The Wait and the Worry: Writing, Querying, and Learning to Let Go

Waiting is the worst part.

There is no doubt about it. Good news or bad, waiting is the worst.

Christmas Eve. Doctor’s results. University acceptances. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives waiting to find out what happens next. Ask a group of writers about the hardest part of the writing life, particularly the strange limbo of querying agents, and I suspect many will say the same thing: the waiting.

Although the worrying comes a close second.

Will anyone like the manuscript? Will it land with the right agent or editor? Did I write the hook well enough? Should I have changed that opening one more time? Have I done enough?

Lately, I’ve realized that I know this particular combination of waiting and worrying very well. My son is in Grade 12 this year, and we are beginning the strange process of preparing to launch him into the world. University. Adulthood. Whatever comes next. As a parent, I find myself wondering: Will he be okay? Does he have the tools he needs? Have I prepared him well enough? Does he still need me?

And then I realized: I’ve been doing a version of this for more than twenty years.

As an educator, I have watched generations of students, and later beginning teachers, leave the relative safety of the classroom and head out into the world. We make a ceremony of it. Pomp and circumstance. Gowns and mortarboards. Speeches about beginnings disguised as endings. And then off they go.

We wait.

Sometimes they come back. Sometimes an email arrives years later. Sometimes we hear about a degree, a job, a marriage, an adventure, or something extraordinary they have done. And sometimes we hear nothing at all. You learn, as a teacher, that eventually you have to trust what you gave them.

Perhaps manuscripts and the traditional publishing process are not so different.

This summer, The Bruges Affair received more recognition than I could have imagined when it was named the Historical Novel Society First Chapters Contest Overall Winner. It was a glorious way to send a book I love out into the world.

And now?

I wait.

I worry as it lands on the desks and screens of agents, editors and publishers. I wonder whether I have done enough. Whether it is ready to stand on its own. Whether it still needs something from me.

But teaching has taught me something else about waiting. September always comes. There is always another group of students walking through the door. New minds, new questions, new debates. Young people ready not simply to learn about the world, but to tackle it. They deserve my full attention, even when some part of my heart is still roaming around out there with all the students I taught before them.

Writing, I am discovering, asks the same thing of me.

The Bruges Affair is out there now. I have done what I can for it. I can worry about where it will land, refresh my inbox, rethink every sentence, and wonder whether I should have done something differently.

Or I can turn my attention to the next thing that needs me.

So, I pour myself a cup of coffee. Open the new manuscript.

I look at the blank page.

And I start a new chapter.