Letter 51: December 21, 2008
Go here regularly. It's also well worth taking a few minutes of downtime to prowl around that whole website for useful thoughts on time control.
Yes, letter 51. A few weeks ago a reader aked me what I would do when I reached a hundred. I'm not ready to say. In fact you may recall I have never told you how many letters there were going to be; but fifty is a good landmark, and I'm closer than I was to coming up with some sort of answer.
On that same subject, I guess, let's talk about the mathematics of motivation.
D'you know about the "goal-gradient"? It comes from classic work on motivation around 80 years ago. The idea is that as you get closer to a reward, you put more effort into trying to get there. As a random example, here's a Columbia University paper by Kivetz, Urminsky and Zheng who set out to test the hypothesis. They found that if you give people a loyalty card to earn a free coffee after buying ten, they will buy coffees faster and faster as they get closer to the reward.
Maybe those customers were just over-caffeinated. But no, for here's a more advanced discovery. Let me tell you how to get people to buy ten coffees even faster. Customers who were given a 12-stamp card, with 2 "bonus" spaces pre-stamped, made their 10 purchases faster than customers who got the regular 10-stamp card. Can you see how to use that marketing psychology with your kids? - my Christmas (for US readers, "holiday") present to you.
And all this is the opposite of what I wanted to write about. Because the reason I was thinking about the goal-gradient is that I heard it mentioned at a conference recently, by someone who seemed to think that it meant the opposite of what it does mean - seemed to think that progress gets more difficult as you approach your goal.
And I think he was right; it gets more difficult. As I get close to a target, and it's clear that I could do it if I wanted to, I've already proved my ability and I'm in danger of shifting focus to the next project. A regular mountain-climbing partner used to say that he could tell when we were two-thirds of the way to a summit because I started to suggest we had done enough. That is still part of why I won't declare my target number of newsletters.
In creative writing, people often report a third pattern. That as you go through a large project there comes a predictable moment - page 62 of a screenplay, some say - when you know that what you've written is total crap. To be a writer of full-length works, then, you absolutely have to be able to work through that embarrassing horror.
Back on the hills, when the ground gets steeper and the walking gets harder, here's the trick to completing the climb: it's ok to take shorter steps, but you have to keep taking 'em. Left, right, left, right, maintaining your same pace-rate. Writing seems to be like that too. When the going gets tough, the tough keep on going.
Something you can try today: keep going. When the work is garbage, when the work gets harder, my congratulations - those are symptoms of being a writer. Which is what you wanted to be, dummy. Merry Christmas one and all!
David
David Jung McGarva
+1 (818) 707 1871
Write me: david at todayiwrite dot com
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