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Whenever someone asks me what keeps me motivated to write, I only half-jokingly reply, “Deadlines.”

Over the years, I’ve become fairly disciplined about my writing; I may not write fiction every day, but I do tend to prioritize it over other things I could be doing, such as reading other books, playing video games, blogging, watching TV, or sleeping. That’s most of what it takes to be productive, assuming you don’t have other things eating up your time, like a demanding job or taking care of a new baby. But I can still procrastinate, like writers do — though that usually means I make up for that misspent time later, because no matter what else is going on, having a contractual obligation to turn in a manuscript by a specific date goes a long way toward making me productive.

One thing I’ve learned since my first novel was published is there’s a world of difference between writing and writing under contract. Before you have sold your book, or even signed with an agent, writing can take as long as it takes to make the book “perfect.” Years, even! But once you have that book deal and publishers are filling their catalogs and marketing plans are being developed, you have to not only write a good book, but you have to do it on a schedule — perhaps only a matter of months. (This is perhaps one reason why second books sometimes aren’t as well reviewed as debuts, even if the author theoretically should improve with each subsequent novel.) Sure, sometimes writers miss their deadlines and the world doesn’t end, but in general, I like to follow through on my commitments, and I want to be viewed as a professional so people will want to keep working with me.

Leonardo da Vinci famously said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” This rings true for me when I’m on deadline because no matter how pleased I am with the “final” product, I always feel like it could be better if I only had a little more time. Most recently, at the end of July I turned in my first draft of Against All Silence, the sequel to The Silence of Six — mostly on time! Although I had a reasonable deadline, when I was supposed to be working on it I was also:

• Taking care of a baby
• Doing freelance writing to pay bills
• Packing an apartment
• Moving to a new city
• Unpacking
• Stripping wallpaper and painting our new home

With time running out, I made up for months of low productivity by writing every day in a library — averaging 5,000 words a day. (On a good day, I can write about 1,000 words an hour. Drafty words!) Nothing focuses me like a looming deadline! Fortunately, I had a detailed outline that only derailed towards the end (which I was anticipating), my previous day job had a heavy workload that forced me to write as fast as a journalist, and I had a new writing process, as I mentioned back in January.

My usual approach to drafting is to keep moving forward until the end, because the momentum keeps me going and I don’t want to waste time revising earlier scenes or chapters that I might change repeatedly or ultimately cut. This time I tried something new: I wrote on my Alphasmart Neo, a standalone word processor with just a keyboard and a small screen that displays only four lines of text, transferring completed chapters into Scrivener. And rather than stopping to research every little thing as I wrote — a time waster! — I left placeholders: “TK” wherever I needed to look something up or fill in missing text. (There were a lot of those, from looking up street names to particular models of cars.)

I never could have met my deadline without these time-saving tactics*, although the end result feels like a rougher draft than I usually like to share with anyone. I often refer to my first drafts as the “zero” or “vomit” drafts, but my tight schedule meant I couldn’t clean it up much or research everything before hitting Send; yes, I had to abandon my unfinished work to meet my deadline. Which led to me Tweeting:

Writers, how rough are your first drafts? Like, the ones you turn in to your editors? Asking for a friend.

— E.C. Myers (@ecmyers) July 20, 2015

Of course, because all writers are different, this prompted a range of responses — from very polished first drafts to drafts about as rough as mine, which someone pointed out leaves room for editors to help guide the revision. I like that. It was important to remind myself that this is still only the first draft, and I will have time to make the book better in subsequent drafts and editing passes. It’s not like we’re publishing Go Set a Watchman here. But yeah, I’m still nervous about the edit letter that’s sure to arrive any day now…

So now I put the question to you: How rough are your first drafts? When do you feel ready to share your manuscript with your critique partners, writing groups, agent, or editor? Also, do you have any tips and tricks for meeting deadlines and/or writing quickly? Please share in the comments below!

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*On the flip side, it took a long time to format the novel in Scrivener and Word because the Alphasmart Neo only spits out plain text. Bah!

When in my classes, I plead, beg, urge, encourage my students not simply to write but to re-write, many have no idea how much the rewrite means to me; they've no conception of how many rewrites I do to get a page, a scene, a chapter right. Not just right but perfectly right to my final perfect LIKING.  Of course, it is not always easy to determine when it's as good as it's going to get, but there comes a moment in the many rewrites of a scene or chapter that screams at you--you're DONE DONE.  But then you turn it over to a number of editors, and guess what?  You're not done.

However, you've now been away from the story long enough--or that chapter long enough--that you can be objective with it and yourself, so that when suggestions anew are made, you can deal with them without freaking out (as the younger generation is want to say). The story or scene or chapter is not correctable inside your head, and so the first and rough drafts have to be produced before you can ever get to the process of rewriting and revamping and reorganizing and re-this and re-that. Once it is out of the gray matter and on the white page, you now have product to work with...to mold and shape, to hammer and saw...and you see it and feel it as a product rather than nebulous, foggy thoughts and voices careening about your mind's deepest recesses and corridors.

Some authors say they hate the rewrite and this is understandable because once a story's been told (the plot is put on paper), it can't help but get old; it gets older as your rewrite, too. However, in my own case, I get my best lines and most inspiration and insights into character(s) and best plot twists and the occasional ingenious idea or "movement" in the action or situation during the laborious rewrites. Whole incidents not there before worm their way in, insisting on being a part; whole new characters crop up insisting on being in the story. Layers develop and the once straightforward story takes on a character of the onion needing to be peeled away so as to get at the core. Themes emerge that were not there until that sixth, seventh, or tenth rewrite.

This certainly has been the case with my Children of Salem, a purely historical novel set in Salem Witch Hunt days wherein our hero is trying to conduct a courting of his childhood sweetheart when her mother is excommunicated and locked up as a witch....and this was certainly true of my 11-book medical examiner series begun with Killer Instinct and predating Bones and Silence of the Lambs.  This was definitely the case with my recently completed and gone on sale Kindle Original entitled Titanic 2012 - Curse of RMS Titanic.  The thing grew and grew with each successive rewrite, and I believe and feel with all my heart that it grew for the better and not the worse.

Chapter 30 - wow, OMG....how many times did I have to rewrite Chapter 30, far more than all the other chapters, and why? For one, it needed a great deal of attention from the get-go and a lot of rewriting even before I turned it over to early readers/editors. Knowing I need all the help I can get and not shying from that fact, I had as many folks read the early, ugly drafts as I could manage to find. The book was torn from limb to limb, as my early readers did not spare the rod or spoil the child/book...nor did they spare the slings and arrows for its author. "How couuuld you?"/ "Call yourself an English Professor, do you?"/ "What were you thinking?"/ "Are you sure you want to be a writer?"/ "Ever et raw meat?" ---OK, I exaggerate and none of my early readers are that blunt or harsh, but I KNEW what they were thinking.

Chapter 30 - as with other chapters just required so much attention in large part due to the fact I had NO idea what I was talking about. I knew what I wanted to say, what I wanted to accomplish, but as my final editor pointed out, he being a genius with special effects of the science fiction order: "You'd be laughed off the face of the Earth had "THAT" gone to press." Fortunately,