A Note on Deadlines & Serendipity
As writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library, I was due to give a talk about writing into the dark just as I was completing the final pages of a novel. Because the dark (the unplanned, undiscovered story) is a sacred space to me, I didn’t want to speak about the work-in-progress for my talk, despite its near-completion. No matter how late in the creative process I am, the development of a story is as unknown to me at the end as it was in the beginning. If the final pages were known to me as I approached them, I wouldn’t believe them. I couldn’t trust them. They would seem … available or convenient or—worse—contrived. Surely, they would belong to the pattern of other works of art (and even archetypes), rather than being unique to this novel.
Picture of the Hawarden woodland taken during one of Caoilinn's walks.
The closer I get to the end of a novel, the more challenging it can be to protect the remaining blank canvass: those sacred white pages. It can also become increasingly difficult to carve out non-writing writing time: for reading, for wandering directionless in the psychic space of the novel, for eavesdropping to hear how people outside your novel sound, for staring at clouds. This late-stage non-writing writing helps me to abandon false, convenient solutions and paths forward … even if it’s very scary to pause when a deadline looms, or when I’ve already overshot it!
I had yet to write the talk. I had yet to write this blog post, which is a week overdue! I was behind on my novel deadline (albeit, the deadline was self-imposed … but necessary for reasons I can’t begin to describe). I had many starred emails. But I trusted the urge to stop writing. I spent a day in the library as one of my characters. She dictated what books I should slip from the shelf. The morning was barely through when she (the character) opened a Bertrand Russell text, at random, on the following passage:
‘… however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely ascertainable knowledge. …
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. … Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which is raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
… Unless we can so enlarge our interests to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. … In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife. One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation.’
So my character came upon an entry point into the talk I would give. So my writing method was granted permission: what is a ‘tyranny of custom’ if not the compulsion towards the knowable, familiar, pre-approved pattern of creative development; the tried-and-tested formula or thought. Certainly, productivity can be a tyranny: neoliberalism deals in deadlines. One way of escaping the ‘tyranny of custom’ is by listening to silence (the white page) as closely as to noise (the expectation), and by following unanswerable questions across a page—as a reader and as a writer—even if they don’t reveal any cozy familiar pattern. Especially then. 
The view from the bedroom window. Taken during Caoilinn's residency.