Three things about deadlines
Two of them are obvious. The third took me about eleven years and a broken promise to a publisher.
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I delivered a book four years late. The contract said 2020 and the manuscript went in in 2024, and in between there were eleven separate conversations with an editor who was more patient than the situation deserved.
So I have some standing on this, though not the kind anyone would want. Three things, of which only the third is worth the price I paid for it.
The third one is the only one that matters
- A deadline someone else is waiting on works. One you set yourself does not. This is unfair and universally true and there is no way round it except by involving a person.
- A deadline compresses the work and degrades it in a predictable direction: more assertion, fewer sources, worse jokes. If you know the direction you can partly correct for it.
- A deadline is a promise about a date, not about a quality. This is the one that took eleven years. I had understood my deadline as a promise to deliver a good book, so every time it was not good yet I concluded I could not deliver. The deadline was never about that. It was a promise about a date, and I broke it four times while protecting a standard nobody had asked me for.
(My editor, on being told this, said she had assumed I understood that in 2021. She had not thought to mention it, on the grounds that it was obvious.)
Four years late, eleven conversations, and one thing learned: the date was the promise, and the quality was always going to be my problem either way.
