Zen and the Art of Querying

By Deborah Lindsay Williams

I am not by nature a patient person. I think microwave popcorn takes too long.

You will thus perhaps understand my pain when I tell you that I’m querying agents for a new book project, a process that by definition necessitates waiting. A voice in my brain urges me to keep refreshing my email: you sent the query two days ago, shouldn’t they have answered already?

When my son was a toddler, he would chant “mommommomMOM” on infinite repeat until I broke down and paid attention to the latest Lego creation or supplied a snack so that he wouldn’t die of starvation that exact second. Generous child that he was, he taught his younger brother the same chant. Halycon days.

With every query I send out, I hear the ghost of that chant and I wonder if the agents hear it too: agentagentagentAGENT!

Isn’t that what we all hope for? That somehow our letter will cut through the clamor of all those other voices and swivel the agent’s attention towards our latest project?

My kids had the option of throwing a temper tantrum if I didn’t respond and while I suppose I could throw myself on the floor in front of my laptop, I’m not entirely sure that’s going to get me very far. (Full disclosure: it didn’t work that well for my kids, either.)

Besides, at my age, hurling myself to the ground in a fury would probably only result in a wrenched back or a sprained knee.

But the other day, after yet another fruitless refresh, I decided it was time to tame my querying monkey mind. I’m going to reframe the whole process: querying will become my Zen teacher; I’m going to remain calm and think only about the process, not the product.

If you think about it, querying—and the waiting that goes with it—is a microcosm of the entire writing process. Writing almost always takes more time than we’d like. Who hasn’t thought, “okay, I’m going to revise three chapters this weekend,” only to realize even getting through one chapter by Sunday is going to be a tall order? Sure, a lucky few will have their queries snapped up immediately but for most of the rest of us? It’s going to be a long slog. Get comfortable—and by “comfortable,” I mean let go.

That’s the most Zen lesson of all, that letting go thing. Send out your first tranche of queries and breathe. Resist the impulse to consult QueryTracker as if it’s some kind of oracle, as if all those numbers can be shaped into a comforting narrative: “this many people after me in an agent’s queue means this; if all those other people have responses and I don’t, it means that …” QueryTracker is neither an oracle nor a Magic-8 ball, as much as we might wish otherwise. It’s just a list, a tool that’s useful but not essential (and no, you don’t have to subscribe to QueryTracker in order to use its basic functions).

Remember that as a writer, you’re practicing the art of letting go. All writers—but particularly writers of creative nonfiction—work deep into the seams, excavating just the right words, the precise image. We wrestle with family stories, with difficult and powerful memories, all with the rather strange desire to share those stories with absolute strangers. It’s a curious business, isn’t it? We do this work in order to give the work away—and we have no control over how those strangers will read our pages, just as we have no control over how the people in our pages will respond.

So use your queries to practice the art of letting go. Launch your elegant letter, your polished proposal and fascinating first pages into the ether, and then make like Elsa: let it go.

Buddhists suggest that we live with intention but without interest in the result. That advice sounds great, but I think it’s actually hard as hell. I mean, the result I want is a review in The New Yorker before I die, even if the review is terrible, but setting my sights on that result seems like a writerly version of my kids’ temper tantrums.

Here’s the reframe: what if querying became a mark of fulfilled intention? If we hadn’t committed to the intention of writing a book, we wouldn’t be querying. Bravo, us, for making it this far on the journey. See? We can all become querying Buddhas.

Think I’ll make some of that slow-cooking microwave popcorn, jot some notes about my next project. I am all about the journey at this point.

OMG. I just got a request for a full manuscript. If I send it tonight, do you think they’ll have a response in the morning?

__________

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a writer and professor now based in New York, after eleven years in Abu Dhabi (she’s an ex-expat). Her essays have appeared in The Markaz Review, The Rumpus, The Common and Brevity, among others; her academic book The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction came out in March. She is currently working on a novel about academics behaving very badly. You can find her on twitter @mannahattamamma; find her author website here.