Lifted this from one of my daughters. Good advice.  Even better, it's a command worth following.    Good writers do this, is my firm belief. Struggling to find your voice as a writer isn't easy.  Whatever is truly important to  you finds its way into a manuscript, whether you want it there or not, and getting it down exactly is only the result of many rewrites.  Just try keeping your beliefs out of a story, and you're dead in the water. Sure, characters run away and do their own thing, so to speak, and as the writer, you sit back and say, OK, I'll see where you're heading, and if I don't like it, you're history.  Allowing a fictional person to act like a jerk doesn't mean you cotton to the power of jerk-ness.  It just means the story needs that vinegar to get the hero going on the right path.  All very obtuse, but if you're a writer, you know what I mean.

The soul-scorching heat this week has sapped whatever sanity I once possessed.  I'm either cowering in the AC, bemoaning the fact it's 102 in the shade, or wandering my desert-like yard, sweating through every inch of clothing, as I try to save what few plants haven't croaked.  The day lilies are gone, with a few exceptions, the rose bushes look peaked, (a Southern expression meaning they're not in good humor), the flower boxes droop pathetically, and the grass has given up the ghost. We have West Texas hard pan out there now. Even the weeds have given up the ghost.  Can't wait for the rains to come. And they will.  Just as the next sentence will come when a story seems stuck.  I believe in the power of words and rain.