I grew up very familiar with the idea of hurry-up-and-wait. My dad brought the saying forward from his time in the Marines, and it often popped up in his aviation career. My mother, in turn, saw more than her fair share in thirty-plus years as a secretary, a job largely defined by the ability to soothe, satisfy, and otherwise manage the (imagined) emergencies of others. As writers, one wouldn’t think we encounter hurry-up-and-wait often, but I’ve noticed it in the lives of the writers around me lately — and in my own, I should add.
One version is the very very important hurry-up-and-write-but-then-wait-before-you-show-it-to-anyone, otherwise known as “put it in a drawer for a year.” I first heard this advice in reference to the short stories of my friends and classmates when those stories simply weren’t ripe yet. There was a core of something very good in the writing, but it needed time to mature. In nonfiction, the same principle applies: sometimes to the writing, sometime to the writer. Personally, I had a piece that was demanding to be written last summer, but I knew I needed more distance from the occasion of the piece. I wrote it, then promised myself I wouldn’t look at it until 2011 — a little over six months away at the time. (I haven’t looked at it yet. Sometimes this version of hurry-up-and-wait turns into hurry-up-so-it’ll-go-away.)
Another form of hurry-up-and-wait is the urge to be discovered. We spend much of our time (and I’m generalizing here — not all writers feel this way) hoping for such a turn of events. Yet when it happens, some of us have reached a stage in our development as writers when we don’t feel ready — not yet proud of the arguably-finished work. In such a position, it’s the writers asking the world to hurry-up-and-wait: see me! see me! oh, um, wait, just gimme a couple weeks to revise… just… stay right there.
And third but not least, the version emerging writers all hope for: hurry-up-and-sit-on-your-hands-while-THEY-read. Almost all of us have experienced rejections, and many of us have received the sought-after “nice no.” But the stage after that is:
Editor: “We’re making the final cuts for our next issue and considering your piece — is it still available?”
Writer: YES! YES! TAKE IT! Um, I mean — “While I have sent it to another journal, they haven’t yet responded; so yes, for now the piece is still available.”
“Great we’ll try to tell you within the next few weeks.”
Weeks? Whimper… Are you sure you don’t mean in the next few hours? minutes? heartbeats?
I’m by no means an established writer. I have scholarly work and some book reviews published, with a couple more reviews and a poem forthcoming. But I also have more than one piece of work in a situation similar to the dialogue above. (Just for the record, I don’t bite my nails. But if I did…) There seem to be two ways to react. One, rock back and forth, chanting “please like my work, pleaselikemywork, pleaselikemywork.” Or two, tell yourself, “You already know they liked it at least this much. That rocks, so be a rockstar.” That’s the direction I’m trying to go, and I’m succeeding … if you don’t count the adrenaline spike I get each time my phone chimes for a new email.
