What Are Writers Doing...

When you don't hear from them?

Hopefully these images give you a clue…

Writers do a lot of waiting. In fact, it seems to be a large part of a writer’s career.

We wait for:

• Inspiration.

• Time to write.

• Feedback on our words.

• Other people to make a decision about whether or not they want to take a risk on our words.

• Edits to come back.

• Panic about edits to subside.

• Publication dates.

• First reviews to appear.

• Sales figures…

So much waiting.

So, if you don’t hear from a writer for a while, you can be sure that she’s waiting for some reason or another. And very often she’s waiting for something she either can’t speak about or doesn’t want to speak about. Either because it’s confidential, or painful or… any number of other reasons.

In the meantime, if she’s wise, she’ll embark on some new writing to fill this waiting period. New, absorbing writing that takes the pressue of waiting off.

Of course, it might just replace that waiting pressure with a whole new pressure. You might end up starting the whole waiting cycle up again as you wait for inspiration, for your characters to come to life inside your head, for the puzzle pieces of your novel to click together in your mind…

Yes, there’s a lot of waiting involved in writing.