Rewards cause your brain to release the neurotransmitters that allow you to rewire your brain. This rewiring takes more time and repetition than your conscious mind might think necessary. You might spend several weeks or months repeating and rewarding a series of tiny, incremental steps to acquire the writing habits and skills you want. If […]
Reward Your Intermediate Writing Steps
Speaking is natural and innate for humans; writing is not. Likewise, much of what dogs do in agility are natural behaviors – running, jumping, climbing – but navigating the teeter-totter is not. Watch the first 40 seconds of this if you’ve never seen a dog on a teeter-totter. What does teaching my dog to walk a […]
Why Rewards Work for Writers
If you’ve seen a border collie run an agility course, you’ve seen the epitome of self-rewarding behavior. Clearly, these dogs are eager to run. You might think that because these dogs are having so much fun, they never needed to be rewarded for doing agility, that agility was always its own reward. Not so! What […]
Write, Reward, Repeat
Joel Canfield commented that he’d like more information about the Reward Yourself box on the Get Around Writer’s Block flowchart. The funny thing is that when I ask writers about rewarding themselves for their writing efforts, many react as if I’ve suggested they do something immoral or indecent. “Writing is its own reward!” they say, […]