Thursday, October 2, 2008

Odd but true: I love deadlines!

Really, deadlines are my best remedy for writer's block. Time pressing is stressful, but it helps a lot to realize priorities, take decisions, and stop muddling with trifles.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No wonder a deadline motivates: it creates a sudden drive to act where none existed before--or it brings to he boiling point a drive that was merely simmering, maybe forgotten or neglected, on a mental back burner.

Deadlines jump-start the mind and hot-wire new connections--connections that are creative, analytical, critical and more.

A deadline looks a lot like part of the recipe for forced innovation or forced creativity.

But it's hard to say whether the results of forced creativity or innovation are better than those you get without a deadline. Certainly they come up faster, and in greater volume.

Look at Saturday Night Live as an example. What we see on TV at the end of each week is the final product: sketches and jokes selected from a broad menu of ideas that a team of top writers and performers originate, then continually dice, reshape, cook and recook for six or seven days.

Yet not everything that appears on SNL is funny.

Is this because forced creativity doesn't always yield quality results, or because humor is so subjective that nobody will laugh at everything?

Exploring the concept of forced creativity leads to even more questions.

One question: how do you tell what's a good or productive idea, and what's not?

Another: what skills do you need to determine which is which?