Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work: Set a Deadline

Scott Myers
Go Into The Story
Published in
3 min readMar 10, 2009

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Nothing like the fear of being publicly humiliated to motivate you to write.

There are a lot of find things to motivate a writer to write.

The desire to craft a wonderful story…
The fantasy of writing a million dollar spec script…
The realization of putting on paper the singular story your life has led you to tell.

And then there’s possibly the best motivator of all… humiliation. Or the threat thereof.

If you can orchestrate events so that the fear of being humiliated by not writing is greater than the fear of having people read what you do write, then you will be well on your way to getting your ass in chair and plowing ahead to FADE OUT.

So how to ensure this threat of humiliation?

Set a deadline. Not just any deadline. A public deadline!

Prepare an email in which you state your goal — “I am going to finish a draft of my long cherished screenplay ‘Leopard Lips’” — and most…

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