Deadline, or no deadline?

Two weekends ago, given a Monday deadline, three book chapters flew off my fingers. Now, it has taken me three days to write just half a chapter, reason being that, with no pressure, my whole pace has slowed and I am spending longer thinking than I am writing. I also have a strange feeling that what I am producing at my natural pace, the amble of a ruminating donkey in a thistle field, isn't as good as it was when I was a racehorse given my head on a flat, three-mile stretch.

Am I unusual in needing a deadline to work to? My agent is of the opinion that I am more of a journalist than a 'writer', because a natural writer feels a compulsion to write, whatever the circumstances. Hmm. Writer or journalist, I still have to eat and pay the bills.When there is no deadline involved, no sniff of a publisher around the corner, I am spending my time thinking up ways to make money rather than spilling out words that may never have a life beyond the flat screen of the computer.

Many characters live inside my head. They are clamouring to tell their stories, but I keep them firmly locked up in the gaol of my imagination. Some of them may grow old and die there. Others may find ways of escaping, parading in front of my closed eyes in a dream, or curling out of my nostrils like wisps of ectoplasm as I lie sleeping, to whisk through the atmosphere and into the mind of a novelist who is more active than I am, and can birth them onto a page.

Good luck to them, I say. And, to my long-suffering, frustrated, yearning characters, wait just a little bit longer. Once this book is finished, it may be your turn next.