In an interview with the Creative Penn podcast, Tiffany Yates Martin discusses the role of your intuition in choosing which projects to tackle and managing your writing career.
“Intuition gets confused sometimes with magical thinking or manifesting, and that’s not what I mean,” she says. “Rather than trying to take some external system of writing and impose it on our writing, which I think is counterproductive and strips the writing of its voice and originality, we have to grow a story from the inside out.”
Yates Martin also applies this concept to developing a writing career. “There’s a lot of prescriptive advice about…here’s how you become a best seller, here’s how you make six figures as an author. It’s all very system-oriented,” she says. “I think writers go into it thinking, okay, I’ve got to do all those things, check, check, check, so that I can be successful also.” Instead she recommends that writers devote time to decoding their personal path and boundaries. Joanna Penn adds that she has a not-to-list of projects that sound fun or that she “should” do, but which don’t interest her and would take up too much time.
“We have to say no to the things that don’t suit us, whether or not we’re told they are best practices,” Yates Martin says. “First of all, nothing that works for one person is going to work for every person. So if somebody is trying to set something up as the holy grail of ‘here’s the secret sauce,’ there is no secret sauce. Also, the secret sauce isn’t right for everyone.”
