Your writing intuition is more reliable than you think. Here’s why you’ve stopped listening to it.

There’s a question I ask at the start of every session I run for writers: when was the last time you second-guessed a decision about your writing?

The answers come fast. Today. This morning. Five minutes ago, actually.

And almost no one says it was about talent. The second-guessing is rarely can I write this? It’s almost always should I write it this way? Or: is this the right direction? Or the quiet, persistent, exhausting: I don’t know if I can trust what I think about my own work.

That last one is what I want to talk about. Because I think it’s at the root of more creative paralysis than we acknowledge.

And, that’s why at lunchtime on Monday 13 April, I’m running a masterclass on this very topic to help you move from paralysis to trusting your intuition.

The thing we get wrong about intuition

We talk about intuition as though it’s a mysterious gift that some writers have and others don’t. A sixth sense. An ineffable quality that separates the instinctive writer from the one who overthinks everything.

But that’s not what intuition is.

Intuition is pattern recognition.

Every book you’ve read and loved, every sentence that stopped you cold, every draft you’ve abandoned, every time a paragraph clicked or refused to. Every piece of feedback that landed and every piece that didn’t. Every creative decision you’ve made, good or bad. It’s all stored. And your writing intuition is your nervous system giving you rapid-access to that accumulated knowledge, without making you consciously process all of it first.

This is why experienced writers often know a scene isn’t working before they can say why. The analytical brain catches up later. The intuitive brain got there first.

The problem isn’t that your intuition is unreliable. The problem is that you’ve been taught to distrust it. And some of that teaching came from experiences that were genuinely confusing: times you followed your gut and it went wrong, or times you ignored it and it also went wrong. After a while, you stop knowing which voice to listen to.

The harder truth: fear and intuition can feel identical

Here’s where it gets complicated. Not everything that feels like intuition is intuition.

Fear can feel like discernment. Anxiety can feel like caution. Avoidance can feel like wisdom. And because they produce similar sensations in the body, a tightening, a resistance, a pulling-away, they’re easy to confuse.

On the other side: excitement about a new idea can feel like certainty when it’s really just the shiny-object problem. Stubbornness about a failing draft can feel like conviction. Magical thinking about a project can feel like vision.

So the real skill isn’t ‘trust your gut’. Everyone says that, and it’s only half useful. The real skill is learning to tell the signals apart. And that’s a learnable thing.

One of the most reliable ways to start: ask yourself whether the feeling is about the writing or about what will happen to you because of the writing.

If the resistance is about the structure, the voice, the choice of what to keep: that’s more likely to be intuition doing its job.

If the resistance is about consequences, judgment, what your writing group will say, or whether this is the kind of thing that gets published: that’s more likely to be fear wearing discernment’s clothes.

Same sensation. Different source. Completely different action required.

What fear sounds like vs. what intuition sounds like

Fear tends to be loud and urgent. It focuses on worst-case outcomes and other people’s reactions. It disappears when the external threat disappears. It comes with shame attached, the particular flavour of you’re not a real writer, who do you think you are. It makes you feel smaller.

Genuine intuition tends to be quieter. More persistent. It focuses on the work itself rather than the audience’s reaction. It stays constant even when you try to argue yourself out of it. It’s neutral rather than self-punishing. It feels more like knowing than feeling.

The question I come back to, and that I give to every writer I work with, is simple: is this about the writing, or is it about what will happen to me because of the writing?

It doesn’t answer every question. But it starts to separate the signals.

Why commitment is part of what makes a decision right

One of the things writers find most confronting is this: most creative decisions don’t have a single correct answer waiting to be discovered. They have a range of workable answers. And the decision becomes right largely through commitment.

When you choose a direction and then give it everything, the decision tends to work. When you choose and then immediately start second-guessing, you never fully inhabit the choice, and it rarely works, not because the direction was wrong, but because you weren’t really in it.

Think about point of view. First person or third? There are writers who have agonised over this for months, switching back and forth, losing momentum with every change. And there are writers who picked one, committed fully, solved every problem the choice created, and finished the book. The second group finished.

This isn’t a call for recklessness. It’s a recognition that the search for the theoretically perfect decision is often just another form of avoidance. There are more workable answers than you think. Your job is to pick one and execute it fully.

Building conditions where intuition can speak

One more thing that doesn’t get discussed enough: intuition isn’t always available on demand.

It gets drowned out by noise, other people’s opinions, what’s trending, what your writing group said, what sold recently. It gets quieter when you’re exhausted, and louder when you’re rested. It struggles to be heard when you’re rushing, or mid-comparison spiral, or making decisions in the immediate aftermath of a rejection.

Creating conditions where your intuition can speak isn’t soft or precious. It’s practical. For writers this might look like making significant structural decisions after sleep rather than in the middle of a difficult session. It might mean rereading your work without a pen in hand before you decide anything. It might mean getting away from other writers’ news before you sit down with a question about your own direction.

The conditions matter because the same decision made in panic and made in calm can produce completely different answers. And only one of those answers is actually yours.

The practice

Confidence in creative decisions doesn’t come from certainty. It comes from the practice of deciding.

Every time you make a call about your writing and commit to it, you’re building the muscle. You’re accumulating evidence. You’re teaching yourself that your judgement can be trusted. Over time, you start to develop a record of how your intuition actually works, what it sounds like when it’s right, what fear sounds like when it’s pretending to be wisdom, and what conditions you need in order to hear the difference.

You already have more writing intuition than you’re using. You’ve built it through every page you’ve read, every draft you’ve struggled through, every creative problem you’ve moved through, however imperfectly.

The work isn’t finding your intuition. The work is trusting what’s already there.

Ready to work on this together?

If you recognise yourself in any of this, the next step is the masterclass.

Creative Intuition & Decision Making is a 60-minute interactive online workshop where we put all of this into practice. You’ll leave with a clear framework for separating fear from genuine creative knowing, a set of personal decision-making conditions that work for your writing life, and a writing decision ritual you draft during the session and walk away with.

It’s practical, interactive, and designed specifically for writers.

Details

When: 13 April 2026, 12.30-1.30 pm AEST

Platform: Zoom

Investment: Free for coaching members | $20 single session | $180 annual pass

x Meg

PS: Want more support?

I’m here if you need help. You can explore the Start Here page to find the ways I provide support for creatives from free articles to monthly creative mindset masterclasses, paid memberships and retreats. My Momentum memberships are a great way to get regular support you.