The Waiting Game

Writing is a waiting game, in so many ways. You wait for ideas, you wait for artwork, you wait for readers, you wait for reviews. You wait for sales, for any indication that people have actually read what you’ve thrown out into the world.

And most of all you wait for submissions. You wait for feedback on them. You wait, often, for any indication they’ve been seen at all. And you wait a long time.

I’ve been querying my various books with literary agents for many years now. As you will no doubt have noticed from my conspicuous lack of shouting it from the rooftops, I have yet to encounter success.

And that’s fine. Without a hint of sarcasm, that’s genuinely fine. This is a long game as well as a waiting game – I know that very well. It took me years to even get a short story out, let alone a piece of longer work, and though I’ve achieved a vague level of consistency on that front in the last year or two I know it could easily be a blip. Creative recognition takes time. That’s what we all sign up for when we start this writing lark. And when something does slip through and get accepted it’s one hell of a feeling.

But agent submissions, full queries like the ones I’ve been making myself get back into sending out, are a different kind of waiting. It might take a while for a magazine editor to send back a form rejection, but they usually get there in the end. And, being short stories, the work of sending one out again to somebody else doesn’t take that long.

Agent queries are like job applications. You research who’s open for submissions, you research their tastes. If they might – might – be right for your book, then you figure out how much of it they actually want to read as a sample. You edit extracts. You put together a synopsis, a covering letter that goes into what feels like nauseating detail. You throw all of this out when you realise that their website has a submission form instead of an email address. It can take hours just to get something ready to throw in front of an agent’s eyes.

And then you sit back and wait. Sometimes for months. If you’re incredibly lucky, sometimes for days. For a form rejection, yes, but at least it’s something. Or, as has been the case for me, you wait for over a year and hear precisely nothing.

My current QueryTracker list. Blue is recent submissions, red is actual rejections, and pink is submissions so old that the website is telling me to give up hope.

Agents are busy. Of course they are. There’s a reason they all state multi-month response times, and it’s because there are a thousand people in exactly the same situation as me, with exactly the same hopes and frustrations, hurling submissions at them every day. Slush piles totter like skyscrapers on desks across the world. I understand. I sympathise. I remain frustrated beyond belief.

Because a rejection is, while disappointing, fine. It’s a conclusion, even if one you don’t want. It tells you to move on to the next attempt. Silence, on the other hand, has no closure. These unanswered submissions – and unanswered follow-ups, and follow-ups to follow-ups – sit in my emails like lead weights. I may as well have dropped my manuscript in a well: at least I’d hear a splash when it hit the bottom.

But long after any stated or reasonable window has closed, I still sit and stare and wonder. Sometimes things fall through the cracks, after all. Occasionally I’ll actually get a response, a year later, to an ancient query to that effect, and even though it’s a form rejection at least it’s got a personal apology appended to it. Never mind ‘no news is good news’ – bad news is at least news.

I keep going. I keep submitting. I add more names to the pile and wait to see what flavour of news I’ll receive. I don’t mind which, honestly. Anything will do.

But I keep going, because this is a long game and I’m in it until the end. Because that’s what writing is. That’s what stories are. They keep going until they’re finished being told, and I am certainly not finished yet.