Niel Gaiman on Writing Deadlines

I got this from Gaiman's blog a few days ago. I thought it was pretty inspirational, and hope it rings with other struggling writers out there.

Mr. Gaiman:

If you are writing (or doing anything else) for the sheer fun of it, and may sell it and may not, then you are on your own time, and can go throw popcorn at the TV all you want to.

If you have taken an advance or a contract, YOU ARE WORKING FOR SOMEONE ELSE, and you have the same obligation to produce quality work, ON TIME, as a soldier in Iraq does.

If you didn't know that all cats can levitate, and that it's already been studied exhaustively, then you are an idiot, and your cat thinks so too.

--Name Withheld

Mm. You were doing okay until you threw in the bit about Iraq. (I assume the flip side is, "Soldiering. Well, it's just a job. What are they complaining about? Why are they nipping off to hospitals and complaining about the facilities and treatment? Soldiers in Iraq have the same obligation not to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and not to put themselves in harm's way that a novelist in a rose-trellised cottage in Devon does.") (And I keep having fantasies about a trained platoon of Her Majesty's Armoured Novelists being put through their paces by an irascible RSM "... on the double - wait for it wait for it, what do you think you're doing, you horrible little man, contemplating litotes? -on the double, quiiiiiiiiick PLOT!")

Normally, I'm the one marching up and down trying to explain to the world that writing is a job, and it's not romantic and it's not clever and it's not special. For the most part, that's what this blog is about.

But writing fiction isn't the same as say, carpentry, patrolling a border or animal husbandry. You're making stuff up. It's a kind of weird confidence trick you play on yourself, like the Roadrunner running across the air between two peaks, where if you stop and look down you can plummet like Coyote. And getting stuff done on time isn't the same as getting it right.

I'm not sure when The Graveyard Book was meant to have been delivered, under the original contract. I do know that I had a $50,000 delivery bonus, if I handed it in by the end of December 2007, which I definitely didn't collect even a penny of, what with finishing it in March 2008. I'm pretty sure that I could have bashed something out in 2007 and got it in on time and collected the money; I am also certain that that book wouldn't have won the Newbery, and probably wouldn't have been very good. And I suspect that people who read the book would have complained that I was just churning it out for the money, and they would most definitely have been right.

But, yes. The person or organisation the writer has a contract with definitely has every right to complain, and trust me, they do. The writer is, after all, working for them, if there is a contract.

Often, with a long series, there isn't. I suspect that Stephen King's deal on the Dark Tower was that he did them as and when he was ready. It took him 34 years. Readers died, not knowing how it ended. If Steve had been killed by that minivan in 1999, nobody would have known how it ended. It would have been a tragedy, for many reasons, but contract violation would not be one of them.

Preach it, brother.