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The hubs and I have been watching a show on Netflix called Paradise, and last night we had an interesting moral and ethical discussion about one of the pivotal scenes of the series. (Don’t worry—no major spoilers.)

With a cataclysmic extinction-level event on the immediate horizon, the U.S. president, a ridiculously handsome James Marsden, has followed the protocol and recorded a serious but misleading address to the nation that understates the severity of the crisis in order to prevent chaos and panic, which will be aired after he and a small select group are safely en route to a bunker.

At the last minute though, he can’t bear the idea of people not having time to say goodbye to their loved ones, and he bucks operation protocol and goes live with a grim and truthful message about the coming devastation.

Chaos and panic, predictably, ensue.

I recommend the show, which despite some plot implausibilities, is beautifully acted (and with one hell of a first-show plot twist), and hits some disturbing and uncomfortable chords relative to real-world events.

Afterward the hubs and I debated the character’s decision as if it were a Bachelor finale. We both agreed that the fictional president’s actions were understandable and kind and even noble. And also that it may have been a huge mistake because of the dire consequences it kicked off.

As creatives—and as businesspeople pursuing our creative careers—we face countless decisions every day. Most of them (hopefully) don’t carry the kind of stakes or ghastly consequences of the fictional president’s decision in Paradise, but they can certainly feel like they do in the moment.

What should we write, which of the many ideas so many creatives have teeming in their heads, what genre, what point of view? How should our story be structured to best tell it?

How well is it working on the page, whose feedback should we listen to, how do we know what feedback is right for the story, and how do we incorporate it without gutting the work?

How should we share our work, which publishing path should we choose, which one is best, what consequences might each one hold?

We face decisions in negotiating and signing contracts, in deciding what marketing paths to pursue, in how to present our work and ourselves and build a “brand” and a following and a career.

And as CEOs of our own “company of one,” almost every one of those decisions is up to us. It can be daunting, exhausting and stressful to worry whether you’re making the right one, time after time after time. But keeping a few thoughts in mind as you consider your choices can be helpful in guiding you to choose among them.

You Have to Decide for Yourself

Decisions like the ones I mentioned above can be hard because authors face them almost constantly, and we are the ones with the ultimate responsibility for not only making them, but dealing with the consequences.

In our business, where it so often feels as if much of an author’s career is dependent upon others—the gatekeepers, readers, reviewers—it can be tempting to allow ourselves to be led by their decisions rather than our own. We may decide what to write next based on what we think our readers want or expect, or what is marketable, or what our agent says we should. We may decide against a publishing path that might feel like the best fit for our careers because others dismiss it as not legit or inferior to other avenues.

Every decision about your career is yours to make, and if you want to create a writing career where you are the captain of your own ship, rather than a dinghy at the mercy of every wave, you have to be the one to make them.

It’s tempting to defer to people we regard as experts, or to what we may think of as the realities of the business, but the real reality is that every decision about your career is yours to make, and if you want to create a writing career where you are the captain of your own ship, rather than a dinghy at the mercy of every wave, you have to be the one to make them.

When I interviewed bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch for my How Writers Revise feature a few years ago, she told the story of how her agent and publisher advised her to change genres or publish under a pen name after underwhelming sales of a previous book due to a confluence of circumstances beyond her control.

For many authors it might be tempting to feel that these pros know best, but Allison knew what she wanted for her career and what was important to her, and she bucked their recommendations. “I was too stubborn and proud to do that,” she said. “I hit the Times bestseller list. I’m not giving up my career.”

Instead she self-published her next book—to impressive sales, including several foreign markets, and eventually selling film rights. (Allison’s interview is one of the most popular I’ve shared, rich with empowering advice for authors—I highly recommend listening to it in full.)

But you can benefit from the experience and knowledge and perspective of others

That doesn’t mean we make our decisions in a vacuum. One of the upsides to pursuing a career in a crowded market like publishing is that there are many others who have walked the various paths we may be considering, and their experience and counsel can be invaluable data points to consider in what might be best for carving our own path.

Recently I was invited to join a mastermind of creative entrepreneurs in a similar space to mine, serving, teaching, and guiding authors. Every one of the highly accomplished professionals in this ad hoc group is someone I deeply admire and like, and yet I was a little hesitant at first, worrying that it might be focused on high-pressure business-building techniques like “building a sales funnel” and “maximizing your marketing dollars,” approaches that give me the heebie-jeebies; I’m not the hard-sell type and have always preferred organic outreach to grow my business.

And yet almost immediately, I was the first one to go to the group with a decision I was struggling with about distribution for the audiobook for The Intuitive Author (coming soon!). Their experiences and advice didn’t make the decision for me, but it was invaluable in giving me information and a bigger picture so I could weigh the pros and cons and decide what was right for me.

Ultimately each of us in this field is forging our own path, but we don’t have to walk it alone.

There’s no right answer

Not long ago I wrote about a LinkedIn thread about how much feedback an editor should offer to authors in a professional edit, where the consensus in the comments seemed to be that less is more; most editors advised salting out only as much feedback as they felt the author could handle. (You can read that post here.)

I didn’t reply in the thread, but shared my views in the post: that I felt that was a disservice to an author who was paying thousands of dollars for an editor’s expert insight and feedback, and also seemed a bit uncomfortably paternalistic to me. It’s not up to the editor to decide what the author can handle.

Edits can be tough to swallow, even when they are presented positively and constructively and with tact, as I (and any good editor) strive to do. But I’ve heard from too many authors how valuable they find detailed, comprehensive feedback, even when it may have felt daunting or overwhelming at first. I’ve gotten many emails from authors who say it illuminated issues not only in the story we worked on together, but all their writing going forward.

That’s the best-case outcome I’m hoping for with every edit, but it doesn’t always go that way. I’ve had authors I worked with for years who moved on to other editors. That’s actually something I often recommend to authors: not to get locked into one editor’s style and see what works best for them on each particular story, at each stage of their career. Editing is subjective as is everything else in this business, and finding the right editorial fit is one of the most important criteria for a successful edit.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bother me when it happens, and make me wonder if I should have approached my edits differently.

There’s no way of knowing where each decision may lead. All you can do is weigh all the knowledge and all the input and all the factors you can against your own personal goals and preferences and carve out the body of work and the career you want

And even when an author has asked for forensic-level feedback in the intake questionnaire I send before every full developmental edit, I still struggle with just how in-depth to be. I consider every time how to balance a deep, thorough analysis of their work with not overwhelming them with feedback, or shutting them down with analysis paralysis, or disheartening them. I question every time whether my approach is the right one.

Like most decisions, there’s no way to know until we’ve made them. Like most decisions, we just have to take in as much data as we can, in my case past feedback from the majority of authors I work with and their pre-edit questionnaire, and then weigh what I feel is the rightest thing to do. As creatives that’s all we can do with most decisions in this highly subjective, complex, ever-changing business.

There’s no way of knowing where each decision may lead. All you can do is weigh all the knowledge and all the input and all the factors you can against your own personal goals and preferences and carve out the body of work and the career you want, listening to your best instincts and judgment even when it may go against what “experts” or the masses are telling you, like the president in Paradise.

And then hope that, when the smoke clears and you look back on your decisions, you made the rightest ones for you.

Decisions can change 

For our entire life together, I have watched my husband deliberate over decisions for far longer than I am prone to. He researches exhaustively, and where I am likely to jump in on gut feeling once I’ve gathered the facts, he can take weeks, months, even years to come to a decision about something important. While I admire his carefulness, sometimes it can be frustrating—but I finally realized he worries about making the wrong choice.

When so many of our decisions can feel intrinsic to our success as writers, each one can feel like a heavy responsibility with career-changing if not life-changing consequences.

But most of us are not in the position of James Marsden’s fictional president, making formidable, irrevocable life-or-death decisions where it’s literally the end of the world. One of the things I love most about heading my own “company of one” is that I can change my mind and course-correct at any time if a path I’m going down no longer feels right.

As recently as two weeks ago, for example, I had decided to phase out my recorded online Working Writer courses. A recent restructuring of my business toward more editing options and consulting packages means I’ve been busier than ever, and I was daunted by the idea of updating my existing classes and adding the dozen or so I’ve developed in the last couple of years.

But then the hubs and I talked through the pros and cons, reminding me of all the reasons these classes are important to me.

And circumstances have changed too: After recently retiring, he’s been taking on many of the technical and logistical tasks of running my business, and he pointed out that he can do all of the work of editing and launching the courses; all I have to do is record myself teaching them, which is the part I love.

Finally, so many of you were kind enough to respond to the survey I posted recently, letting me know that there is strong interest in the practical, actionable, pinpointed approach I take in my classes.

So although I have been intending for more than a year now to phase these classes out when the platform renewal comes up in a couple of months, I changed my mind, and now updating and expanding them is not only my main focus for the remainder of this year, but a project I’m excited about.

Here’s an even fresher example. I wrote a different first draft of this post, 2,000 words that I realized, after percolating on it overnight, weren’t saying what I actually had set out to say, and the next day I decided to rewrite almost all of it.

We are not locked into most of our decisions. Even if we make one that might be irrevocable with one book or project, that becomes a data point in making decisions about our next one, and our next, and our next. We can course-correct at any time. We are the captains of our own ship, free to set our course as we will.

Few decisions are life and death. Every one is a single step along a path, and while they can add up to realizing we may be off course or headed somewhere we didn’t intend, getting back on track starts with just another single step in another direction.

Over to you, authors. Are there decisions you find challenging or difficult to make in your own craft or career? What are they, and why do you struggle with them? How do you determine the right path forward for you? Are there decisions you’ve made in the past that you regretted or had second thoughts about, and if so, how did you course-correct?

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