Politicians live by them. Banks and their customers’ accounts die by them. The military invented them. And writers are most creative because of them. But I didn’t realize how critical they were in my life until this past weekend. I was out walking the dog and passed a neighbour raking leaves on her front yard. (Yes, I know, it is an odd fall to be raking leaves a month before Christmas, but that’s the problem.) Anyway, I commented on her task.
“Got to get them done,” she said. “Pickup deadline is Tuesday.”
“No. Can’t be,” I protested. “I haven’t got a single one bagged. Some of my trees are still turning. Can’t be the last pickup day already.”
Nevertheless, she had used perhaps the single most inspiring word in the English language – deadline.
I can point to the joy of research, the excitement of interviewing and the thrill of composing just the right words on the page (or screen) as the motivation for writing. Without question, however, a deadline will move all writers – be they poets, playwrights, script writers, lyricists, novelists, historians or columnists – to action faster than just about anything.
As I said at the top, politicians can’t function unless there’s a deadline given. Every transaction in a bank has a deadline attached to it; when it comes to mortgages or loan payments, there’s probably no more appropriate word. Deadlines are constraints I impose on my journalism students. They’re the second most important piece of data included in every contract (the first perhaps being the fee). And by virtue of the calendar the newspaper’s always got a deadline.
The term originates, I understand, from the mid-19th century, during the American Civil War. When either Confederate or Union prisoners-of-war were assembled, there weren’t always fences, gates or walls to restrain them. Sometimes the only imprisoning element was a line drawn in the dirt. According to encyclopedias, captors warned POWs: “If you cross this line, you’re dead.” Before long both prisoners and guards began referring to the line in the sand as the “dead line.”
The clock does a pretty definitive job of imposing deadlines. On many occasions as a freelance writer, I’ve found myself racing against the clock to submit material. At the Globe and Mail in the 1960s, an editor paced beside my desk waiting for a review I was writing on a Beach Boys concert; he had me rewrite it three times between 10 p.m. and midnight, the newspaper’s deadline.
Television and radio are equally relentless in their demand for immediacy. Walk into any newsroom and watch the tempo of fingers on keyboards, steps across the floor and the intensity of editors’ commands as the top of the clock draws nearer. It’s the epitome of that scene in “Broadcast News,” the movie in which the Holly Hunter reporter character races from the edit suite with her completed story on a video cassette, catapulting at the last second it into the technician’s waiting hands just as the news anchor introduces the report live in the studio. Newsrooms know how to make the term “deadline” live up to its billing.
Just for the record, “deadline” can be translated into at least 16 other languages, including derniere limité in French, prazo de entrega in Portuguese, frist in Swedish and scadenza in Italian.
But I come back to the English language deadline and the leaves in my yard. As I mentioned at the beginning, many of the leaves in my yard remain attached to the trees. A lot of them are still green. In other words, they’re not dead. It seems to me – whether an idiosyncrasy of this particular year or yet another effect of human-made global warming – that our seasons may be changing. Perhaps our system deadlines need to change too. I know that just sounds like an excuse for not bagging my leaves on time. But it’s true.
It seems that deciduous trees are dropping their leaves a little later in autumn than they used to. Maybe the pickups could adjust to accommodate just a tad. I bagged 15 bags of leaves at high speed in the cold and rain Monday night. Deadlines tend to govern the rest of my life. I’d sure love to have life at home a little less definitive.
By the way, you won’t be surprised to know this column was written at deadline.
