The Writer's Loop

Waiting on answers, not just rejections

I picked up the latest local magazines yesterday and flipped through them the way I used to when my byline was in the rotation. Nothing. Not in this one, not in the next one, not in the one after that. I set them back on the stand and walked out.

Outside, the loop started.

It started with a question that sounded reasonable. When was the last time I published a piece? Alberta Views in October. Over six months ago. That was when I still had the rhythm, when I was out in the city every week, interviewing, writing profiles, filing on deadline. I chose to slow that down. I chose to focus on the books. I know this. The slower pace was a decision.

The loop did not care that it was a decision.

It moved to the next question. Any literary piece published recently? Not that I can remember. Things come in bursts. Nothing has arrived in my mailbox with my byline lately. Then my Submittable account surfaced in my head, pending items stacked up like unopened mail, each one sitting longer than I want to admit. As every week goes by my feeling about those pieces drops a little lower. They must be terrible or I would have heard back.

Then the escape hatch. I should submit more. It’s a numbers game. I checked the tracker on my phone. Everything complete and ready is already out. There is nothing left to send.

And then the urgency. The push. Write more, do more, be more. Edit more ruthlessly, write faster but more articulately, dig deeper until I am excavating my soul, and then push just a little more.

If I hear nothing, I assume the worst. I’m a failure. I’ll never be anything.

The reality is I’m just one in a pile.

It’s not personal.

• • •

That is the loop, in the order it arrives. I have been watching it run for months and I have started to recognize its sequence. The magazines were a trigger yesterday. Last week it was a friend mentioning a Canadian prize I did not submit to. The week before, it was a colleague’s byline in a venue I had been rejected from. The trigger changes. The loop does not.

Here is what I have noticed about the shape of the waiting itself. Most essays about rejection skip over it. They write about the email. The email is the smallest part.

By the time the rejection arrives, I have forgotten I submitted.

I mean this literally. Four months is long enough that the piece has moved out of my working memory. The rejection arrives and for a second I have to think about which piece, which venue, which round. The email is a stranger tapping me on the shoulder to tell me something I am no longer thinking about. And by the time I have placed it, I realize I have been rehearsing this exact response privately for months. The editor had not decided yet. But I had. And I had decided against myself.

The thing that makes it worse, or makes it more recursive, is what I do once I have reached the private verdict. I do not stop there. Because I am committed to improvement, because I am the kind of writer who takes the work seriously, I begin to respond. Quietly, constantly. I mentally revise drafts already out. I draft strategy notes for the next piece. I start a list of courses I should take, readers I should ask, craft books I should buy. I should ask someone to read my work. I should look at writing courses. I should read more. I should edit more ruthlessly. Push, push, push.

I am already in an MFA. With a mentor who is generous and precise. I read more than most writers I know. I revise four, five, six times before a piece goes out. The reading list for my thesis is longer than an undergraduate English syllabus.

I am already doing all of it.

The push is not filling a real gap in my work. It is filling the gap that silence created in my nervous system. I am not improving against real feedback. I am improving against imagined feedback, a verdict I have rendered privately and then tried to preempt. Which means I am course-correcting against nothing, which means the improvement has no shape, which means I am training myself to get smaller, more careful, more hedged, more afraid of a criticism that has not been made.

And underneath all of it, the improvement loop is not really cognitive. It is somatic. My body cannot sit in the unanswered question. The anxiety lives in my shoulders and my breath. The push-push-push is what my body does to discharge the feeling. It mistakes the discharge for work.

• • •

It is a little like dating. When the text does not come back for six hours, I do not actually know whether they are not into me or whether they are at work. The not-knowing is the thing. I fill it in with the worst read, because the worst read is the most available one.

The editor is not sitting at her desk thinking about whether my piece is good. She is walking her dog. She is taking her mother to a hospital appointment. She is closing out the invoice for a photographer who has not been paid. My piece is a file on her screen, behind two hundred other files. It will be read. But it is not the day she is living. Her day is the day she is living.

I am not at the centre of her attention the way she has become central to mine. That asymmetry is the whole engine of this. Not her silence. The mismatch between how much weight I am giving her response and how much weight my piece is currently holding in her actual life.

I know this. Knowing does not stop the loop.

• • •

I catch the loop sometimes. Not always. I caught it in the bookstore yesterday, a few minutes after it started. I caught it again this afternoon when my own brain told me I had not published anything in six months and I realized, when I actually checked, that the number was wrong, and the knowing did not make the feeling go away. The feeling was not responsive to the correction. It had its own logic.

The catching is not the end of the loop. It is a few hours of distance inside it. Tomorrow I will probably drift back in. The drift is the condition. The catching is the exception.

What I am trying to practice is the discipline of not acting on the loop while it runs. Not pitching harder in response to silence. Not opening Submittable at 9pm to see if anything has moved. These are the things my body reaches for when the silence becomes intolerable. They look like professional rigor from the outside. From the inside, they are what I do to stop feeling the feeling.

The pieces are out. The editors will respond on their timelines, which are not mine. The rejections will come. Some of the yeses will come. I cannot predict which week brings which. I cannot manage myself out of the waiting.

And so I’m here writing this to freeze the moment so I might remember it next time. Meanwhile I keep looping.