Deadlines and discoveries

 

Deadlines are wonderful things, looming there on the horizon getting ever closer. They provide impetus for getting words on the page and, in some cases, can be the inspiration which provides a topic for a piece, an article, a book. Whatever the work, deadlines push creativity. Which was why I chose to sign up for the more advanced family history writers' retreat in January, the one where we are supposed to have 5000 words of our manuscript written before the retreat begins.

I had about 700 words to begin with. So, a significant amount of words needed to appear on the page to meet the January deadline. It wouldn't be that difficult though if those were the only words to be produced but they aren't. Then I discovered writing sprints, Zoom meetings where writers get together to commit time, usually an hour, to their writing. The sprints were doing wonders for my fictional writing, a novel being one of my other projects. If I committed to enough sprints, I should be able to alternate between the novel and the 5000 words of narrative non-fiction about my ancestor.

Writing sprints work well for fiction where you can make things up as you go along. I discovered that narrative non-fiction is a different story. I was able to write part of the ongoing narrative but there were a lot of blank spaces where specific facts need to be looked up and whole passages which required research. Added to that, the facts and research sources needed to be noted to make my family story a useful family history source. Looks like this will take longer than I thought but, without a deadline to work towards, it would take infinitely longer.