Erin Lodes

So now I’m going to talk about deadlines, which were a HUGE part of how I finished this freaking thing. When you have a publisher, the deadlines are set for you. (Or so I’ve heard anyway.) You have an actual contractual obligation to finish the book by a certain date. But when you’ve been tinkering around with the same novel for six — now, holy shit, seven — years, and you don’t have a publisher? Well, you have to set your own deadlines.

This was an incredibly important part of my process because I am a perfectionist. I will go over and over and over a chapter, switching around little words and sentences here and there until I convince myself the whole thing is probably crap and start from scratch when really it was a solid chapter a week ago. At some point you just have to declare something finished. That was something I had to learn.

So I decided I wanted to have this book finished before the New Year and then I set deadlines based on that. A deadline to finish the outline (and I’ve become convinced that if you want to write a good book quickly, outlines are important). A deadline to finish the fast draft. A deadline to finish the first edit pass (which was really composed of a million tiny edit passes broken up into chapter-sized bites). A deadline to finish the FINAL revision.

I wrote the deadlines down on a calendar and I told my Stephen and my best friends so I had some accountability. I decided on rewards for myself. After meeting this deadline I can read that V.E. Schwab book I’ve been waiting to read. After meeting that one I can watch the latest episode of the Handmaid’s Tale. After this one I can get my hair cut. After the big one I can get a tattoo I’ve been wanting for a while. Rewards, I think, are important.

Having John (my amazing writing coach) also helped a lot with meeting deadlines. Because now I had someone else I was sending my work to. I had an exterior pressure, someone I knew was waiting for that next chapter I was working on. So I learned to call something finished even when another edit pass might have resulted in a different word at the end of that sentence or deleting that particular adverb or whatever.

I knew I had to finish a certain number of chapters a week to meet my deadline, so when I was getting stuck going over and over and over a chapter, I would book an appointment with John because then I had to send him whatever it was that I had. And once I sent the chapter to him, I had to move onto the next chapter. It helped me keep forward motion.

I can’t tell you how many times I sent an email to John that said, “I’m sending you this so I stop fucking around with it.”

And it worked. I learned to stop looking for perfection and start looking for this is good or this is really good or, sometimes even, this is awesome. I learned to recognize when something was good enough to move on to the next piece. I kept moving forward.

And honestly it’s a bit scary, to have actually finished a book (even though I still have one more revision pass to go at the time I’m writing this). Because now when people ask to read it, I can’t tell them it’s not finished. At some point there is no making it better. At some point you just have to call it done and move on to the next book.

You have to finish things.

And it’s scary as hell.

But I want to be a published author. I want to make a living from this someday.

So I have to finish things.

I have to keep moving forward.

How I Finished My Novel is going to be an ongoing blog series detailing how I finish this freaking thing. I know, I know, you could probably tell that from the title… I’m being helped along on this journey by John Adamus, who is amazing and you’ll hear a lot about him in this blog series.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One and start from the beginning.