In the Five Stages of Writing, the decision is stage two because you can’t make a decision if you don’t have an idea. It’s like starting a knock-knock joke for somebody else. When they ask, “Who’s there?” you have no idea because it wasn’t your joke to begin with.

There are lots of flavors of decisions:

1. You can have an idea and decide to turn it into a book (or a picture, or a song, or whatever your artistic bent tells you).
2. You can choose between multiple ideas that you have tooling around in your head. Or better still, a notebook—again, write stuff down before you forget it.
3. You can decide to take an old idea out and play with it to see if it has any hidden compartments, or can be turned inside out. Seriously. My first official book, the one that got me an agent and came THIS CLOSE to getting me a book deal with Disney, came about because I was playing with an old idea and spun it into something new and original.
   (For the record, that was as much an idea point as it was a decision point.)
4. Decisions have power. Every time I start a new book, it could be one of several that I have ideas for. I have to decide to write this one and NOT TO write that one.

Okay, you get the basic idea. Right? Ideas are awesome and the foundation stone for every work of any art. But until you decide to act on that idea, it just sits there like a soft apple at the back of the fridge.

Actually using the soft apple was a bad decision because the only way to act on a rotting apple is to throw it away or throw it at someone. I should’ve gone with bruised bananas and banana bread. That works.

Long story short—pick an idea and make a decision about what you’re gonna do with it.

The nice thing about decisions is that you can always change your mind. And sometimes you should. I once started to write a book that wasn’t fully thought out—hadn’t played with my idea enough. So I got to a certain point, going strong, until I realized that I didn’t have anywhere to go. So I decided to do something else.

It was the right decision.

I’ve also made my fair share of bad decisions. They’re like scalpels, man. They can cut and they can heal.

Bottom line. Without decisions, you can’t go anywhere. And every decision you make prepares you for the next one you have to make. Life is a series of decisions.

It’s where art meets ideas.