On Mindful Waiting
By Alexandria Peary
The writing path can seem all call and no response. Must we be like Emily Dickinson writing our letters to the world that did not write back because the number of submissions precludes a personal or timely response? We speak into the void, and a generic rejection boomerangs back after a delay of eight, ten, twelve months—hardly fulfilling human communication. On social media, it's easy to spot writer laments. The gist of a recent S.O.S. post was “please, someone tell me one reason I should continue writing poetry.” After a robotically quick rejection, a novelist vented, “I F*ing Sent this Query 5 Minutes Ago What The F*.” On Facebook, another bewildered writer just received notification of an anthology acceptance five years after they'd submitted.
I certainly didn’t receive training in my two MFA programs on how to wait or hope for a warm human response. “How to not check your Submittable account twenty times a day” wasn’t in the curriculum. It’s something we endure privately during the boom-and-bust periods of our careers. What I've come to realize is that I don’t have writer’s block; I have reader’s block. To clarify, I don’t mean a failure to reach an audience. Readers’ blocks don't correlate with the number of published titles or level of acclaim. Just as writer’s blocks are caused by mindless mishandling of the present moment at the desk, reader’s blocks are glitches in our mindset after work is ready for publication.
Why is it that I can relish delays in creating but struggle with not hearing back from editors? As I type this sentence, my longest limbo on Submittable is eleven months with a literary magazine that has been publishing my poems and creative nonfiction since the 1990s. My credentials include five books of poetry, three edited collections, and a scholarly book, but I’m still on hold. As I type this sentence, I want to compulsively check Submittable.
At the same time, to the jaw-dropping incredulity of my creative writing students, it didn’t particularly bother me that I’d waited twenty-one years to finish a poem in my recent book, Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak. I’d found fulfillment in a writing process that was literally older than them! Who’s more patient than a seasoned writer? How often do we ice fish on top of the unconscious, waiting for hours or weeks for a bit of wording to catch? Over the course of honing our craft, we grow accustomed to waiting for insights, new ideas, different approaches, or the next revision.
Waiting is one of the more contemplative aspects of writing.
As a mindful writing practitioner, I notice and accept verbal emptiness, those blanks integral to the form and formlessness, writing and no writing. I also take full advantage of the natural separation in space and time between me and any anticipated readers. From a mindfulness approach, when we write, we reside in a different present moment than readers. If we procrastinate or edit more than create, we're importing a reader from the future (or a past critic), inviting them to perch at the edge of our desk and stare disapprovingly at our vulnerable draft. We can stop conflating writing with public speaking; writing isn't real-time before a live audience with no opportunity to revise.
So how about the emptiness of No Reaction? Can I expand my tolerance for uncertainty—make it as big as the universe—for after I finish? I am content to be mindfully left alone as I work. When I’m ready to resume contact (with editors, publishers, readers, reviewers), I smack into the situation that in this post-production moment, there’s solitude and absence.
Preconceptions about the timing of a response from the publishing world will flop. I’ve learned to entertain fewer preconceptions about how long it should take to start or complete a piece: “I’ll finish that project by next Tuesday" predictions often backfire. Ditto: assumptions about the timing of editorial response. It’s also a relationship with strings. I want editors to respond in a “yes! Publish!”, though the pleasure will be temporary. In this writerly samsara, that burst of excitement or pride is fleeting. I chase after the next big break, waiting for the newest sign of acceptance. A “yes” won’t end my craving. It’s temporary relief in a cycle of restlessness when I already have everything I need in this writing moment.
I try to notice the countless ongoing connections with other people––obscured by craving success. A sense of connection doesn't have to take the form of an acceptance email or my name in another table of contents. Interbeing, Thich Nhat Hahn’s term for interconnection, is evident everywhere in the writing life if we’re not blinded by outcome-fixation. None of us are freestanding as we write but rather supported by unseen hands—starting with the workers in factories that made this keyboard, that mechanical pencil—all the way to language itself.
I welcome change in the seemingly finished. I don’t let my writing lie frozen at the virtual doorstep of a literary magazine's email address. Occasionally, I open a file and reread, jotting down without critical evaluation any new wording. I practice genre recycling such that a poem might become prose and vice versa. The words we wrote last month can be seeds for the unexpected.
If an editor is No Show, you be No Show. Don’t check your Submittable account more than once a day. Recall the pre-Internet days of walking to the mailbox? I remember the bumblebee engine of the mail truck, the anticipation of extracting the fortune cookie strip of paper with the typed rejection or handwritten acceptance from a S.A.S.E. Make checking your submissions intentional and infrequent.
Honor your waiting. It’s important stuff. If you’re enduring, you’re already one of the strong. It might feel like your waiting-around is a shameful secret, a sign of failure, but you’re not alone. You’re in noble company.
Alexandria Peary serves as New Hampshire Poet Laureate and is the author of nine books, including Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak and Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and the Iowa Poetry Prize. She specializes in mindful writing, the subject of her TEDx talk, "How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Write," and webinars and programs, including for the National Council of Teachers of English and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on mindful writing at Salem State University.