Decision-Making 101: Keep It Creative But Effective

How do you make big decisions in your life—especially your writing life? To go back to school for an MFA. Decide you’re ready to query agents. Join a writer’s group or find a writing partner. Submit your stories or essays to lit mags or online sites. Or accept an offer from a publisher or agent. Quit your job to write full time. Or decide to self-publish. Up your marketing skills to promote your latest book.

Been there. Struggled through all these decisions myself, some agonizing and stalled from fear, some perfectly timed to move forward now.

I’ve decided fast and intuitively. Slow and deliberately. The way I make my best decisions has morphed into a combo of intuition plus rational analysis. I don’t go for off-the-cuff decisions anymore, without weighing pros and cons. Because decisions carry more weight for me: Each affects my future. I have less future to play around with now. Each affects people I live and work with. I care more.

I approach decisions with a mix of thought and feeling. Most of the time, they work out pretty well. This week I want to share a story about a very hard one I recently made, and how I went about it.

Happy birthday to me

I just celebrated my seventieth birthday. We were at a campground in the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia, a place of supreme beauty, returning from our months-long trip. This sacred time of healing, for me, my “in between book launches” recovery, was one of my best decisions. To celebrate feeling better than I had in a year, I enjoyed a homemade cake baked in a tiny tabletop oven on the campground’s picnic table, a few choice gifts, and a pint of coconut ice cream. I did gentle yoga outdoors, as I have each day of our time away. We walked the dogs, napped, talked, ate, and read (we’re finally reaching the end of our suitcase of books, so time to get home!).

Reaching this decade, leaving the amazing sixties, is a huge and scary milestone. But even more scary have been the creative seeds sown in the past year.

Seeds we sow

Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you sow.” When launching a book, you plant a LOT of seeds. Each one, you hope will yield. You may not reap the results for months, even years.

During this winter trip, I’ve had to live by that level of letting go. When I decided to release my next novel this month (in three days, April 21!), I had to sow my seeds many months ago, even while my last book was still launching. For an author, this can be crazy making.

In launching a new book, not to mention two, we really can’t count on any harvests at all, ever. Even if backed by a big publicity team, a book release is a investment of time, energy, and hope.

With experience, and a good team, we have more luck in choosing the right seeds to plant. Decisions are based on past experience.

I hadn’t published a book for a decade, so my past experience was a bit like writers marketing their first book. I hired experts who knew the current industry to teach me about social media, podcasts, launch teams, and book influencers. I researched and talked to other authors. It grew to a series of decisions based on research, what I felt able to gamble (money, time, reputation), and experts’ guidance. Always a big risk.

By the time my last novel came out in October, I had accumulated some marketing decisions that paid off, that offered data for the next book. I’d taken good notes but results were just coming in about sales. I had to take what little I knew from reader response, reviews, and how widely the word had spread and make decisions about the next book.

It made me nervous, though. As the launch window approached for Last Bets, a lot rode on my gut. I didn’t have enough data to bring in analysis and rationality. Which, over the years, I’d gotten to appreciate.

The intuitive approach and how it bombed

Back in my twenties, I made life-changing decisions so easily! If something felt right, I did it. Logical, back then, to choose marriage, a job, a cross-country move based on gut and heart response. No need to be scientific, even rational. I was an artist. I chose based on instinct.

Often wrong, as it turned out. But like many failures, I learned so much from these mistakes, these poor decisions.

Harsh learning arrived with my first real business. I wanted to open a natural foods cooking school. I had opened a school, ran it successfully, for a small restaurant in another state. My new husband and I were fired up about having our own.

Business is an unforgiving relationship for many artists. Good business is built on careful analysis and rational decisions. We knew we needed loans and we cobbled together a business plan to show our investors, but it was our enthusiasm that won them over. Good thing, because neither of us knew much about money.

We found a location, persuaded friends and family to help us build the school and small shop, created beautiful publicity. We were floored by the response—classes sold out in days. We had an amazing six months of big success, including national publicity. Carol Flinders of Laurel’s Kitchen fame attended one of my classes and wrote about it for her syndicated column. We had inquiries from Switzerland, Australia, Japan.

Then the 80s recession hit. Nobody had money for cooking classes. I branched out into catering, got great contracts, even one with DreamWorks (Lucas Films) who were shooting a movie on top of a nearby mountain. We desperately tried to keep the business afloat, but enthusiasm and hard work wasn’t enough. It folded three years after its inception.

Closing a business is not simple. It involves legalities, creditors, employees. To me, this dream dying felt like a hard slap in the face. For years, I questioned my right—and my ability—to make life-changing decisions.

Using a purely intuitive approach to launch this business, I’d neglected the rational responsibility that most businesses rely on. I naively thought that if nobody was hurt by a decision, go for it: try, fail perhaps, move on. But a business is a community, a consciousness beyond one or two people.

A friend once told me such projects are like babies. We can’t just do our best then leave them on the side of the road if it didn’t work out.

The rational approach and how I altered it

After recovering from that business failure, which rocked my world for a decade, I set myself the task of learning the rational approach to decision-making.

As I studied, (steps might include these from the Harvard Business Review or UMass Dartmouth) I realized I could never abandon my creative self, which contributes the gut and heart. I could mix the two, come up with my own version of the rational approach plus a little intuitive, which wouldn’t fly with the strict business approach but works for decisions with writing and publishing.

Here are my steps:

• figure out the goal; what am I doing this for, exactly? what do I hope for?

With my new book, Last Bets, my goal was to, obviously, get it in as many reader hands as possible, but even more than that, my goal was to keep momentum going for me as an author, the good and useful momentum started with my last book. The way I would know if this book was received and my readers were satisfied was through reviews and responses.

• get information about the possible outcomes, pro and con

I made a pros and cons list early on. The pros side was momentum, knowing how to launch a book and having that knowledge very close at hand and not in the distant past, having a team of volunteers willing to help, having a publishing team I loved working with, and already being somewhat savvy on social media.

The cons side was financial outlay so soon after the last book, my own exhaustion, and the worry that I wouldn’t be giving this new novel enough fresh attention.

• look at other options—are there better roads to take? consider the consequences via future forecasting—brainstorm about what might happen with this choice or that one

I could’ve released the book in fall 2024, a year from the other novel. I could’ve waited until spring 2025. I could’ve put it off for two more years, even, until 2026. I wrote each of these three possible dates and listed the pros and cons of each. Big in my concerns were the growing cost of publishing (paper increases are being felt by the industry in a big way), the U.S. election in November 2024 and whether that would derail my and readers’ attention, and the general uncertainty of the economy. I knew where I was now, I didn’t know if a window would be available in the future. I also looked at my age, my personal stamina.

• get experts to weigh in, talk with people who have done this before or work closely with the industry

I consulted with two or three experts. Opinions were mixed. Some said that the book would get better visibility if it was not tied to my just-published novel. Others said the opposite. I weighed all the opinions and realized this is where my rational thinking must cede to my gut response.

The inner nudge

Some days, when facing a big decision like when to publish this next novel, I long my carefree youth. How easily I decided life-changing things when I was in my twenties to mid-thirties. No sleepless nights or heavy lifting required. Just decide, do it, and find out what happens.

I can’t approach decisions that way anymore. My sense of commitment to anything I decide is much more serious.

After all my back and forth, analysis and research, I came up with equally positive and negative results: there was no one way to go. So I took the decision inside, in the end. Like I did when I was much younger, I waited for the inner nudge, a dream, a rightness.

What I got: let this book be published as your seventieth birthday gift to yourself, another bucket list item fulfilled.

When you publish, whether traditionally or indie, you don’t just say Bye! to the book and let it go out in the world. You have to shepherd it along. You have to introduce it around, not leave it alone in the corner of the packed party. You have to help launch it. So that required effort, time, and funds. Would I be able to generate all three in just six months?

Even though, at seventy, my methods of deciding something big are much more conservative than in my twenties, I still need that united YES! from heart and gut, that excitement that a clear path delivers.

In the end, I also had to accept that I might have chosen wrong. I would accept the fallout, if so. As long as I was OK with the decision in my heart and body, and that OK-ness comes more from the instinct and intuition than the absolutely rational, I would go forward.

My final steps were fairly new to this decision, so I wanted to share them in case you are facing a big one and want to try these.

• I “made” the decision in my mind and heart, pretending I’d decided, then lived with the feeling for a few days. How did it sit? Did I get swamped with terror or unease or sadness, like I’d lost an opportunity? Then I “decided” another option, doing the same steps, living with it via my imagination as if the decision was made. Which felt right?

Once I got that sense of which decision would be livable, to me, I went back to my pros and cons list. I looked at the “cons” and brainstormed worst possible outcomes of each. That’s not a fun task but it does let some of the unanchored fears surface. I realized I could live with any of them—and we’ll see if that remains true.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Consider a decision in your creative life that’s on the horizon or on your plate right now.  Read back through this article and try one or more of the techniques that intrigue you. 

Then join the discussion below.  What are some big decisions you’ve made recently?  How did they turn out?  What’s your normal way to make decisions?