Despite all the writing I have done, I am a kind of slacker – at least according to the conventional wisdom. Writing is supposed to require discipline, “will-power,” and punctuality with deadlines.

Though I adhered strictly to deadlines in school, imposing them on myself for writing rarely led to my finishing stories. Deadlines, and the accompanying threat of punishment, induced terrible dread. Rebellious feelings followed. I procrastinated. I always felt like I was fighting myself.

But not all writing goals are deadlines. I have written a blog post every week – on purpose – for the last two years with only a couple of skips, but the due date is subject to change if I discover an individual project needs more time. My consistency has nothing to do with “discipline.” It has everything to do with loving to write.

With my blogs, I have never bribed myself with rewards or threatened myself with punishment. The reward for writing a blog is writing a blog. The reward for publishing a blog is publishing a blog. The only punishment is not getting to publish it. Otherwise, I know that not publishing a blog is not a disaster, which means I am writing freely.

Unlike ordinary writing goals, deadlines suggest inflexibility; even the name deadline suggests that morbid disaster will follow if I fail to make my sacrifice to the punctuality gods. In the past, I would inflict self-punishment for failing to meet my deadlines: I would beat myself up, cudgeling myself with guilt and shame the way I imagined a boss might do. It never worked. Oddly enough, what did finally work was giving up.

Not completely. I do have one rule, which is to write at least one sentence a day. If I do that much, I am off the hook guilt-wise, yet I hardly ever stop after a sentence; stopping takes too much discipline.

That is because, when I am writing freely, I usually enter a tranquil, and sometimes euphoric, state in which time passes without my being aware of it. I feel like a SCUBA diver admiring coral and interesting fish, until at last I come up, surprised to find the sun occupying a different position in the sky than when I began. Writing because I want to write and love to write is a different experience than writing under threats and self-coercion.

Even though I consider punitive deadlines – for myself – a discredited experiment, a friend recently argued that since I am trying to juggle so many writing projects – including the final edits of my novel The Ghosts of Chimera – I should reconsider my anti-deadline stance. Embracing deadliness, my friend suggested, would turn me into a bona-fide business person, rather than an accidentally prolific slacker.

Why did my friend encourage deadlines if I was doing fine without them? Well one down side to deadline-free writing is that with my fiction stories – and even my blog posts sometimes – I rarely have any idea how long they are going to take. I have spent as much as twenty hours on a four page blog post in order to make it exactly as I had envisioned it, even though I could have produced a passable product in much less time. To most people this is lunacy.

Granted, I would love to get the same results more quickly. A recent story I had hoped to finish in a weekend turned into an eighteen page mini-novel that took three weeks to perfect. I finished it and was happy with it – but if I had been working for an impatient client or employer, I would likely have received a spirited knuckle-rapping. There are disadvantages to working the way I work, but one major benefit outweighs them: When I write, I am fully absorbed in what I am doing.

Every story is different, so I let the story “tell” me how much time it requires. This attitude goes against the common sense “disciplined” approach many professional writers espouse.

However, my friend was persistent, suggesting I should try deadlines again, using a light reward-and-punishment system along the lines of giving myself cookies if I met my goal and depriving myself of cookies if I failed.

Although I have blogged against such practices, I accepted the challenge because I was curious to see if anything had changed. I wondered if deadlines would work for me now, after all I have written; it had been a long time since I had even attempted them.

I decided to try it on a short story I was already working on. I set the deadline for a week later. On the final day, I realized that there would be no cookies for me. To fully realize my story concept, I needed more time.

Considering that only a cookie was at stake, I was surprised at how many of the old anxieties surfaced, including feelings of guilt for not meeting my goal. It was not really about the cookies. I could still eat cake and ice-cream. What stung was the old sense of failure.

Even the desire to flee my writing for a less stressful activity re-emerged. I became more aware of clock hands creeping as I wrote. I felt impatient with myself. I was not enjoying my writing and wanted to quit – something that has not happened to me in many years. My mood nose-dived, and I had a sickening flashback of the nightmarish case of block that stymied my creative efforts right after my bipolar disorder diagnosis.

I asked myself. What am I doing? Why would I ever want to return to a system of self-motivation that has never worked for me? I wrote down a list of problems I had with deadlines. The obsession with punctuality removes me from the tranquil state where my ideas flow freely. It engenders impatience with myself; instead of giving myself credit for what I have done, I focus on areas where I have lapsed. Instead of feeling rich with creative ideas, I feel like I am suffering from a time famine.

Besides, sometimes I lose perspective on a story and need to put it away for a day or two so I can return to it with fresh eyes. In the world of deadlines, putting a project away for days is considered “procrastination” when in reality it is sometimes a necessary part of the creative process. Moreover, making a deadline supreme means I may never draw out the full potential of my story idea, since the compulsion to rush can drive writers to skip important steps.

However, it would be nice to know, ahead of time, how long my stories would take to write. It would be nice to say, “I am going to write a totally awesome story in two hours,” and then do it. Maybe I could cut out certain time-draining practices that do nothing to enhance my story. When working on an unfinished piece, I have a habit of rereading, multiple times, the passages I love. I only do it to make myself feel good. There is no other benefit. I am willing to be more cognizant of such unnecessary steps if it means I can write more stories without sacrificing quality.

However, rushing would mean sacrificing my creative freedom; my ability to focus on the writing itself rather than the clock; my sense of owning my writing rather than subordinating myself to an imaginary authority who is empowered to punish me by instilling guilt for disobedience – or by withholding cookies.

My experiment has confirmed my need to shun deadlines. There shall be no more cookie deprivation for not punching out X amount of words by a certain date or time. Writing – and cookies – are far too important to me for me to ruin them with discipline. Too many writers view writing as an unpleasant chore that triggers misery and drives them to procrastination. Other writers, obviously not related to me, claim to be inspired by deadline stress.

I will never be one of them, but that is okay. Even though I write slowly, I am about to publish two novels and two short story collections. Publishing books is more rewarding than cookies could ever be.

And that is saying a lot.

If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here. Also my new novel “The Ghosts of Chimera” will soon be published by the folks over at Rooster and Pig Publishing.