September 2023: Revision Reflections

The Work of Waiting: Letting stories find you

I have learned the hard way that writers spend much of their time waiting. Anxiously awaiting replies to submissions and queries. Nervously waiting for advances and royalty payments. Waiting for someone, anyone, to walk through the door to sit in an empty chair at a book event. Gather any group of writers in a room and conversations center around who is in what stage of waiting. “Just waiting to hear back from…” “I sent it in two months ago and I’m still waiting…” “How much longer should I wait before I…”

To be a writer is to be impatiently patient.  

I never imagined that being the youngest child of three would be all the preparation I’d need for life as a full-time writer, where waiting is a job requirement. Being the youngest meant getting used to hearing, “Not yet,” over and over again as I watched my older siblings race off to lessons and practices. I waited for them to arrive home from school. And even after school began for me, it seemed it would be a lifetime before I would enter their intriguing worlds of science experiments, research projects, Spanish classes? Would I ever be big enough, tall enough, fast enough, smart enough? After a while, I resigned myself to the waiting, yet I still bristled with the slow pace of prolonged postponement. 

After publishing my first book, and then my second, and then twenty more, I found the intensity of my writing kept pace with my publishing schedule. But so did my fatigue. When I was awarded a residency this summer, I looked forward to the time away, three weeks all on my own, without distraction, to create in solitude.

I’d just experienced a tremendous loss, and for the first time in years, my work had faltered in my overwhelming grief. Healing was needed. Yet the projects were long overdue and I knew that more than anything I needed this time to catch up and deliver. But at the same time, I needed to stop and breathe. How could I do both? Slow down and speed up?

As I arrived at my assigned studio there was a guest book propped on the mantle, its pages filled with words of wisdom from the studio’s previous residents. 

Blankness filled me. I had no wisdom, no sage advice, nothing to add to these pages. I was here to work, to complete projects, not to give advice. But as I sat at the desk in front of a large window overlooking the woods, the words I so desperately needed were nowhere to be found. And so in the quiet of the days that followed, I listened to the radio, the owls at night, the cicadas, the whirr of my fan during stifling heat. I walked, and ate lunches that arrived in a picnic basket at my doorstep promptly each day at noon. In the evenings, during the communal meals with the other fellows, when asked, “How’s your work going?” I answered smiling, “It’s going…” 

With no Wi-Fi in my studio, I visited the library after breakfast to begin research on one project, then returned to my studio to write in my journal. I read. I napped. I cried. A lot. After four days and not one word of writing, I began to panic. Was I just wasting time? Frittering away a wonderful opportunity? Was my writing career….gulp…over?

Photo by Max Saeling on Unsplash

I attended presentations of other fellows, soaking in the creative writing, film, compositions, visual art and poetry fostered by their residencies. Together we drank wine in the evenings. And more wine. I made playlists that we sang along to, someone taught us line dances. I played ping pong, darts, bowled. I pulled a hamstring doing some combination of all of the aforementioned activities. 

In between I thought of the characters, the stories I’d come to this residency to write about. I wondered where they were. The fear of the teacher who secretly taught enslaved blacks in the 1800’s under the shade of an oak tree. The courage of a journalist fighting violence with truth and words in 1894. The uncertainty of a black wagon company who were traveling west from Mississippi in 1879. Like a new mother, I worried over their future. Uncertain I could ever help them reach the potential I was certain each story possessed. And I did what I knew best, I waited.

 “Certain subjects just need time. You’ve got to wait before you write about them,” writer Joyce Carol Oates once said. 

I couldn’t quite let go of the idea of completing all that I intended, but I began to surrender my vision of “productivity.” I reimagined work as not only output, but input as well.

And then one morning, as I picked up my journal to write my daily entry, I found, not just the words for my morning meditative ramblings, but sentences. A start of a story. I put down the journal and moved to a pad of paper, scribbling furiously. By the end of the day, I’d begun writing on my laptop. I created an actual document. I named it and pressed SAVE. A structure for the story appeared and then more ideas formed, so I started a new document and saved that one as well. Each day I returned to my laptop, eagerly greeting the characters and subjects, and the words came, tumbling onto the pages. I could see faces, hear voices. I knew these people and their stories. I had not just any words, but good ones, I felt. The words I’d been waiting for. As if they were sitting quietly, shyly in the corner, biding their time.

Stories can’t be rushed, no matter how quickly we need them. Sometimes we need the quiet, the space to let them find us.

“Drafts sit and wait for us to come home, I believe. At least I’ve never met one that made secret progress while I was gone,” Virginia Euwer Wolff, a dear friend and critique partner once emailed when I complained of too much time spent away from my writing during travel.

In the periods I spent not working, I discovered that sometimes the work of writing is to listen. To play. Sometimes the work is waiting to work. All the moments of not putting pen to paper, of not writing, were the times that stories were forming. It is the gift of what solitude and time and breaks, and retreats can provide.  

The stories will find us in the waiting. Turns out I did have words for both my story and to leave behind for the journal on the mantle as well.

Stay tuned for news of our upcoming R(ev)ise and Shine! retreats where we trust you will find community and stories waiting…

In community,

Lesa

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Don’t miss our next Zoomie, this time hosted by Jo Knowles who will be sharing her best revision tips and techniques. Reserve your spot now on our Eventbrite page.

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We’re thrilled to announce that the next selection for The Writers’ Book Club will be The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette's Journey to Cuba, by Margarita Engle. Reserve your spot now via our Eventbrite page, and watch this space in the coming days for discussion questions to ponder while reading.