Blogger: Wendy Lawton
I’m heading out on a working vacation for two weeks, so I dusted off a post from about seven years ago that, unfortunately, still rings true. It’s especially timely in light of my absence. For the next couple of weeks I may not be able to join in the comments but I will read them when I return.
Many an agent blog talks about what writers do that make an agent cringe—everything from crazy queries to attention-seeking ruses. Addressing some of these issues makes great cautionary tales. Today, however, I’m going to talk about what we agents do that make us cringe.
I’m guessing that all of us start out with the noblest intentions: I will answer emails within twenty-four hours. I will never let a query sit longer than two weeks. If I meet a person at a writer’s conference and request material, I will put that at the top of the pile.
And then we wake up.
The universal fact of publishing is that each cog in this mighty machine is working at top capacity and still not getting the kind of traction we’d like to see. You’ve heard the numbers of projects editors handle. Agents are in the same boat. We can’t control the amount of work coming in—take queries, for instance—and we can’t always control our day-to-day schedule because much of our job revolves around averting crises and meeting immediate needs. It means that we do the best we can and blush when we come up against our inadequacies.
So let me make this personal. These are the things that me cringe:
- I cringe when I look at my pile of requested manuscripts. I have a basket in my office with some I’ve printed out, others are on my Kindle, others in a file on my computer desktop marked “To read/non-clients.” How I wish I could get to these quickly. Having been a writer, I can never forget that wait.
- I cringe when I come back from a trip or a writer’s conference to 400+ emails. I know I can’t catch up and handle the new emails in a timely manner. The deluge of communication seems to increase each year.
- I cringe when I’m distracted around people. I used to try to keep up with email while I was on the road, but I found it impossible to be “present” with the people I was visiting. I stopped trying to multi-task. I get more done when I’m focused. Besides, flesh-and-blood people are important.
- I cringe when I’m at one of those conferences and meet a person to whom I didn’t respond in a timely manner. It’s especially painful when, had I had time to read their submissions, I would have offered representation. But someone else beat me to it.
- I cringe when I get a new proposal from one of my clients and have to put it in the queue. Clients often hope for immediate feedback. In a perfect world. . .
Cringing aside, part of my job is to prioritize. Each thing that crosses my desk is intuitively categorized—drop everything and put out the fire, do immediately, put this in the file and create a tickler, get to this when you can.
One of my clients gave me this set of Post-It notes that I love:
After reading my list of regrets, you may wonder if I ever get anything done. I do and, on the whole, I do it successfully. I’ve had to learn to set aside my perfectionist tendencies, offer frequent mea culpas and repeat my favorite sayings, “It is what it is,” and “You can only do what you can do.”
How about you? What things do you wish you could do better?
I hope you have a great vacation, Wendy, but we’ll all miss your comments. It’s one of the nicest features of this blog.
I’m sure you work long and hard at doing all you can, but to talk about cringe-inducing… one of your favorites hit my hot button whenever my kids used it. Whenever they said, “It is what it is,” I countered with “But it becomes what you make it.” I’ve never been one for passive acceptance, and the surest pathway to being less that God intended for you is to assume nothing can change.
I cringe when I see someone I promised to pray for and realize I didn’t. It happened so often that now when I hear, “Please pray for me,” I put my hand on their shoulder and speak a short prayer in their presence. And speaking of prayer,
*Lord God, grant Wendy a well-deserved season of rest, a change of pace that restores her soul and recharges her energy. Amen.
Amen.
I agree. Amen.
May your working vacation be more vacation and less work, Wendy! Thanks for your giving spirit and hard work.
What do I wish I could do better? Everything. But I struggle particularly to market as as I should and to organize my technology. I’d also love to read more for pleasure and to improve my craft. When I crave an extra 24 hours a day, my husband says I would only stuff them with more work. So I try to keep my spiritual, family and people priorities straight and pray the Lord works out all aspects of my writing career with His wisdom and timing. And that in my mansion in heaven, I can open all the closets without fearing for my safety.
I hope you have a good vacation, and return refreshed, Wendy.
* Interesting topic, because I’ve gone through something of a ‘process’ of cringing, born of circumstance. I’ll only detail the end of the path. Such are small mercies. Still this may help someone.
* I reached a point at which, illness and disillusionment having made having ‘outgrow’ the moto quotations, poems, music and images I’d used to help me move forward, their previous use made me cringe (and yes, this includes Scripture verses I’d written on file cards). I thought that being plainspoken was more noble, and going to the meaning of Scripture rather than memorizing sound bites was more authentic.
* And then I began to cringe at the goals I had. They seemed puerile, children’s games set against the background of Real Life. What matter a hope to do this, or build that, when my life is in flames, and I know there are others far worse off?
* The penultimate step was to hold the confidence I’d previously had in contempt, measuring both achievement and intention against standards that constantly shifted…because I shifted them. I was busily tattooing ‘Born To Lose’ across my chest.
* There was only one more thing left…forgetting how to be loved, and cringing at the thought of love itself. I questioned its very nature…what did Love, both human and Divine, really MEAN? But you can’t stand outside that question and ask it, any more than you can find the meaning of a rainbow in a textbook on meteorology, or the revelation found in of a sky full of stars in a lecture by Hawking.
* Do you see the path? I hope you do. To first deride one’s tools, then one’s goals, and finally oneself is oddly Scriptural. It’s walking in the ways of the wicked, standing with the sinners, and taking the seat of the scornful.
* God help me, I tried to give all of this a cloak of nobility, a cutting down to the essence, a burning of the dross to the hard diamond purity beneath…something on which I might build my own Brave New World.
* But you see the fallacy there, don’t you? There IS no inner core save the Almighty, and in savaging the dreams and hopes He’d given me, I’d evicted Him a long time ago.
* I cringed at the nihilist I had become. It was done; I’d been present at my own crucifixion. I’d even pounded in some of the nails myself, thinking it would toughen me.
* Will there be a Rising? That depends; a Hand is extended, and always was, but it’s up to me to take It, and not to let go. And that is a decision that has to be made in every moment.
* The road back is long; makes me cringe at the task ahead, and at the path I chose that brought me here.
Profound, Andrew. I hope you know that even as you were pulling yourself down, you still kept lifting all of us up and holding a lamp to guide our footsteps toward God. You’ve just given us another saying worth remembering in good times and bad: there IS no inner core save the Almighty.
Carol, thank you. A part of my motivation has been simply…don’t be me. I intellectualized something I should have taken, gratis, and it nearly destroyed me. My ‘intellect’ was not a match for the darkness. Strong words, but true. It is much harder to return to life than to choke the life out of oneself.
I appreciate this. Thanks.
Hannah, all I can add it this…reach out, to help, and to seek help. I started too late, and the metaphorical cancer was already entrenched.
* And one thing more – understand that if there is any meaning in this life, ALL of our dreams have meaning, and reflect some facet of that Infinite Diamond that is the Almighty. The dream you cherish…whatever it is…has the power to inspire someone else, yes, but the main point of it is that it can give YOU the clarity of faith that lets you see God for whom He really is.
* Scripture says love thy neighbour as thyself…would you denigrate someone else’s dreams and hopes? I doubt that. Very much.
You are so loved here.
Shelli, thank you. I so appreciate and respect you!
* The hardest thing in the world is the second Big Commandment…love thy neighbour as thyself. It’s easy to die for someone else…really, it is. But to think that you have the same value, and are not an expendable resource…that’s tough.
Absolutely.
Beautifully written, Andrew. In the darkest, most painful days of my life, I also tried to insulate myself with my intellect, and felt very wise in my own eyes while doing so. It is indeed a long road back.
I understand those feelings. Everything … I wish I could do everything better. I think the only thing I’m doing better is not being as internally hard on myself over everything. Like you said … we can only do so much. Enjoy your working vacation. 🙂
A great post, Wendy. I hope your working vacation is refreshing, and that you don’t come home to hundreds of emails. 🙂
*For me, like Shelli, I wish I could do everything better. 🙂 I wish I was able to process things more quickly. When I need to make changes to a story, or to improve my craft, I wish I could just absorb and figure it out with a snap of my fingers. But I’m one who needs to process it, and to experiment in order to figure things out.
*I wish I could do all my home responsibilities more quickly to open up more time for writing. Sigh. Since this is not my reality right now, I’ll keep pressing on as best I can.
I feel for you–and the rest of us in this crazy, over-busy, multitasking world!
Thank you for the insight. I appreciate the understanding. My heart goes out for you while I said a small prayer.
My early attempts at writing make me cringe.
Like, CRINGE.
What do I wish I could do better? Type.
Wendy, thank you–thank you for this list. It will help me cope with the waiting when I finally get around to sending out a revised, as well as a new, project to my favorite agents. I wish… I wish I could focus on only one project at a time. But I enjoy variety. I enjoy reading and writing in more than one genre at a time too. Cringe and blush.
Blessings on your time away ~ Wendy Mac
Thanks for admitting that you’re human, Wendy. Please enjoy your vacation!
I hope you have a refreshing break. I’ve also felt the cringe you described in coming back after vacation to a bazillion emails. I agree, that we sometime need to set aside perfectionism and realize “it is what it is”.