On Waiting

Or, on patience as an antidote for a lack of control

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

When I was younger, I did not consider patience a particularly admirable quality. Why would I? Patience was boring. It wasn't fun or spontaneous. It meant waiting around, and I did not like to wait. No, I wanted everything, and I wanted it all at once.

This was true of outings and purchases and hair cuts and milestones. It was true of big life events, and it was true of writing. The idea that a novel would come together slowly over time was agonising. So agonising, that the thought of slow progress was almost worse to me than no progress at all. What was the POINT of working seriously on a project if I could only manage a few thousand words a week? I wanted a novel draft finished in weeks or months, not a year. I wanted it all right away.

Perhaps it's ironic, then, that I who considered patience a very unattractive virtue has found myself living a life driven mainly by – yes! – patience. It turns out that it is indeed a teachable skill. (Though, to be fair, I would not recommend my teachers.)

Being a writer and being chronically ill are alike in that they both require an almost endless store of patience. I spend a great deal of my time waiting to get better, both in the short term (pacing even tiny activities, waiting for payback to pass) and in the long (optimistically waiting for more general improvement). And then the waiting involved in writing! Goodness me: no wonder the two words are only one letter apart.

To begin with, us writers must be patient with ourselves while we take the time to write draft after draft. We have to allow tens of thousands of words to slowly simmer as we build layer upon layer to create a whole world in pages. Some stories come together relatively quickly, while with others, progress feels as slow as the drop of treacle from a spoon. (Slow, slow, slow, then – if the wind is blowing in the right direction – a burst of overwhelming sweetness all at once.) Either way, writing, then rewriting, then rewriting, seventy to a hundred thousand words is something that requires time and space to get right.

And then there's the wait for feedback. Maybe we give a draft to some trusted readers. Maybe we send it to a professional. Either way, we then have to wait with as much grace as we can muster to be told the ways in which the manuscript has met expectations and the ways in which it has not.

The waits involved in sending manuscripts out to agents or editors can, perhaps, be the most soul-destroying. I say this because in these cases there's not always a reward for our patience. Sometimes what we're waiting for is simply an absence: an absence of demand, an absence of feedback, an absence of any response at all.

It's easy to feel powerless in the face of all this waiting. After all, we do not have control over what other people think of our work, or whether it lands in the inbox of the right person at the right moment. We do not have control over the many invisible demands of the market, or over what might be considered 'sellable' and what might not. All we can do is write what we feel called to write, write it as well as we can, and then send it out into the world with a whispered prayer of hope.

And so to patience, and to cultivating it. I still have many moments of impatience, as we all do. But the patience I once had so little time for (pun intended) now enables me to bring focus back to the moment. It lets me concentrate on the things I can control rather than those I cannot. It lets me find joy in the small things while I wait on the big things. While always, of course, holding onto hope that they will fall in my favour.

For writing, the very best advice is the suggestion that's repeated over and over again: to focus on writing something new while you're waiting. I think the value of this is threefold:

1. It solves the practical issue of distraction by occupying our minds while we wait.

2. It reminds us about the only part of writing we CAN control: finding joy in the process of creating a world of words from a blank page.

3. It means that if the feedback or the agent queries or the editor submissions don't turn out as we hoped, we can perform a sleight of hand and produce the next project ready to try again.

And so, right now I'm waiting on:

• Various bits of feedback on one project.

• My own progress on a second draft of another.

• Feeling better (Always. We need to properly fund biomedical research into post-viral conditions).

• The world at large to tilt back on its axis and remember that we are in 2024, not 1934.

Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is a lot of waiting for one formerly very impatient person to be doing.