Being a writer is mastering the art of waiting.
For impatient people like you, mastery is almost impossible.
Everything about being a writer is about waiting.
You wait for ideas to come. Even for people like you who get ideas daily, it takes time to get worthy ideas, to get great ideas, to get publishable ideas. Stories are a dime a dozen (download plenty free on your Kindle today!), so finding the right story takes time.
You wait to finish your story. Some novelists write twenty thousand words a day, but you’re not one of them. Maybe you write five thousand words, but if so you’re usually spent for a few days. Writing takes months if not years. It’s not hard to get words onto the page. It’s hard getting meaningful, impactful words on to the page.
You wait to retouch and retweak and redo your story. It’s takes time shifting from your right brain to your left. Don’t let anybody fool you: the most difficult thing in the process is creating something from nothing. Anybody can sit on the sidelines and make suggestions. But trying to do this yourself before submitting the story takes time.
Then you hand it in. Whether it’s to an agent to review, or to an editor to review, or maybe to your spouse to review.
Now here’s when the waiting really starts in earnest.
Reading takes a long time. If you were a musician, it would take three, four, maybe five minutes to listen to a song. But it can take hours before the manuscript is read. Then it takes a lot longer to get input, simply because input takes time to digest. Agents, editors, publishers—they all need to think through their comments. They’re dealing with highly emotional and insecure people, so they need to be encouraging and careful while still doing their job (creating books that WILL SELL).
So reading takes time and input takes more time.
Meanwhile, you’re waiting. And if you haven’t gotten published yet, multiply that times ten. Or maybe a hundred.
When you had a fulltime job, you would worry and wonder even though you had lots of other things to do.
But writing is now your fulltime job. (For the love of mankind, what possessed you to write fulltime anyway?). Of course, you work on other projects and do other things, but still, part of what you do is wait.
You wait to see if a project is accepted. Wait to see if a book needs rewriting (they always do). Let’s rephrase that—you wait to see how much rewriting a book needs.
Then there are the times you wait to see if an idea or a synopsis or a book gets the green light.
Then there are the times you wait to see if an idea or a synopsis or a book gets the green light.
And you wait.
Moons change shape.
You wait.
Seasons pass.
You wait.
Your hair grows longer and more unruly and the bags under your eyes begin to look like the moon and your beard is growing in so much you’re starting to look like Cousin It.
You wait.
When you finally hear something, somebody needs to awaken you from your sleep. Like waking the dead. Who needs to write another vampire series when you’re looking like one?
Most of the time, the news is what you expected. Sometimes it’s worse, seldom times it’s better.
You hear news and then have a panic attack because whatever they want (your editor or agent or publisher), they want it tomorrow.
You wait to get the strength to carry on.
You understand why Stephen King drank and drugged his way through several novels (though you’re not advocating anything like that, of course not, you wouldn’t ever do that!).
You wait to get inspiration and it never comes but you get to work anyway.
You wonder why your dog is looking at you with pitiful eyes.
You wonder why the rest of the world waits to see when you’re going to get a “real” job.
You wait for the next thing.
Then you wait to find out what you’re going to be waiting on next.
Because when you’re a writer, you’re always waiting.
Travis … congrats on the new novel and thanks for the great, and all-too-true post on waiting. Maybe that's why we love the Internet … no waiting … except for the comments we hope will come.
One of the best blog posts I've read all year.
And so true, also, when it comes to every area of life. I've spent the better part of 3 years "waiting" to get energy back. And continue to wait.
Happy Christmas week! (I am also waiting for a WHITE Christmas…)
Thanks for the kind feedback Joyce and Aimee. Merry Christmas!
At church, I recently spoke about waiting in relation to the advent season. In Spanish, to wait is the same as to hope… esperanza. But yet we always think of waiting as a negative and "hope" is always written in a scripty font with a sort of Thomas Kincaid glow around it. My conclusion? God prefers Spanish.