This is a shout out to all you brave writers hailing from
the query trenches. Life in query land is its own special hell. I know; I’m
there myself (and it’s not my first trip). And since I’m currently in the
trenches, I’ve been researching (former life as a researcher, so it sort of
comes with the territory). My current objective is to find an agent, so I’ve
been researching agents, what they do, what their routines are, who’s stirring
the pot at Absolute Write and Query Tracker (both excellent resources, but
should be taken with a grain of salt as the qualifications for joining sites
like that is the ability to remember your password). What I’m seeing a lot of
this time around are agents posting about what their day is like.
This is brilliant.
Mostly what I’m seeing is that agents work just as much as
writers do. They keep the same hours that writers do. Work all day long, then
come home and try to cram some words into a computer? Just replace words with
read submissions, and that’s what agents are saying their days are like.
I know, people are starting to wonder if I’m a chicken
voting for Colonel Sanders here, but I’m always trying for perspective. What I’m
seeing is that agents are unbelievably busy. Like when I was working 80 hour
weeks, people would shake their head at me and ask me how I did it. I usually
told them that I kept a list of impossible tasks and just didn’t feel
comfortable without one on my plate.
And because agents are so busy, something else happens: we writers
wait.
We wait to hear if our query is getting upgraded to a
partial or a full. Once an agent has a partial, we wait to hear if it gets
upgraded to a full. If it’s a full, we are waiting to hear if it’s going to be
a rejection, a revise and resubmit, or the holy grail of querying: an offer. Oh
that waiting is such torture.
And as the time stretches on, we writers start to think, “Well,
if it’s taking this long, they must not like it.” Which leads to “If they don’t
like it, then why are they just holding on to it? Can’t they just put me out of
my misery with a rejection???”
I know how this feels. In the past, I may have felt like this
myself *looks innocent*. But that’s not how it works. The reason for this misconception is that we’ve all read just
enough success stories where the writer connected with an agent prior to sending a query. The agent then instantly requested a partial; upgraded to a
full the next day, and two days later, the agent offered representation. These
stories are just common enough for people to think that’s how it is.
I’m here to be the voice of reason. Most agents use a
reading queue, so unless you were one of these writers who made a special
connection before hand, you’re going to have to go through the reading queue.
As in, they read your query/partial/full when it floats to
the top of their pile of work. This seems pretty reasonable from the outside,
but when you’re the writer with your hopes tied to that little query letter, it
just seems like a short slice of forever.
Sorry to be the one telling everyone that it's going to be more waiting. I really wish we could all have the instant gratification of instant responses, but try to remember that there are other writers just like you
waiting for their query/partial/full to be read too. I know it’s hard to hear
it. It’s painful to wait when you hope so hard, but just take a deep breath.
And if you need a kick in the pants, go over and watch this skit on
patience where Ed Grubberman gets a lesson in patience…
*hint, this is one of Ed Grubberman’s lines.
