I’d had the best conversation with a prospect who, at the suggestion of a current writing coach client, had emailed me looking for help on a book that had been rattling around in her head, as she put it, for almost 40 years. Her protagonist, she told me, was a pro-choice advocate. I was intrigued.

I happened to be driving to a neighboring town, so I had plenty of time to chat. And with the election looming, we found plenty to talk about.

Apparently, we never got around to her novel’s plotline, which was also never mentioned in her emails. So, six weeks later when the author asked me to provide a written critique of her book, I discovered to my dismay that the book’s antagonist was a serial killer.

My client sat down to her novel. Having blocked out the time to write, she was determined to honor that commitment to herself and her book. But she didn’t have a clue about what she was going to write that day.

“In the past, that would have freaked me out,” she admitted during our subsequent writing coach session.

This time, instead of allowing that uncertainty to hijack her creativity, she asked herself two questions: