Pressure Makes Everything Better

Written by Walt McGough

I like to think that I’m one of those writers who is able to set a strict schedule for writing, where I wake up every morning two hours before leaving for work, get my coffee, shower and dress, and hunch over some great piece of literature for an hour. And, in theory, I’m pretty successful at this; I do in fact get up two hours early most mornings (barring an alarm malfunction), I do get coffee, I do shower (thank God), I do hunch over my computer for an hour before entering the morning commute, and I do occasionally end up with words in a document file (though “literature” is more than debatable).

Unfortunately, I find that when I’m just going day to day, writing towards some vague, undefined “future” point in time, those words tend to be a bit sparser than they should be. I can sit in front of my computer for an hour each morning, with a document open in front of me, and even be making contact between my fingers and the keys, and still only end up with a half a page of usable text. This is a mystery to me. I honestly don’t know where the rest of the time goes (though a good chunk of it is probably accountable to extra time spent choosing the “perfect” music to write by, and other distractions). One thing I do know, though: Deadlines are the be-all, end-all cure for that problem. Give me a set point when I need to have something done by, and suddenly my morning rituals are producing exponentially more pages at a time, and the number increases as each deadline looms. I also spend less and less time checking up on my favorite
blogs/sports scores/random web sites, but that’s neither here nor there.

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