Hold on cookie fiend—you have to finish that chapter first!
As I sat hunched in my dank writing grotto, and tried to figure out a way to move my mouse so that the 40-pound chains that kept me at my desk wouldn’t rattle so, I pondered the rewards of writing. No, no, not those tinhorn rewards like a Booker or a Pulitzer or a Nobel, where you are forced to podium-prattle about authorial intention while you die inside over errant exposure of your nose hairs to the functionaries seated below. No, too tedious those rewards—I turned them all down, a polite click on the phone.
The rewards in question are the spurs, the goads, the carrotiest of carrots: the in medias res rewards you give (or deny) yourself while you are writing, or after a writing bridge has been crossed. The system of checks and pizzas, er, balances, by which you induce yourself to squeeze out another chapped chapter or even a single soggy sentence. What are those rewards? Do they work? (And does this punctuation mark make me look fat?)
I know you are champing at the bit to know whether it’s the lady or the tiger (or the tequila or the cookies), and one more click will do the trick: see the rest of my post courtesy of the fine folks at Writer Unboxed.
(Check out the post there for the crazed comments alone. I’d recommend Writer Unboxed for all fiction writers, for issues of craft, agenting, publishing and more. And tequila and cookies.)
