Does this idea excite me? Am I curious about this topic/character? Does this feel meaningful to me? Could I spend months or years on this project and feel fulfilled? Do I have love for this? Is love my primary motivation?

The situation is what it is, and the best thing you can do is pull over to the side of the road and wait.

be possible if you unleased it at full capacity.

But the writers who, somewhere along the way, realize that they have been called to writing, that writing was something that decided

So, how do I do the work of staying in deep time when I have such big issues with impatience? Well, one of my students pulled an animal totem tarot card for me one day and it made all the difference. The card that came up was Turtle, and the moment I saw it I knew that it was a message that had come for me at exactly the right time. I looked up

and the writer can go off and do something else. Maybe work on a different writing project, or paint and draw, or go out into the fields and gather wildflowers to press into a book. Or maybe just deal with life events that conveniently come up at the same time and need to be addressed. The rest break given to the writer is a blessing, not a

them (they suddenly disappear, fizzle out, collapse and fall to pieces, or you lose all heart to continue with the project), you end up with something like creative PTSD.

Take this time for the blessing it is and go do something else that nourishes you for a little while.

This also brings up an essential truth of intuitive writing. If you commit to it, and stick with it, it’s going to lead you back to one place and one place only: yourself.