The Art of Waiting

by Grant Faulkner

Sometimes when I talk to new writers about writing a book—and then finding an agent and working with an editor and seeing a book through to its finished state—I’m daunted by the timeline I map out for them, even though I’ve followed such a lengthy timeline myself.

I’m daunted by how long a single book can take, and how the art of waiting is actually an unrecognized and under-appreciated part of the creative process (and certainly the publishing process).

Let’s face it, we’re generally not good at waiting. Not these days. Humans used to be good at waiting because waiting was part of every day. Waiting for a harvest. Waiting for a hunt. Waiting for a letter. We once even had to wait a whole week for the next episode of our favorite TV shows.

But now we rarely wait for anything, so all of our waiting muscles have essentially atrophied. Or been re-trained in impatience and urgency. We scarcely know how to wait for an idea or a deep thought. We’re often horrible at waiting to see what someone has to say. We flinch with chagrin the moment we have to stand in a line.

And writing and publishing a book might take … five or ten years. Or dare I say … more? (Ouch, but sometimes yes.)

The treasures of waiting

We’re so used to an action/reaction world that we practice impatience more than we practice patience. We’re really good at impatience, in fact. It’s amazing how much we trust our impatience when it has delivered so little.

I wonder what would happen if we decided that waiting was actually a good thing: an opportunity to pause, reflect, catch our breath. An opportunity for anticipation and excitement, not discouragement. An invitation to imagine.

When the memoirist Lily Dancyger was on the Write-minded podcast (now Memoir Nation), she talked about how she’s always been in a hurry with her writing, but that hurrying has never sped it up. It took her 11 years to write her last book despite being in a hurry the whole time.

We’ll get there when we get there, in other words.

I sometimes wonder if we should practice wasting time, just for the sake of “wasting” time. We practice productivity a lot, after all. We practice making good use of time. But when we make such a good use of time, do we feel all of time’s textures and contours? What do we miss by not simply enjoying its passing?

Borges put time—and our role in how time is experienced—into perfect perspective in his essay, “A New Refutation of Time.” “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Time is an illusion for Borges—which means that we can shape the nature of our waiting. Honoring the times of waiting invites in creative fertility. When we wait, “We begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness,” said Pema Chodron. Or, as the monk Thomas Merton noted about the contemplative life, “You do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.”

Sometimes our best ideas need time to simmer in the background. When we're not actively forcing solutions, our subconscious continues working. As Maya Angelou said, "What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks 'the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.' And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'"

Welcome waiting

Welcoming waiting is a key part of the creative process. But there is also a different kind of waiting after you’re done with the writing, of course, and that kind of waiting has more variables because you have so much less control as you await word from an agent or editor.

Such waiting is the more challenging, but often the most necessary. I’ve waited my way through many a rejection from agents and editors. The tension of waiting can actually fuel creative energy when I finally get to work. Distance in time often brings clarity—so I’ve used my periods of waiting to view my work objectively, and to prepare myself for a rewrite.

The key insight might be that waiting isn't empty time—it's preparation time, processing time, and sometimes exactly what we need for the next chapter to emerge naturally.

The time isn’t now. But the time will come. Waiting is the art of trusting the passage of time.

See what happens if you practice waiting in every part of the creative process. See what happens if you approach life with the expectation to wait, not to go.