This week I gave a talk to Foothills Writers Group on history writing. They invited me to speak on the topic because The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World won a Colorado Book Award last year. As I prepared my speech, I reflected on the history of how that book came to be.
In early 1998 my co-author, Emory, approached me with a sheaf of notes he’d been collecting since 1972 about American Indian achievements. For years he’d talked with one person after another about the possibility of collaborating on a book. No one was interested, but he persisted.
I’d begun writing a series of personal essays and wasn’t sure I wanted to switch my focus by taking on another project, but Emory was persuasive and the facts he’d gathered were impressive.
His idea was to pull together a short book for children. Together we refined the concept and pitched my former agent in March. We didn’t have to wait long for a reply. She told us the book wouldn’t make any money and chose not to represent it.
We believed in the idea and submitted our query letter to an editor I’d worked with at Facts on File, Inc. While we waited for her response, we began hammering out a proposal.
In May she asked to see it. Again we waited. Her response was mixed. She liked parts of the idea, but it needed to be more focused. That meant dropping half of the material Emory had gathered.
We revised the proposal. She liked the second version better, but still had her doubts. Neither of us had written history before. Emory hadn’t written professionally. The publisher was cutting back on Indian books, so it would be a hard sell-to the monthly acquisitions committee. The 50,000 words we’d proposed weren’t enough. At a minimum the book had to be at least 150,000 words long.
Even though we weren’t sure how we’d come up with enough material for 100,000 more words, we knew it was out there somewhere. We told her that we’d do it and scrambled to come up with headwords for 400 more entries. Then we waited for her to pitch it to the committee.
August came and went and then September. Still we waited. Finally in October, she felt the time was right to present our proposal. The committee said yes.
We waited another two months for the contract and then another month after signing to receive the executed copy. The first part of the advance didn’t arrive until six weeks later, but we began researching and writing.
During the year and a half it took us to write the book, we rode the wave of energy that tangible progress provides. Emory had two surgeries. I was responsible for my father, who had one health crisis after another. Even so we were able to tally up our mounting word counts and make our way one page at a time through a 1080 page rough draft and multiple revisions. We were more than ready to hold our book in our hands and show it to our friends.
After sending the manuscript to New York, we waited for weeks to learn if it was acceptable. We waited months for the printout bristling with yellow sticky notes containing questions that we had to answer within two weeks. Then we waited another six months for the galleys that needed to be proofed yesterday if not sooner. Six months of waiting later, we were hit with a barrage of last minute questions and fixes before the book went to the printers.
And then we waited again. Finally, on Christmas Eve of 2001 the Fed Ex man knocked on my door with a carton of books. Almost four years after I’d begun, the book was real — two years of writing and two years of waiting.
We were lucky. Not only is the publishing industry slow, most books require repeated marketing attempts. Writing is hard work. It’s also a waiting game.
The writing wasn’t the hardest part for me; the waiting was. During the times Emory and I were writing, I felt as if I had some control over the process. Even when I procrastinated, being lazy was a choice I made. The waiting times were the times I was most tempted to give up because during those times the fate of the book was out of my hands.
What kept us going? Having a strong vision and a big one was critical. We were writing to change how Indian history is taught and wouldn’t settle for less. We learned to stop obsessing about possible worst-case scenarios. While we played the waiting game, we turned our attention to other projects. For Emory that meant community organizing; for me it meant working on my essays.
Are we overnight successes? Hardly. Was the waiting worth it? Absolutely. This month the Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World has won yet another award. It was picked as one of the Word Craft Circle Native Writers books top books of 2003. That’s three national awards in six months.
Whether you write articles, short stories or books, a big part of your job description involves waiting. Not only must you wait for responses from editors and then wait for your work to see print, sometimes you need the courage to set work aside and wait until you can revise with a more objective eye.
Write about a time in your life when you had to wait so long for something to happen that you didn’t think you could stand it. (Obviously you stood it. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this.) How did you feel? What were you tempted to do? What did you actually do? What helped you persist?
Make a list of things you can do while you wait as a writer. These can range from small tasks such as filing all those papers you’ve been promising yourself you’d tackle to big things such as starting another book proposal or brainstorming another article and writing a query letter. Keep this list handy. You’re going to need it.