Imagine that you’re being interviewed right before you give your Pulitzer acceptance speech (the National Book Award ceremony is next week). The reporter asks, “Oh Fabulous One, what kind of writer are you?” You think: dreamy, inquisitive, creative, esoteric, ephemeral… but it becomes painfully clear that you misunderstood the question.

The reporter wants to know about what shape your writing habit takes and how your habits impact your productivity. Wow, not nearly as glamorous as you thought. But finding out what kind of writer you naturally are can tell you a great deal about your relationship with writing and can reveal ways you can be more productive (and yes, you can always teach an old writer new tricks).

For today, let’s focus on one specific (quite common) temperament:

The Fool for a Deadline

(I use “fool” affectionately, since I am in this category.) The deadline junkie can’t get anything done unless someone else is expecting the work. Yes, writers need other writers. Although writing is usually done at your desk, alone (unless you’re collaborating with someone, and even then much of the work has to be done solo), you need to connect with other writers to ultimately be successful in achieving publication.

Support, feedback and networking are vital in today’s exceptionally competitive publishing market. However, if you can only work when those extrinsic motivators are in place, you’re lost when you don’t have someone to enforce those deadlines.

This type of writer acknowledges that he “works best under pressure.” But the truth is that he only works when under pressure. No pressure (i.e., deadline, outside expectations), no work. This writer looks back at every high school and college writing assignment and remembers how things “magically” fell into place two hours before the papers were due. A grueling two or four or six hours fraught with tension and anxiety, but hey, some great stuff was cranked out then.

No, fellow wordsmiths, this is no way to live the writing life. Take what you know about yourself, about the way you work, and reshape it into something that feels tolerable and even good.

You may have a winning idea floating around the eaves of your mind, but the world doesn’t know that. And the world won’t care if you don’t get it to them (they can’t miss what they don’t know about). So you have to find a way to motivate yourself, to manufacture that pressure you claim you work so well under. (Again, I’m guilty as charged.)

Benefit: The Fool for a Deadline can get work done. You know you can, you’ve done it. As long as someone needs it and is actively waiting for it and has handed down a date in ink, you are motivated to complete it. Good for you. You’ve proven you can work, and work well, and this is no small accomplishment with a task as difficult and lonely as writing.

Cost: At some point you might convince yourself that you can’t work unless you have that Other waiting for it. And if everyone in your life is too busy to help you enforce your deadlines (if you’re not under contract and have an editor already setting up deadlines for your work); if you don’t have the funds for a writing coach; if you haven’t found a critique group you like, then you will inevitably stumble upon times in your life when you have the will (though floundering) and the time to write, but you just don’t get it done. The future feels too amorphous and nebulous, and if no one’s really looking for what you’re working on, then what’s the point if there are so many other things that have to be done?

Other people apparently have their own lives and they don’t always care whether or not you finish your manuscript (gasp!). When you can’t rely on others, try to strike a deal with yourself: set up deadlines and enforce them on your own; offer yourself an incentive for finishing a milestone (a chapter, a draft, an outline, etc.). The incentive should be something you’d fully enjoy but something you typically wouldn’t indulge in: a movie matinee when you normally would have been working; a brick-sized brownie slathered with peanut butter and hot fudge and mounds of fresh whipped cream; a long, meandering walk in the woods (not immediately after the sundae, though). You get the idea.

The point is to honestly assess how you naturally work and then work within those parameters to be more efficient. If you decide to completely change your writing temperament (which would mean fighting against your natural inclinations), then you’ll end up being more frustrated than productive. Use the way you already work as a logical starting point, and shape your habits from there.

Lucia Zimmitti, a writing coach and independent editor, is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the Editorial Freelancers Association. Her fiction and poetry have been published in various national literary journals, and she has taught writing at the high school and college levels.

To discover more ways to improve your writing and have more fun in the process, visit ManuscriptRx and sign up for “Write Through It,” a free, monthly e-newsletter that offers tips on writing more creatively, clearly and effectively.