Member-only story
Or: How to wait out the no good, terrible, very bad waiting game
You hand in a longform story or a short piece of journalism or an essay here on Medium and it starts:The waiting game. Waiting for feedback from an editor. That wait can be terrible. Will they like the story? Parts of it? None of it?
How to endure the waiting game?
I can’t answer for you but can say what helps me. I take an unnecessarily historical and philosophical approach to the waiting game, or at least try to. I first think how Homo Sapiens have existed for 200,000 years and for only 10,000 of them have we had any recorded account of our actions. For 95 percent of our existence, in other words, we’ve had no way to understand how people lived, to say nothing of how they struggled, how they triumphed, how they enjoyed life or wallowed in it.
One of our direct forebears existed as a species for one million years and all we know today is that they once existed.
So, will it really matter what that editor thinks? Will it really matter how I respond to those edits? No. No one hundreds of years from now — forget thousands — will remember this story, or me, or the editor who improved it.
Enjoy the process for what it is, is what I’m saying. Enjoy the act of creating and…
