I have a love/hate relationship with deadlines. I can't stand them for things like grading, paying bills, and making connection flights, but I love them for the creative process.
When I was younger I thought the creative process didn't need deadlines, but the longer I create the more I see how immature that kind of thinking is. Deadlines are critical to taking the work to the next level.
Raw Talent Only Gets You So Far
I'm a creative person. I always have been. When other kids were watching TV, I was staging and performing plays in my garage.
I used to pretend I was a radio DJ and would "broadcast" from my bedroom. I did whole shows.
I dig drawing, though I suck at it, and photography has always been in my blood. One of my first "real" jobs was as a photographer for the City of Tulsa. I'd snap shots of maintenance crews fixing lines and repairing roads. Exciting stuff.
And, then there has always been the writing.
Writing is my true love, my mistress and wife. I'm lucky to have it. Sure we've been on again, off again but, for the most part, I've been writing creatively all my life. I started writing short stories and poems and eventually worked around to screenplays, ad copy, speeches, and novels.
It was during the ad copy years when I first experienced deadlines, and I respected them for their importance and function. Working under multiple deadlines for multiple projects helped me create stronger concepts and write quicker, tighter, more effective copy. As much as I understood this concept in my day job, I didn't make the connection to the importance of deadlines in my creative work until just a few years ago.
I'm no guru creativity master by any means, but I think creativity stems from two places: the heart and the mind.
Creativity Is Born In The Heart
Creative people have passion. When a student of mine says, "But I'm not creative," it boils my blood. You just identified yourself to me as someone who has no passion, no zest for life. Either that or you don't understand what it means to be creative.
Passion is the fuel for creativity, and you need fuel to be creative. Creating something takes energy, but how much fuel you have depends on your passion for the subject. For some things you've barely got a spark, but for others you could burn down Winterfell.
Creativity Is Shaped In The Mind
Having passion is one part of the creative process. The second part is sculpting that passion. Raw passion is beautiful, but even the wildest of flowers needs pruning to grow stronger. This is where critical thinking, decision-making, and basic mechanics come in. Without the mind, creative pursuits have a hard time developing into anything tangible.
For some people creative pursuits are just chicken soups for the soul or hobbies to pass time or to avoid interaction with family members. Other people want to push their creative projects beyond the comforts of their home and into venues where strangers can enjoy the work, as well. Whichever side of the creative coin you land on, deadlines are critical to producing creative work.
Deadlines Help You Deliver
Even if you don't want to get published, or show, or make it big with a creative pursuit in some way, you still need deadlines to feed your passion. You don't have to have tight deadlines or even hard deadlines, but you still need some kind of deadline to help you finish the piece. Otherwise months, years, or even decades could pass without you actually completing something, and it's the completion of something, the standing back and marveling at your handiwork, that is the fuel for your passion.
Hold Yourself Accountable
Developing your creativity is like exercising your body. You've got to get the heart pumping so that the mind can focus. If you don't workout consistently you get soft, winded, and when you do workout, you hurt muscles you didn't even know you had.
Those who workout consistently can push themselves harder, have more stamina and energy, and aren't nearly as sore the next day.
Setting frequent deadlines and holding yourself accountable to hit those deadlines can help you produce a volume of work, and like Ira Glass said, it's only in producing a volume of work that your work will actually improve.
Give It A Go
Try setting weekly or monthly deadlines for your creative pursuits. Start small with, say, a poem a week or whatever creative activity you enjoy doing. Do this for a month and see if the quality of your poems (or other work) improve. I bet it does.
I also bet that if you upped the ante and tried two poems a week for the next month, the work would improve even more. More than likely you'll also find the work gets easier to produce because your creative muscles are starting to get ripped.
Will every poem/script/photo/sculpture/dance/video you create be amazing works of art? No, but the chances of a few of them being amazing works of art increase when you have more finished pieces to choose from.
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