Listen to the podcast here.

We’ve all been there.

The draft feels stuck, the notes aren’t talking, and your outline suddenly looks like wishful thinking. You can’t decide if what you have is any good. You just don’t know what to do next.

I wish this didn’t sound so familiar! But uncertainty is a feature of the writing process. No matter how much you plan, plot, research, or outline, you will encounter uncertainty along the way.

Uncertainty can be a confidence and productivity killer. Too often we wind up getting lost in more research, or meaningless revisions, or just avoiding our writing to keep the uncertainty bogeyman at bay.

But what if there was a way to embrace uncertainty and turn it into a tool to help you unlock your productivity and creativity?

In this week’s Get Your Writing Done podcast, I sit down with historian-turned-book coach Christina Larocco to discuss her approach for turning uncertainty into momentum—without waiting for a muse or getting lost in another stack of sources.

As Christina argues, the first key is making a mindset shift. That moment of uncertainty can feel like failure. But it isn’t. Instead, view that uncertainty as an invitation. And you can keep moving forward not in spite of the fact that you don’t know everything, but because of it.

The second principle is developing a set of strategies for turning your uncertainty into opportunities for discovery and creativity by breaking it down into specific questions. These questions, in turn, become small, focused experiments you can run in a single writing session. We explore how to use structured freewriting, constraint-based prompts, and even playful techniques—like writing a paragraph three ways—to transform confusion into clarity.

Finally, once you’ve made the mindset shift and developed some of the strategies, you can use them to inform your planning process. When you stop fighting uncertainty, it becomes the voice that tells you what to do next.

If you’ve ever tinkered endlessly, over-researched, or abandoned a promising draft too soon, this episode is for you.

Listen to the podcast here.