This is a guest post by author Amanda Linehan. If you are an INFP trying to fit your circular self into a linear world, I would highly recommend Amanda’s work. And now, over to Amanda talking about how we need to “trust the pull” as intuitive writers!
INFP writers face some particular challenges when it comes to being productive. I’ve been writing fiction since 2009, self-publishing since 2012 and blogging since 2008. Oh, and I’m an INFP too. And, as an INFP, I have a circular productivity rhythm, which can feel like a challenge when I seem to be doing things differently than many other people and, sometimes, frustrating myself with how many things I have going on.
A circular productivity rhythm is when you “jump around” between projects and keep circling through them until they are finished. As opposed to working on one thing linearly until it is complete.
Personally, I love variety, but when I’m doing a little of this here and a little of that there, I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get any of them done!
I’ve found a number of ways to remain in my creative and energetic flow while moving projects along in an appropriate fashion. But here’s the most important one.
Trust That “Pull.”
I think you know what the “pull” is and I think you’re probably a little suspicious of it. What if it leads you off in a really weird direction? What if you never get any work done? What if you should be working on something else?
The pull is that feeling I get to go toward something, and it is completely a felt sense. It is not analytical. I know I’m feeling the pull when my attention is engaged, when I feel excited, enthusiastic or curious about something and when I want to engage with it to the exclusion of anything else. It’s the pull because you are energetically pulled in that direction.
I try to follow the pull with work projects as much as possible because I’ve found that it’s telling me something. I’m feeling into the energy of a project or task and it’s communicating to me that now is the time to work on it. It also tells me what not to work on.
With my third novel, called North, I had an interesting writing/publishing schedule. I began writing it in November 2013 during NaNoWriMo and, while I didn’t reach 50,000 words that November, I got a good chunk of it done and kept working on it afterward. I was finished with the first draft by the end of February 2014 and that was the fastest I had ever completed a first draft.
But the thing was, the energy around it was high and I was constantly feeling pulled. So I worked for four months and finished it. I figured that I would have it published by the end of 2014.
Wrong.
Typically, what I would have done at this point is let the story rest a while (maybe a month), then done a second draft. After finishing that, I would have gotten it copy edited and then began the process of publishing it –creating a book cover, getting files formatted and getting meta-data together (book description, keywords, categories). But that is not what happened.
The story rested for a bit and then rested some more, and then I met a fellow writer in my local writer’s group who I decided to swap novels with. We would read each other’s work and give each other some feedback. This was in the summer of 2014, six months after I had finished the first draft.
We spent the next several months going over each other’s novels a chunk at a time and I got some good feedback. There were a few places in the novel that I really re-worked based on the feedback I had gotten. Finally, early in 2015 we finished our novel swap. Time to publish now, right?
Wrong.
Although it stayed on my mind, I didn’t work on North for the rest of 2015, I spent it on other projects. And that was hard because I really wanted to publish. Having more books is an advantage while selling, and I really wanted to get it out there so that I had something else to sell. But, I wasn’t feeling the pull with it.
Ultimately, I was just feeling pulled toward other things and that didn’t make sense to me at the time.
During the times when I wasn’t working on North, I was actually working on two other novels. Shortly after finishing the first draft of North, I began working on what I thought would be a short story about vampires. It eventually turned out to be a full length novel, called Bored To Death. I worked on Bored to Death in the spring of 2014, put it aside and worked on it again in the spring of 2015, only to finally finish it early in 2018.
I also started another novel called Lakeside, which I began during NaNoWriMo 2015, and with a few stops and starts finished in early 2017. So you can see how often I move in and out of projects.
At the beginning of 2016, I finally did that second draft of North and incorporated the feedback I had gotten from my friend. It just felt like it was time. But then it sat again, while I was pulled to other things. I did send it for a copy edit in the spring of that year, but it wasn’t until late summer that I began to pull things together to publish it. It was finally published in October 2016.
This seems like a really drawn out, unnecessary process, but in hindsight here’s what I could see.
Even though I had a finished first draft early in 2014, my publishing skills still needed some improving. So, if I had published North later on that year, it wouldn’t have been as quality a finished book.
For instance, my book cover designing skills still had a ways to go in 2014, but late in 2016 I was pretty decent. I had a number of covers under my belt and I had also learned how to use Adobe InDesign to do them. I was also able to use InDesign to design the paperback cover and interior — things I couldn’t do in 2014. I think that the pulls I kept feeling, or not feeling, were keeping me aligned with the right timing for this book. When I published it, it definitely got the best reception of any of my books at that time and readers were enjoying it. The experience and ability I had in 2016 as a publisher was simply not there in 2014.
Holding off on publishing North ultimately gave my readers the best experience. It had allowed my publishing skills to grow.
Trusting that pull can be difficult because it may not seem to make any sense. It may even seem to go against what your brain and eyes are telling you in the moment. But, if you follow it, and then look back, it’s easy to see why and how things happened the way that they did. And how the pull was always on your side.
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Amanda Linehan is the author of Productivity For INFPs: How To Be Productive Within Your Natural Rhythms. Amanda is a fiction writer, indie author, and INFP. She has published five novels, one non-fiction book, six short stories, and two short story collections. She has been self-publishing since 2012 and her stories have been read by readers in 86 countries. Her short fiction has been published in Every Day Fiction and in the Beach Life anthology published by Cat & Mouse Press. Visit Amanda’s website at amandalinehan.com.
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