CECIL CASTELLUCCI: Some people are people who wake up every day and they hit a word count or they have like, OK, I'm only going to write from like 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM or 12:00 PM, whatever. I'm not one of those people. I like to leave the page open and sort of arrive to the page. And that hasn't really changed, because I feel when you're an artist, you're never off the clock, you're always working. And a lot of writing is actually thinking, and mulling, and sort of being in the world and nourishing your eyeballs.
So I think the thing that's changed the most is that I'm very firm about giving myself deadlines, rather than having these open-ended things. So I give myself a deadline. I beg my editors to give me deadlines, just so that I have something that I have to do. So that means if I decide to wake up every day for a month and write in an orderly fashion, I can do that, but if I binge write the last three days of that month, then that's also my choice, but no matter what, I always hand in on the deadline. So the deadline has become sort of a more firm marker for me in my process, because I find that a lot of writing is not actually sitting down at the desk, but it's sort of taking walks, or washing your hair, or thinking, and sort of letting the story stitch together.