The Ticking Clock: Your Imaginary Friend.

The ticking clock, presaging the arrival of the deadline, is a splendid inducement, the agar agar or other nourishing medium on which story begins to munch, then outright feed.  If you procrastinate much longer, try to think things through for just a few moments more, surely the idea will come, a gift from the indulgent uncle who has been so tolerant of you all these years.  Procrastination is your individual way of hastening the process, creating the atmosphere for the work to come forth, identify itself, then begin the process of revelation.

No matter that the indulgent uncle's gifts are never quite the things you'd wished for, they are nevertheless tangible manifestations of a process in place.  You notice, sometimes in your procrastinating clean-up and desk tidying, other times as you stumble about your rooms in search of a particular thing that has no relationship to your writing life, a clutter, a graveyard of gifts that seemed pleasing enough at the time but now cause you to wonder about your sense of taste.

Add another element to the recipe; add the atmosphere of surrender, of recognition that this time, it has finally caught up with you; you can't do it.  You have exhausted all your ideas and strategies, your jokes instead of stories, your technique masquerading as story.

Ticking clock and admission of surrender usually do the trick, a one-two punch that admittedly has to be sincerely felt before it can work.  But it does work, just as the process of giving up on trying to recall a name, a lyric from a song, some splash of memory hastily filed in your already crowded mind produces the answer you sought.  Many products forged in this particular fire of ticking clock and surrender are things you are more likely to want to save:  they are gifts from the process, not from the indulgent uncle.

Thus you arrive at an awareness:  if you are driven to begin setting it down somewhere, your notebook, a legal pad, the backs of the interminable index cards about your desk and work areas, there is no need for the ticking clock, no need for the surrender notion that you have written yourself cold, out of enthusiasm.  The awareness has to do directly with thought.  Thought in the beginning is a distraction.  Stories should not be thought about until they are in a completed draft form.

The awareness continues:  many of your things are begun in the forge of despair, arriving in some kind of focus only after you have despaired of ever having another impulse to begin.  An equal number, however, are begun with enthusiasm or a sense of mischief, or a desire for revenge or a wish to rewrite your own history.  All those stimuli are, of course, feelings.  Beginnings come from the crucible of feelings as opposed to the textbooks of thought.

Story comes rushing forth like a tube of toothpaste too tightly squeezed at the outset.  Trying to think a story out is like trying to get a cat to come when you call it.

Devices and Deadlines

device--any stratagem, trait, or narrative technique that triggers consequences in a story; a framing pattern for including one or more stories within a longer work; a catch-all for narrative technique, metaphor, props, mistaken identity.

Although the reader may not see the device immediately, its cumulative effect begins to tell at some point and the reader goes forth, making assumptions about the left-handed individual who walks with a slight limp, causing the reader at the appropriate moment of hearing the sound of a halting step behind the protagonist in the alleyway to suspect that the protagonist has been betrayed and is about to suffer unknown consequences. 

Another such device is a frequent cliche in low-grade horror films where, #1, the protagonist is specifically warned about going up to the attic, and #2, the protagonist goes up to the attic, where it is quite dark and, #3, steps on something that produces an eerie yowl. #4, the genesis of the yowl was a cat, identification of which produces the catharsis out of early Greek drama, setting the protagonist for stepping something which produces an eerie yowl but the something is not a cat, it is the reason the protagonist was warned against going to the attic in the first place.

Device may also be point of view, particularly if the use of that particular point of view goes out on strike against a convention such as having a story or novel narrated by a dead person, such as the narrator of Machado de Asisi's Epitaph for a Small Winner or Alice Seybold's The Lovely Bones.

See also Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, in which two identical-appearing boys have their roles transposed, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in which the character Viola pretends to be a young man, in which guise her love is sought by a woman, a device that could have stopped right there had Shakespeare not recognized the added device of having Viola fall in love with the man she is now serving as a confidante.

See also alternate universe novels such as those of the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman, in which the device becomes an entire universe parallel to but slightly different from our own.

See also details.

deadline--the time by which one or more characters in a story have to make a decision; the time by which a character was to have completed an assigned task.

Often a moment of exquisite tension, the arrival of the deadline is a threat even in the abstract sense of the main characters in a story being reminded that the meteor will strike in one day, the dam will burst by noon tomorrow, the planet Earth is doomed in two years if scientists cannot determine a way to shift the tilt of it on its axis, a patient in an episode of House, M.D., being consumed by her own immune system and only five minutes left in the episode, a wrongly convicted man facing lethal injection in six hours unless... Thus time running out; the guttering candle, the remaining grains of sand in an hour glass, the needle flickering even on a hybrid auto's fuel tank.

Deadlines are stress situations writ large; they infuse story with a necessary sense of inevitability, which is, after all, one of the ways story takes an alternate route from life.

The Third Deadline

There are two kinds of deadlines, those you set for yourself, and those set for you.

The ones you set for yourself often have some specific time and goal set about in the literary equivalent of a linear accelerator, whirling them into a spin that will end in collision.

There are numerous age-related deadlines as in an income of X dollars by age Y; being published in any form by A age, in book form by B age. That sort of thing. I had one age related deadline I'd set for myself: Being paid to return to New York for something related to publishing. Missed by just under a year, which was acceptable.

The goals set for you involve your need to have something ready for delivery on or before a specified date. An inveterate procrastinator on such deadlines, I have vivid and varied memories of such deadlines. The one I have for tomorrow was amazingly met less than half an hour ago, leaving me with a mixture of uncertainty and a slight tinge of regret. Meeting deadlines as a result of super-adrenal, coffee-driven intensity seems so a part of the process that I am still evaluating the sense of calm. Perhaps it isn't such a bad way after all, being ahead of the deadline.

Of course there is a third kind of deadline. Were I not to mention it, one of you would There is the time-bomb (bombs) deadline life has set for you, the ultimate being the one in which Life has the last word because it is for you The deadline, the delivery date for your Life. In October of 2003, Alex Koper, M.D. delivered a deadline, the result of which was an appearance by you on December 8 of that year. This deadline required nothing written from you, simply an acknowledgment that a portion of your body was forfeit for a greater good. Seemed like a good bargain at the time. As time progressed, the bargain continued to increase in value to the point where you rarely think about the consequences of not having met the deadline, rarely dwell on the point of collision between you and the cancer cells or, indeed, the so-called floater cells that might have been circulating their own deadlines within your landscape.

There are any number of these third deadlines burbling along in your slipstream, deadlines brought on by the aging process, deadlines brought along by your sense of the way the world and the universe are unfolding about you. It is definitely your plan now to regard these third-type deadlines as you have so frequently regarded first- and second- stage deadlines, with a last minute tantivy, a stay-up-all-night, blaze-it-through approach bordering on but not lapsing into arrogance, because where deadlines are concerned and most other things, you are not arrogant but instead impudent.

Impudence is your equivalent of a tartan plaid, it and enthusiasm take you to these meetings with Fate that you set or others set for you. From all the available tools in all the available catalogs of useful, those seem best to fit such basic Swiss Army devices as curiosity and love.