At any given time, despite my best efforts to stay busy, I’m waiting. Waiting for something to happen. Something big. Something that could change my life. Not that I have a bad life—just, you know. I’m human. I’ve been trained to want more. It’s a lifelong practice to remind myself over and over again that I have (and am) enough.
One such waiting game that’s always in the back of my head is the process of trying to publish my novel. To put it lightly, this is an endeavor that…takes time. And I’m not even referring to the pieces that are in my control, like writing, editing, pitching, networking, etc. Those definitely don’t happen with a snap of the finger—I mean, it took me almost three years just to write a first draft—but there are aspects that take even longer.
What I’m talking about is the in between. Writing is a very solitary act, so it’s both exciting and terrifying when you step outside of it with a tangible piece of work on which you’d like to get feedback. In a realization that shouldn’t have been so crazy for me but was, the first time I sent a draft to friends and family, it…took a while for them to get back to me. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes never! This makes sense—it’s a big responsibility to read a raw, novel-length piece of work and provide thoughtful feedback on it. For some reason, I just assumed at first that people would tear through it. That the process of feedback and iteration and ship-shaping into a quality product would be WAY quicker than the process of writing the thing. This was extremely incorrect.
It turns out that waiting is baked into almost every step of creating a published novel. After you finish your first draft, conventional wisdom dictates that it’s best to take a break from working on it—a month, six weeks, something like that. Everyone thinks their stuff is amazing once they finish it, which is the worst possible time to do anything with it. You have to unstick from the work for a bit before coming back to self edit, because it’s not just the parts you already know are rough that need work. A good chunk of the writing you think is awesome probably needs that love too.
Anyway, having jumped a bit out of order here, you wait, do a bunch of self editing, get to the aforementioned sharing with first readers, and wait. Then maybe you have enough feedback to take a crack at a third draft. Then you send it to more people and wait. You get more feedback, edit some more, maybe get bigheaded (like me) and think it’s ready to send to literary agents. You compile a list of them that seem like they’d dig your work, put together a baseline query, synopsis, and other supporting materials, then you start sending the first 10-20 pages of your manuscript out to agents with a paragraph at the top of that baseline query personalized to each agent. Then what?
Yep. You wait. You wait weeks, you wait months, and all you get are form “thanks, but no thanks” responses or radio silence. You’ve batched out your queries, so you tweak the pitch with each new group, but still get the same results. Clearly something isn’t working. The confidence has taken a hit, and it sucks not to see a linear path ahead to your goal, but after a bit of waiting for the disappointment to slide off of you, it’s back to the drawing board. Maybe there’s a way to sidestep into something that could launch things forward again.
So you sign up for a writer’s workshop, which is great because not only do you get feedback on your work from fellow aspiring authors, you also read the raw work of others and hone your own feedback-giving skills. The first workshop goes well enough that you sign up for another one, you feel like you’re starting to build a writing community, and you get ideas for your novel that you wouldn’t have come up with on your own. You put work into—what, your sixth draft now?—and share that out with more people. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, through an experience that will be covered in a future article, you find your way to an agent that may be interested in your work. You send off the full manuscript. You wait. And you do your best to fill the time with other endeavors—writing other stuff, building a platform, twiddling your thumbs—but no matter what there’s a part of you that’s always waiting.
This, my friends, is where I am in the process today. I’m waiting for an agent to get back to me after (hopefully) having read the entirety of Fatherboy. I don’t know when (or if) I’ll hear back. In the best-case scenario, I’d get a response tomorrow with an offer for representation. We’d talk, we’d like the sound of this potential relationship, we’d agree to formalize it, I’d work on the novel some more, get new feedback, work on it again, and at some point it’d be ready to pitch to editors/publishing houses. Presumably that would be a process of its own that also involves a lot of anxious waiting. In that best-case scenario, I’d end up with a book deal. Then it’s more writing, editing, waiting. Then getting a publish date sometime far off in the future from there (another year? two years?). Then waiting for that day to come.
Then the day would arrive. And then what? Well, probably we’d do it all over again. Because with the amount of waiting in this game, you’ve got to love it to keep playing. And against my better judgement, I do.