On Deadline

A writing life under the metaphorical gun.

I was sitting in the backseat of the car taking me from the airport in Lexington, Kentucky to the college at which I was scheduled to speak that afternoon. My laptop—for once true to its name—was resting on my lap as I cut, pasted, and typed my way toward the final draft of the talk I was planning to give in about ninety minutes. 

Actually, final draft is misleading. This would be the first draft, at least the first complete one, since my method of writing longer pieces generally adheres to a pattern: bursts of composition across weeks and months (and sometimes years), recorded in passing on notecards or in transcribed voice memos that are sorted by theme or imagery into computer files, where they sit like coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, and the remains of ripe fruit in a compost pile, waiting for time to do its work. Lately, I’ve come to honor my desultory work methods with more respect than they probably deserve: one way or another, the words do accumulate. I like the notion of “compressed procrastination” that the Silicon Valley apostate Jaron Lanier applies to his own work style. Switching quickly from one activity to another, he has said, “You can get away with feeling like you’re being lazy all the time and yet at the end of the day all the things have gotten done.” If the day is long enough, that proves true; meanwhile, I’ll feel lazy all the time and find a deadline to lean on, or to lean on me. 

I continued typing until we pulled into the driveway of the home of the president of the university, a friend of long standing. Inside the house, after quick greetings, I commandeered a printer to produce my text, and slipped the thirty-odd pages of large-type output into the plastic sleeves of the binder I always use when addressing an audience, to keep my fidgety hands from fumbling with papers. I was ready to go with twenty minutes to spare, ten of which would be needed for the walk to the auditorium, on which my host took pleasure in ribbing me about the obvious care with which I planned my assignments. The students would learn nothing about time management from me.

But the talk was well received, so maybe they learned something else (to judge the likelihood of this for yourself, you can read it here: Alone Together: The Civility of Reading). In any case, despite the fact that its components—some culled from earlier pieces, some newly conceived—felt to me like they had careened together on the last leg of the two-pronged flight from Cleveland by way of Charlotte, as is often the case my intense brooding on the themes I was treating had infused the whole with a consistent point of view that the frenetic final assemblage somehow concentrated. Like some emphatic mark of organizing punctuation, the deadline helped me discover through articulation and arrangement some values that I had been living with for a long time. Which is, for me, the best outcome of putting words on a page: to settle into sharable form ideas and intuitions that have been banging around in my head with inchoate energy, to compose them into meaningful phrases.

If I credit the deadline, rather than the writing and the editing themselves, with the product of the associated labors, it’s because this is what experience has taught me.  The Lexington incident came to mind last week while I was frenetically ordering some thoughts for a large meeting in the moment before the session commenced—annoyed with myself that, once again, I had left work to the last minute when everything that needed to go into it had been at hand for a good while. A thought I have only set down now, with all that precedes it, because this my newsletter’s biweekly deadline has once again raised its head after a pleasant August slumber. 

If that newsletter, In the Company Books, is the latest manifestation of my addiction to the forcing function of imminent publication, the reliance began decades ago. Although, in my teens and twenties, I always regarded myself as a writer-in-progress, I never made much of the progress end of that description until, turning thirty, I co-founded A Common Reader, the book catalogue that would be my livelihood for twenty years. Faced with what soon became an unrelenting schedule—a new catalog in the mail every three weeks—that was driven by the urgent capacities of large presses in Wisconsin that would not abide idleness, I wrote abundantly, prodigiously even, as the assembled catalogues arranged in archive boxes on shelves now in the basement attest. I’d never aspired to be an occasional writer—I’d dreamt of writing volumes of verse or fiction that needed no prompt outside themselves—but, once I fell under the unforgiving spell of print deadlines, every waking hour seemed to provide, or demand, an occasion. 

Every six months of so, tired of being always under the gun due to the procrastinating impulse of the writers (first and foremost, me), our design and production team would mobilize us to consider how we might recalibrate our enterprise to a more rational and manageable timeline. Dutifully mapping tasks to days, we would prove to ourselves that it was demonstrably impossible to do what we were already doing, and so reverted to form. When A Common Readermet its demise in 2006, I had already subsumed its perpetual cycle of deadlines into what would come to seem an eternal one, as I turned my writing attention to 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, originally promised for delivery in 2008 and finally finding its way between covers ten years later. Not a weekend went by in all that time that I wasn’t, in some recess of my spirit, entangled in conversation with the increasingly quixotic task of completing that book. Obviously, shorter and firmer deadlines work better; still, without at least the idea of the book’s deadline to weigh down my distraction and anchor it to prose on a page, however belatedly, the more than half-million words it contains would never have been written.

In May 2019, James Parker published “The Lost Art of Deadline Writing” in The Atlantic. In this review of a Library of America volume, The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins, edited by John Schulian, Parker—for my money one of the best writers in America—culminates a string of arresting quotations from sportswriters past with a paragraph that evokes with precision and élan the intoxications of composing under pressure:

And they were on deadline! We’re all on deadline, of course, at all times and in all places.The last judgment, as Kafka pointed out, “is a summary court in perpetual session.” But a print deadline—the galloping clock, the smell of the editor—is a particular concentration of mortal tension. The brain on deadline does whatever it can: It improvises, it compresses, it contrives, it uses the language and the ideas that are at hand. Inspiration comes or it doesn’t. Here the writer is an athlete—performing under pressure and, if he or she is good, delivering on demand.

Which goes some way toward explaining why, after five decades of deadline thralldom, I am sitting at my desk in pre-dawn light writing this brief essay for my newsletter, to meet a mail date no one cares about but me, in hope of finding, somewhere along the way, a phrase that will bring a bounce to my spirit’s gait, just the way the momentum of movement can surprise a body into gracefulness, transforming training and muscle and effort into fluency.