On Waiting

Creative people wait. Even as they write their novel, a part of them waits impatiently for it to be done. They wait for their gallery show, eight months away. They wait for the phone to ring and their literary agent or theatrical agent to give them some happy news. They wait for inspiration, the will to work, the line missing from their poem, the explanation for their failure to follow up a good piece of work with another good piece.

This waiting is a defining feature of the creative life. When you send out a short story to a literary magazine, your waiting begins. In a corner of consciousness, and even if the odds against publication are astronomical, every day you wait for the mail and word of your story's fate. Finally this waiting begins to take its toll. You grow irritable with your children exactly at four p.m., not because they are doing anything particularly annoying but because the day's mail failed to bring you any news about your story. You start drinking a little more as the wait continues. You get impulsive, make odd decisions, sleep poorly, all because this waiting is wearing you down. Finally you get a form letter rejection. Your disappointment is magnified a hundred-fold because you recognize how silly it has been to wait impatiently for this perfectly predictable outcome. What do you conclude? To not send the story out again, so as to avoid having to wait again. The waiting was too wearing! To avoid another painful wait you kill off your story's chances of publication.

Of course, you must send it out again. Burying it can't be the right choice. But you need not wait in the same way. You can wait more consciously, aware that waiting takes its toll and that you do not want to be victimized by the inevitable waiting in store for you. You can endeavor do a better job of "forgetting about" the thing you are waiting for, dreaming about, and relying on happening. A client called me this past week. Her literary agent had promised to send out her latest nonfiction proposal to nine editors the month before and still hadn't done so. What should she do? Fire her? Call her every day? Write her a nasty letter? Well, she could certainly inquire about the delay and she could certainly be assertive in her dealings with her agent. But essentially she had to talk herself into doing a better, less emotionally charged, less anxious job of waiting.

I experienced a wait of this sort from about from mid-April to mid-May. I had one offer of publication for Van Gogh's Blues and was told by my agent that I should expect an offer from a second house. "We'll have an offer on Monday," he would say. No word on Monday. No word on Tuesday. A voice mail message on Wednesday: "We can expect the offer on Thursday or Friday." Nothing on Thursday. Nothing on Friday. And so it went for four weeks. I noticed that, while I was easy with the process and understood that the editor in question was probably meeting resistance at her house, resistance which she would either overcome or not overcome, and while I understood that there was nothing for me to do--no calls to make, no letters to write, not even any thoughts to think--I still was being worn down by the wait. Waiting is wearing. Since, as creative people, we are always waiting for something, we are always susceptible to being worn down by this waiting. There is always the chance that we will gain five pounds in a week and not know why, fall asleep as soon as we get home and not connect our drowsiness to our impatience, or send out an irritable e-mail that we wish we could retrieve the split second after we send it. Such are the bad fruits of being forced to wait so much. By being conscious of the problem we can do a better job of waiting. But we will always do an imperfect job, since waiting simply is wearing.

There is a corollary to this phenomenon. If we wait for what seems like too long a time, even very good news can seem anticlimactic. So many Nobel Prize-winning writers have taken the news of their award with pure grumpiness, because they had expected it long before and had simply gotten tired of waiting. The Nobel Prize as anticlimax! But that is how the mind and the heart work. We long for something, we wait too long, and when that something arrives we grumble. How strange!--and how human.

The following is a section on this theme from The Creativity Book. Because waiting often produces paralysis, it is vital that we live by the creed "Be patient but not idle."

BE PATIENT BUT NOT IDLE

A time will come when your creative products will be out in the world, making their rounds. You'll be waiting to hear if you got the role in that play you auditioned for and are dying to appear in. You'll be awaiting word of how the physics community has reacted to your new ideas about cold fusion. You'll be anxiously hoping to hear from the editor who said that she liked your nonfiction book proposal and was now "taking it to meetings." If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle.

You need patience, because responses from the world often take a long time. What you've created may not be good enough or may not have commercial appeal and what you may receive back after your long wait is a rejection. But even if your work is good enough and even if it's ultimately wanted, connecting with the right consumer or having your ideas accepted in the intellectual marketplace can be a long, drawn-out affair. I've sold fifteen books to medium and large publishers in the last decade, but I sold nothing to sizable publishers for the fifteen years before that, even though some of the manuscripts were worthy. Many creative people have the same story to tell. Patience is not only a virtue, it's a necessity.

A writer friend of mine, who hasn't been published yet but whose latest proposal is being looked at by an editor at a large publishing house, asked me how it could be taking so long to get a response. Six months had passed already! My reply was, "Easy." Here is how it takes six months. Week one: editor Mary brings two new proposals to the weekly editorial meeting, neither of which is yours. Week two: Mary again brings two proposals to the meeting, one of which is yours, but she only gets to present one, and she chooses to present the other one. Week three: the meeting is taken up with all sorts of business and no new proposals have the chance to come forward. Week four: other editors go first and there is no time for Mary to present your book. Week five: Mary brings up your book. There is some interest, but people wonder what the competition looks like. Mary asks Joan, her assistant, to visit the local Barnes & Noble to size up the competition. Weeks six and seven: because Joan hasn't found the time to get to the bookstore, Mary can't move forward with your proposal.

Let me cut this short and not detail the next twenty weeks that your proposal will spend at this publishing house, as one thing after another comes up to delay a decision. Suffice it say that no one is ill-disposed toward your book, nor is anyone acting unprofessionally or unethically. It is simply that there are too many competing projects and too much going on. Your book has not leaped over these natural obstacles--which it would if you were famous or if your book had tremendous sales potential--and hopped onto the fast track. It is moving as proposals often do, from the writer's point of view at a snail's pace.

You will need patience to survive this. But while you're waiting for your products to be purchased, you also want to keep producing. As an everyday creative person, you will disappoint yourself if you say, "I won't start my next screenplay until this one sells." You may have a great emotional investment in your finished screenplay and great hopes for it, but you also have love and energy to devote to your next one. Remind yourself of the value of detaching from any work that's out of your hands and in the world and committing to new work that wants to be born.

PRACTICE PATIENCE

For the next few days, practice patience as you go about your routine business. See if you can consciously make your morning commute or your wait for the bus more bearable by saying to yourself, "I can be patient." Make note of how good it feels and how much anxiety you release when, as you wait on a slow-moving check-out line at the supermarket, you switch your inner language from "What's taking so long?" to "Maybe I'll scribble a few notes for my novel." Dream up and try out a variety of patience-building techniques and strategies.

DISPUTE IDLENESS

Buy a calendar that you keep for the purpose of noting how many days go by between periods of creative effort. Choose the maximum number of days you're willing to let slip by without creating--say, one or two. If it happens that you painted on Tuesday but not on Wednesday or Thursday, then first thing Friday morning go directly to your studio.

Eric Maisel is the author of Fearless Creating, The Creativity Book, Deep Writing, A Life in the Arts, and many other books for creators. His latest book is Sleep Thinking: The Revolutionary Program That Helps You Solve Problems, Reduce Stress, and Increase Creativity While You Sleep. It is available at Maisel's two web sites.

http://www.ericmaisel.com

http://www.sleepthinking.com

Email: Eric Maisel

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