For INFJ and INFP Writers, Focusing on Productivity Is One of the Worst Things You Could Do

Almost every INFJ or INFP writer I’ve ever worked with gets stuck at some point. Their story isn’t flowing the way they think it should, or, their story has “gone dark” and they can’t see the next piece so they have no idea what happens next. This is almost always when the INFJ or INFP writer in question freaks out and tries to push harder on the story — meaning, they try to think their way out of the problem. They try to figure it out mentally. But this never works, and it only makes things worse in the long run.

I actually did a coaching session with a client just this past week who is an INFP writer. When I mentioned that he’d been writing a lot lately and his output seemed to be strong and steady, it made him nervous. He almost didn’t even want to talk about it for fear of “jinxing” it, he said. He’d had periods like this before, and then his inspiration had ebbed and he’d panicked, thinking that his connection with the story was lost forever and he would be doomed to going years without writing again, which was something traumatic he had experienced in the past.

This fear of inspiration dying is very real for INFJ and INFP writers, and it hits us so hard because so many of us have gone through periods in our past when we weren’t writing for long stretches of time and we felt like failures because of it. I’ve also noticed that much of the time an INFJ or INFP writer equates being a successful writer with writing a lot — whether that adds up in word count or in some sort of daily writing schedule. If we’re writing every day, or we’re producing a lot of words every week, some part of our constant anxiety about our creative output is soothed, at least for a little while.

However, I’ve worked with enough INFJ and INFP writers — who I refer to as intuitive writers — over enough years now that I can tell you that the amount of days you spend writing every week, and/or the amount of words you produce, doesn’t really tell you anything about what kind of progress you’re making with your work, especially if you’re writing fiction. For INFJ and INFP writers, it’s about connection, not productivity. It’s about the deep and intimate bond you have with your characters, the relationship you have with your story. It’s not at all…