Writers' deadlines

Having trouble meeting your next deadline? You're not alone, says Jonathan Mahler reports in the New York Times (free registration required).

Novelists are prisoners of their own freedom, a paradox that leads to situations like the one so memorably described by Grady Tripp, the narrator of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys: "It. . . stood at 2,611 pages, each of them revised and rewritten a half-dozen times. And yet for all of those words expended in charting the eccentric paths of my characters through the violent blue heavens I had set them to cross, they had not even reached their zeniths. I was nowhere near the end."

As Mahler points out, finishing a book can become almost traumatic.

Letting go is not always easy. Working on a book can provide authors with a sense of security. It confers on them the sense - illusory though it may be - of being employed, a comforting thing to someone who wakes up every morning without a compelling reason to put on a pair of pants. And a book is more than a job; it's a colleague, too.