The Problem with Carrots

What sort of title is that? Basically, it’s all about motivation. Think about the carrot and the stick – motivating people either by reward or punishment. The carrot is: “do it right and you’ll get this; do it wrong and you won’t” while the stick is: “do it right or else...”

In writing (for those who want to make it a career) there is no real “stick.” It’s very rare for an agent to receive a submission, consider the material below standard and pay you a visit with a baseball bat for wasting their time. So generally speaking, writers are motivated by the potential reward. There are four main rewards in writing:

• the glory of having your name in print
• seeing your book, on sale, in a shop
• a big pot of money
• fame

When I was younger, I think I spent more time dwelling on these things than I did writing. I’ve been writing for over twenty years and so far have had one short story published by a magazine – for which I didn’t get paid, and a selection included in a local anthology – for which I also didn’t get paid.

Of course, I live in hope, and in recent years have moved on from writing as a hobby to taking a more professional approach: writing with a target audience in mind, researching the competition, and finding an agent that I believe in and trust. However, it is only since I changed tactics that I realised that the last two rewards are not very likely (generally speaking, the advances and sales for new authors are quite small) and if a manuscript is accepted by a publisher, it could take a further eighteen months to it being printed. The problem with carrots, for the writer, is that the rewards are so far in the future that you might as well forget them. The hard work comes first, the rewards... well, I've got this idea that if I work hard enough, for long enough, I might see them some time.

So now things are little more in perspective, why do I still write? Why put in all of the work planning out a novel, spending months writing it, more months redrafting and rewriting, leaving it to mature for another three months, then redraft again when the rewards aren't definite, and may never compensate for the hours spent working.

Why?

Because I like it. That’s why. Take all the carrots away and I'll still write.