Mid-career issues

How to pick your next project

Fiction writers often share process stories that describe how they work on individual pieces: articles or books. But it’s much less common for authors to describe the meta-process of how you choose to allocate your time between various projects.

That’s because this meta-process is something that only really comes into play once you’re already agented.

Before you have a literary agent, writing is simple. You carve out some time to work. And during that time, you work on a novel. When the novel is done, you look for a literary agent. Usually, the book gets rejected by agents, and while it’s being rejected, you work on a new book that hopefully won’t get rejected.

The trouble begins when a literary agent says, ‘Yes’.