How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

A while ago, Jessica over at BookEnds LLC asked this question: Are you willing to write anything to build a publishing career or would you prefer to develop your own ideas and wait it out if necessary? It's an interesting question. I'm not in that position at the moment, but I don't know what I'd say if that opportunity presented itself. Would I write anything ? No. Probably not. But would I reject an idea because it came from a publisher or editor as opposed to springing from my own head like Athena sprang from Zeus's? No. I wouldn't. In short, it seems to me like it would depend on the idea and how strictly controlled the idea needed to be. I read an article in The New Yorker , for example, about how Alloy Publishing develops books .* I don't know if that process would work for me. It seems like there's a LOT of input from other people at a very early stage, and in my current process, that's not how I like to work. If I were a different k