaches. And let me tell you, chronic headaches make writing near impossible. But it was more than just my excuses. It’s also feeling like I’m sprinting a marathon instead of pacing myself. Instead of really thinking about the scenes, I feel like I have been creating skeletons of scenes. But you know what, apparently I’m not alone.

Rushing to the finish line

I was reading a blog post from The Literary Lab called Don’t Rush to the Finish Line, and I realized that this is a common problem when there is a deadline involved. In reading the responses to the post, I realized that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have merely sketches of scenes. After all, my deadline is more so that I can get the ideas all out there, see how the story will play out, and then start sketching my new story idea before I come back to the serious work of editing. So maybe rushing to the finish line isn’t so bad in this situation.

What do you think? Are you guilty of this? How rushed can your story be to still count as a first draft? Is rushing a bad thing?