History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Rewarding Yourself for Accomplishments

Last week, I came upon a really inspiring thread on Twitter about rewarding yourself for your accomplishments as a writer. This thread in particular was by a novel author who had wrapped up ten presents, each one to correspond with the completion of 10,000 words of a novel. In this author’s case, most of the presents were food, beverages, or things that smell nice, with a bottle of Prosecco as the 100,000 word reward.

I really like this idea as a motivator and as an acknowledgement of success. Too often, authors think that the only successes worth celebrating are the big ones–a sale of a story, landing an agent, or selling a book to a major press. But the smaller milestones are important too, and getting a tenth of the way through drafting a novel seems like a really good one to recognize. Because at that point, you’ve written a tenth of a novel, which is an impressive feat!

You can also set up the rewards to be appropriate to you–if you don’t want snacks or drinks, maybe small trinkets are more your speed. Dollar stores and the low price bins at some other stores are great for finding cute little things that might be both motivating and useful–like a new notebook or fun pens. And don’t underestimate the power of stickers! (My personal favorite reward!)


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