3 Reasons Why Writing Every Day Doesn’t Work for Most INFJ Writers

When I first started seriously writing I also started seriously looking around for writing advice, and the most common piece of writing advice I found was, “write every day.” It didn’t matter if I didn’t feel like it, wasn’t inspired, was overwhelmed and busy with other things, I still needed to write every single day. That was what real writers did, and according to the same body of advice-givers, that was what separated the real writers from the wannabes.

So, I tried it. I really did. I set a schedule for myself and I did what all the advice said, I sat my butt in the chair and I stared at the page until I started sweating blood. And I got mixed results. Some days pushing myself to write even when I didn’t feel like it really seemed to work. I would end up writing one paragraph, and then another, and then I would get into a flow and an hour later I had about a thousand words that were kind of decent. But on other days it didn’t work. I just sat there and then finally pushed out about 500 words that sucked. Words that felt forced and contrived and that I hated, and I never could do anything with them afterward. It seemed that no amount of revising could make them any better.

Well, then years later I started coaching writers, INFJ and INFP writers to be specific, and I was surprised to find that many of them had the exact same problem as me. They were trying to force themselves to write every day but it wasn’t working, and they were actually feeling worse about themselves as writers than they had when they started this whole write every day thing. After talking to these intuitive writers more in depth I began to see the pattern. There appeared to be three major reasons that writing every day didn’t work for most INFJ and INFP writers.

Our Intuition Works on Its Own Schedule.

Although INFJs work predominantly with introverted intuition, and INFPs with extraverted intuition, both need time to gather information and absorb it fully. It’s typical for an INFJ or INFP to observe a situation closely and then turn it over in their own mind for days afterward, finally coming to some sort of epiphany or conclusion long after the event in question is over. Since our intuition is also the function that mainly fuels the…