Deadlines

 

Deadlines. They are definitely killers. Imagine the number of writers who lose their heads to them? Or the fury in the eyes of a producer when you fail to meet them? It’s either your show is cancelled or you are glued with a sign at your back which cautions everybody from offering you any gig.

In 2016, the opportunity I had been waiting for all my life was presented before me. A famous producer gave me a contract. His upcoming television series demanded so much from him that he had no choice than to employ another writer.
His show, which was supposed to be an inspiration piece, intertwined with comedy, a mystery or anything loved by his audience was not really the problem. My only concern was the fact that he had never done script banging before. You know what I mean when I say script banging. It’s when a group of writers tear apart your innocent story from overanalyzing it to the point that you finally call it their story instead of yours.

Before I began writing for him, I realized he had already written six episodes and I wondered why.  Probably he did that before finding a writer like me.  Or probably he didn’t believe I was up to the task. I assumed.

“I want you to synthesize my stories with six episodes of yours.” he said, offering an outline of some scenes he expected to see in my draft. “I don’t know how you are going to do it but I can promise you this.If you do it and I’m impressed, you will be employed full time. Get it done in a month and you will probably be working for someone else. Your faith is your hands".

The first idea I had in mind to beat his deadline was one I had while watching a video from Youtube.  “A writer is a reader and a reader is a writer”. That was what the lecturer in the video claimed. “You can’t be one and not be the other." He added.

 For me, the meaning I expatiated from this in context of the genre of writing I had specialized was the value of research to any writer.  What the producer didn’t know was I knew a lot about his themes from reading about them, from talking to people, from observing images like them and from analyzing the environment in which I lived before I had accepted the difficult journey of springing ideas on paper for him.

The second strategy I had in mind was a tip I received from my creative writing professor while on campus.  Showing me a popular award winning non-fiction book, prof said to me, “You don’t need all the facts in the world to create fiction. A writer simply is a projector of truth or something like it. Though believable, this book is an example of something like it."
It was prof who also taught me to choose the audience over a producer if I had to choose between the two. "They have the power to cancel any show, " he advised.
After two weeks of writing and rewriting , I delivered my scripts immediately to the producer.
 “ How did you do it ? “ he said with a look of excitement after reading them. I smiled.
 Deadlines, they maybe killers.  But they are definitely not going to kill me.