Targets and incentives

Because I am by nature a right lazy git, over the years I’ve learned that the only way I can make progress with a project is by setting myself targets. I might say I want to get a thousand words done one day, or I might tell myself I have a week to write three chapters. Sometimes the goal setting works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but I still like to aim for some set figure when I sit down to write.

Today, however, I discovered a new incentive. An incentive in the form of my five year old son.

Quite often when I’m writing something I think he might enjoy (my Beastly! books, for example) we’ll read them together as a bedtime story, getting through one or two chapters a night. Tonight, because I thought it might be useful to see his reaction to them, I read him the first two chapters of THE SHiM.

Two things happened. Firstly, I realised the first chapter needs livening up. He said he enjoyed it, but it almost bored me to tears. It’s not a big problem, though, and I’ll go back and fix it in the rewrite.

More importantly, though, he loved the second chapter. He began to really get into the story, and was getting quite excited by the whole thing, right up to the cliffhanger ending. At that point he told me he can hardly wait until tomorrow night, when we read chapter three.

Chapter three isn’t written yet.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him, and so now I’m going to have to sit down and write the third chapter, so that we’ll have it ready for our bedtime story. Of course, it then becomes a vicious circle. If we read chapter three tomorrow night, we’ll want to read chapter four on Monday, meaning I’ll have to get it written before then. By Thursday we’ll be onto chapter six. By the start of next week we’ll have finished reading the book – the book which, I don’t need to remind you, is currently around nine chapters short of being complete.

As incentives go, I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty big one!