Your Next Book

I hear a lot of beginning writers ask for advice about which of the many ideas they have they should write first. They ask about the market, trends, what’s going to be hot in two years (when any finished ms would probably could out at the earliest). But here’s the reality: No one can tell you what you want to write next. Not your best friend. Not your spouse. Not your agent. Not your beta readers, your critique partners, your editor, your children. No one.
The book you choose to write and to spend the next year or two—or more—writing, is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be. It’s like listening to a young child ask parents what she should be when she grows up. It’s a game, and it’s funny, unless the kid is 25 and is still asking around for help. No one knows who you are better than you do.
Now, I admit, there are times when people can steer you in the right direction. And sometimes when it’s just as useful that they steer you in the wrong direction because it’s immediately obvious how wrong that direction is. Sometimes other people see how we are trying to deceive ourselves. You listen to a writer talk about how her next book is going to be science fiction and yet she is obsessed with music. You listen to a writer talk about writing a historical novel when she spends all her time talking about the last romance novel she read and exactly what was wrong with it.
But ultimately, you are the boss. And sometimes the hardest part of being a grown up is that you are the boss, you and no one else. You are going to have to decide what kind of writer you are. Are you a writer who writes series? Do you write in the same genre all the time? Do you change genres every time you pick up a keyboard? Do you have a theme that you continue to hit on, consciously or not, in every book you write? Do you have a style that sets you apart? A language? A rhythm? A kind of description or worldbuilding?
You decide this as you write book after book, and you do not always decide it consciously, I admit. But nonetheless, you create yourself with your words. So when you ask if this book or that one is the one that you should work on next, the only way people can find out the answer is to reflect the question back at you and ask which you want to work on the most? If you don’t know the answer, then it’s probably neither of them. You may not have found what the right book is yet. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but there it is.
And sometimes (a lot more often than we want to hear), you end up writing a book that is the wrong one. And you sit and look at it for a long time, and you think about how close it is to the right one. You wonder about whether or not you can change it into the right one, because you’re good at editing, right? But no amount of fixing is going to change the wrong book into the right one. You are probably going to have to start all over.
I don’t know about you, but I’m afraid that adulthood is mostly about accepting that you made the wrong choice, that it feels like you wasted a bunch of time, and then stopping complaining, and getting back to work. Being an adult writer means that you spend a little bit of time telling yourself that you needed to make the wrong choice to get to the right one, so it’s not really wasted. And then you quit talking about it because it doesn’t matter and you’re busy, DAMMIT!