I worked with a reporter who always filed his copy on time. He was done. He was proud of being done. And on time. Except he had to check one last fact. He had to land one last quote. He just had to write a new lede or a more satisfying ending.

Editor: So you aren’t done.

Reporter: Oh no, I’m done. Except for one more thing.

This man suffered from perfectionism. This is surprising, because he worked for a newspaper and his life was deadlines. The surest way to defeat perfectionism is to face a deadline.

Where do you go to get a deadline?

If you’re a writer, you will have to create your own deadline. For example: I will finish the second draft of my novel by Dec. 31.

Or you can meet an editor’s deadline. There’s always a contest somewhere, or a special issue, or an editorial call for something only you can write.

Of course, unless you’re working for an employer where they have the power to fire your procrastinating ass, there is no penalty for missing your deadline. The coffee shop to which I sometimes flee will put coffee in front of me in January if I’m still working on my novel. This is a mind game, and the game is being played in your mind.

So let’s win it.

I recommend that you pick a realistic date to work toward. And when that date arrives, your story or novel or creative nonfiction hybrid is done. If you have to check one last fact, land one last quote, or rewrite every fucking thing, then your story isn’t done. It may never be done, because you will never be perfect.

Unless you are writing solely for an audience of one (you), it is now time to submit what you wrote to the test of the market.

Always remember Richie and Carl, the school board administrators in Community. After reviewing a new commercial for their pathetic school, Carl says with satisfaction, “It’s better than good. It’s good enough.”

Make your work as good as you can and then shove it out the door. Move on to your next idea, your next project, your next obsession. If an editor wants some improvements, that editor will ask for them. They are not shy.

The suspense and thriller writer Dean R. Koontz once said that he rewrites every page dozens of times before moving to the next page. I am not going to argue with Koontz, who has published more than 100 books while I am struggling with up to one (1) book. Perfectionism works for him. But for the rest of us…frankly, we don’t have that kind of time. We have a deadline.

Decades ago, at the highest levels of tournament chess, after six or more hours of exhausting play, it was time to adjourn. The master with the turn in hand wrote his move on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and handed it to the all-powerful arbiter.

The master’s seconds would spend the night working on all possible variations stemming from the sealed move. The opponent’s seconds would try to guess the move in the envelope and work out a defense or a counterattack. The two players would sleep, unless the guy who sealed the move realized he had screwed up. Then it was the sacred job of his seconds to prevent him from jumping out a window.

The next day, the arbiter would open the envelope and the master would make the move he had written down the day before. Many a game was adjourned two or three times. Chess, like the Cold War, went on forever.

None of this mishegoss happens anymore. Today, if your game goes into extra innings, there are rules to guarantee that you will finish the game on the day you started the game.

In writing, procrastination is something like adjournment. You get lost in the writing and suddenly realize you have to stop. Your boss insists you come to work, your kids insist on being fed, your partner insists that you go to therapy together. Or the clock was sucked into a time warp and it’s suddenly 2 a.m. You hit SAVE or cap your pen or throw something over the typewriter to keep the dust or the cat off.

What have you written? Have you written anything? Have you been staring? At a sheet of paper, a bird in flight, the wall in front of you?

Been there.

The only thing I don’t have in procrastination that the masters had in adjournment is my team of trusty seconds. If only Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald could huddle around my manuscript with their felt-tip markers, drinking too much coffee while recalculating my plot and character arcs.

“Get some sleep,” Emily says to me. “You must start early—and take your dogs.”

Procrastination, in my experience, is no big deal. It’s your brain working behind the scenes, under the hood, beyond the horizon, above the clouds. Your brain needs more time. When your brain is ready, your brain will write. You’ll find a god in every golden cloister.

My revision of my novel slowed this past week as it dawned on me just how much rewriting will be involved in my revision. I am not simply re-imagining my original vision; I am writing thousands of words to create the new vision. It sounds tiring. It is tiring. It’s supposed to be.

Back to work, people!

I became aware of myself as a writer at the age of 11, in Mr. Gray’s sixth-grade English class. Every Friday was Composition Day. It was our challenge to write something there at our desks, on our ruled paper, and read it before the class. Some Fridays, we had an assignment, or what today would be called a prompt. On other Fridays, we were free to write whatever we wanted.

On those Fridays in that long-ago year I discovered three things: I could write under pressure to meet a deadline. I had zero stage fright. And my fellow sixth-graders enjoyed hearing what I had written and often broke into applause.

What did I write back then? I wish I had kept those smudged pages. I can still visualize what they looked like, just as I can see certain positions I found myself in on the chess board no matter how much time passes. I wrote whatever the day’s assignment required, and when I had no one to answer to but myself I wrote about my family. They were always good for a laugh, especially if I added Martians, robots, and outfielders.

In those days, the writers I wanted to be were the writers I read: Ray Bradbury, Andre Norton, C.S. Forester, and whoever wrote the boys’ baseball books starring such stalwart sluggers as Ace Atkins. If I had started writing at the age of 6, they might have been Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon) and Robert McCloskey (Make Way for Ducklings). As I grew up and the conviction I wanted to write grew stronger, I imagined myself writing like Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and W. Somerset Maugham. And then Margie Percy, John Updike, Franz Kafka, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

When Michael Cunningham sits down to write his next novel, he has a vision of what the novel will be: “vast and revelatory and awe-inspiring. It’s a cathedral made of fire.” But:

Even if the book in question turns our fairly well, it’s never the book you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It’s an aggregation of sentences. It doesn’t remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like an insufficient translation of a mythical work.

Cunningham calls this “one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction.” Another is the knowledge that you’ll never be Ursula K. Le Guin or even Crockett Johnson. Though I believe I would’ve done a creditable job with baby ducks trying to cross a damn road.

Cunningham, in Unsayable: A Life in Writing, which is an autobiography with writing advice or a writing manual with some memoir, knows exactly what I’m trying to say:

Writing is difficult enough without adding the imperative to evolve into the writer you wish you were.

To all of you out there who are writing here in my end-of-the-year writing challenge (I should’ve thought of a better name for this), keep writing. Be kind to yourselves. And read Unsayable, which was just published. The author provides the encouragement we all need…plus drag queens and ghost stories. I would like to have seen Thomas Wolfe try that.

Thank you, Franklin A. Gray, English teacher extraordinaire. When I read his obituary, I discovered that he had also been a radio announcer under the name “The Shadow.” Rest in power.