by Suzanne Lieurance
There’s a version of writing advice that says: just push through. Sit down, ignore how you feel, and write anyway.
That advice isn’t wrong, exactly. But it skips over something important.
How you feel when you don’t want to write usually has something to tell you — and if you learn to listen to it, you’ll spend a lot less time fighting yourself.
Feeling Like It Is Not the Standard
The first thing worth understanding is that waiting to feel like writing is a losing strategy.
Inspiration is real, but it’s not reliable. It shows up when it wants to, stays as long as it likes, and leaves without warning. If you’ve built your writing practice around it, you’ve built something that can only work under ideal conditions.
Your future-writer-self doesn’t wait for ideal conditions. She writes in the ordinary ones.
That’s not a harsh standard. It’s actually a liberating one. Once you stop requiring a certain feeling before you begin, writing becomes available to you every day — not just the days when everything lines up.
What’s Really Happening on the Hard Days
When you sit down to write and feel a wall of resistance, it’s worth pausing for just a moment before you either force your way through or give up entirely.
Ask yourself: what am I actually feeling right now?
Sometimes what looks like not feeling like writing is really tiredness. Your body needs rest and your brain is signaling that clearly. That’s not avoidance — that’s information.
Other times it’s low-level anxiety about the work itself. Maybe you’ve reached a part of the project that feels uncertain or exposed. Maybe you’re not sure what comes next and the blankness feels uncomfortable.
And sometimes it’s simple habit. You’ve gotten used to avoiding, and avoidance has become the path of least resistance. The feeling isn’t telling you anything useful — it’s just a groove you’ve worn.
Each of these calls for a different response. Which is why the question matters.
What to Do With Each One
If you’re genuinely tired, give yourself permission to do less — but don’t disappear entirely. Even ten minutes of light work keeps the thread alive. Read what you wrote last time. Make a few notes. Stay in relationship with the project without demanding performance from yourself.
If you’re anxious about the work, try lowering the stakes of the session. You’re not writing anything final today. You’re just thinking on the page.
Give yourself explicit permission to write badly, to write in circles, to write questions instead of answers.
Often the anxiety dissolves once you’re actually in the work. It lives at the threshold, not inside the writing itself.
If it’s habit — if you recognize the resistance as familiar and automatic rather than meaningful — then the answer really is to just begin.
Start with something small. One sentence. One paragraph. Don’t negotiate with the habit; just move past it before it has time to make its case.
The Feeling Follows the Action
Here’s something most writers discover eventually, usually by accident.
You rarely feel like writing before you begin. You feel like writing about ten minutes in.
The motivation doesn’t arrive and then trigger the writing. The writing triggers the motivation. Action comes first, and the feeling follows — almost every time.
That’s not a trick or a hack. It’s just how creative work tends to operate. The engine doesn’t warm up until you start moving.
Give Yourself a Smaller Door
On the days when resistance is high, don’t try to walk through the whole project at once. Find the smallest possible entry point.
It might be opening the document and reading the last page you wrote. It might be writing one sentence — just one — and seeing what happens next. It might be setting a timer for ten minutes and giving yourself full permission to stop when it goes off.
Most of the time, you won’t stop. But knowing you can makes starting feel safe.
That’s the real secret to writing when you don’t feel like it. You don’t overcome the resistance. You just make the first step small enough that the resistance doesn’t bother showing up.
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Want to go deeper on this? This month’s issue of Manifesting Monthly explores what it really means to think and act like a writer who finishes — including how finishers relate to resistance, motivation, and the messy middle. Subscribe here and get the magazine delivered straight to your e-mailbox.
