by Suzanne Lieurance
Most writing advice treats sessions as interchangeable. Show up, open the document, write. But writers who finish know something that advice rarely acknowledges: not all writing energy is the same, and what you can do well today depends almost entirely on what you’re bringing to the page.
Learning to read your energy before you begin — not after you’ve spent an hour fighting the wrong kind of session — is one of the most practical skills a writer can develop. It takes about sixty seconds and it changes everything about how the session goes.
The Three Energy States Most Writers Experience
Clear energy is the state most writers are trying to create and rarely can. Your mind is relatively quiet, focus comes easily, and you can hold the shape of a scene or argument in your head while you write it. This is the state for drafting new material — the scenes you’ve been putting off, the hard chapter, the section that requires the most invention.
Scattered energy is what most days actually look like. You’re present but fragmented. Thoughts don’t complete themselves. You write a sentence and immediately doubt it. Drafting from scratch in this state usually produces work you’ll delete. But scattered energy is perfect for revision — moving through what’s already there, tightening sentences, solving small structural problems. The material carries you rather than requiring you to generate it cold.
Depleted energy is when you genuinely have very little left. This happens. Life takes from you before you reach the page. The instinct is to push through anyway — to prove commitment. What actually serves the project better is something lighter: rereading what you’ve already written, making notes about what comes next, sitting with the story without demanding output. This keeps the relationship with the project alive without asking more than you have.
How to Do the Check
Before you open your document, pause for one minute. Notice your shoulders, your breath, the quality of your attention. You’re not trying to achieve anything in this minute. You’re just taking an honest reading.
Ask yourself: what kind of energy do I actually have right now? Not what you wish you had, not what you had yesterday. Right now, today. Then let that answer determine what kind of writing work you do, rather than defaulting to whatever you were planning before you checked.
This isn’t lowering your standards. It’s refusing to waste the energy you have on the wrong task.
Why This Matters More Than Willpower
Writers who rely on willpower to override their energy state often produce work they don’t recognize as theirs — effortful, stiff, written against the grain. They also burn through their reserves faster, which makes the next session harder.
Writers who match their task to their energy state get more done across a week even if individual sessions look smaller. They also build a more sustainable relationship with the work, because they’re not teaching themselves to associate writing with forcing.
The goal isn’t to always have clear energy. It’s to stop showing up to the wrong session. Finishing is a long game. The writers who win it are the ones who learn to work with themselves rather than against themselves, day after day, until the project is done.
Manifesting Monthly magazine explores exactly this — the inner life of a writing practice, not just the outer mechanics. Each month, a new theme, a full coaching experience, journaling prompts built to shift how you see yourself as a writer. Subscribe here.
Suzanne Lieurance is the author of over 40 published books and a transformational Law of Attraction coach for writers who are ready to stop waiting to feel like the real thing. At Write by the Sea, she guides writers through the identity shift that changes everything — not just the writing, but the whole life built around it. She is the publisher of Manifesting Monthly and the host of Monday Morning Manifestors.
