But be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother. "I see this character in a purple sharkskin suit," you suddenly think, and then the voice of the worried mother says, "No, no, put him in something respectable." But if you listen to the worried mother, pretty soon you’ll be asleep and so will your reader. Your intuition will make it a much wilder and more natural ride; it may show you what would really jump out from behind those trees over there. You won’t always get a clear, panting, "Aha! Purple sharkskin suit!" More often you will hear a subterranean murmur. It may sound like one of the many separate voices that make up the sounds of a creek. Or it may come in code, oblique and sneaky, creeping in from around the corner. If you shine too much light on it, it may draw back and fade away.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. There will be many mistakes, many things to take out and others that need to be added. You just aren’t always going to make the right decision.

When someone reliable gives you this kind of feedback, you now have some true sense of your work’s effect on people, and you may now know how to approach your final draft. If you are getting ready to send your work to a potential agent for the first time, you don’t want to risk burning that bridge by sending something that’s just not ready.

Writer’s block is going to happen to you. You will read what little you’ve written lately and see with absolute clarity that it is total dog shit. A blissfully productive manic stage may come to a screeching halt, and all of a sudden you realize you’re Wile E. Coyote and you’ve run off the cliff and are a second away from having to look down. Or else you haven’t been able to write anything at all for a while. The fear that you’ll never write again is going to hit you when you feel not only lost and unable to find a few little bread crumbs that would identify the path you were on but also when you’re at your lowest ebb of energy and faith.

When people tell you to trust your instincts, it’s like being told to ‘just love yourself’. Well, how the fuck are you supposed to do that? You need tools. I don’t always love myself. I don’t look in the mirror every morning and hit my head on the ceiling jumping for joy. For me, loving myself even part-time came with age and experience, and is rarely easy. It’s the same with trusting your instincts. You have to find and train them, and that’s what happened in Mama Wild. I learnt how to read an audience by doing a hundred thousand gigs, including one for a man with a dog-on-a-rope who turned out to have wandered into the wrong venue.