"So two-faced": Agent letter

As it says. Part of a conversation with a writer/professor I know.

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People have no idea that agents just want someone like themselves but with whom they get to act like they're Yoda or this guru. The unchallenged guide. The doctor to the patient. The shrink to the person on the couch. It's never about money. It's not a commercial business. It's a pettiness business. An ego business. That's the actual business of publishing.

I know many writers who have never made ten bucks, who are significantly older than I. Who will never make ten bucks. Who haven't ever been anywhere and aren't going anywhere. Who do one kind of thing. With no commercial value. Which they do poorly and infrequently. It's not like they can pivot. You know, write about this other subject. No diversification, no potential for diversification.

They're stuck on their narrowest of roads that has these ruts in it and is all mud. They're fifty-seven and they had a story about an MFA professor (who was actually just them) in AGNI once. It's all they can do. The track record is four dreadful published stories exactly like that one while they teach in some MFA program. That's all they got in them. And they barely can do that.

And they'll have an agent. I see it all the time. Hell, they'll put it in their social media bio. It's pathetic. That agent doesn't think they'll ever make them the price of a cup of coffee. And the agent doesn't rep them because the agent just loves and believes in their work in and of itself, like they have this moral compunction to be on the right side of prose-based justice in an unjust world.

Most of these people lack the ability to truly believe in anything. And there's so little that anyone writes that's worth believing in because the guy I just described above is a miserable piece of work envious of anyone with actual ability like almost all of these people and he's inculcating the up and comers new to the system in how to write and have the attitude of a entitled, pretentious, ignorant prick, which most of those silver spooners already have a multi-decade head start on.

The reason for the relationship is other stuff. It's always other stuff. A relation. Some fellow incestuous crony in common. A favor to someone else (like an incestuous crony). They golf with that person's dad. The agent's own insecurity.

You think an agent wants someone they think is on this other intellectual level than they are? How about someone who can do many different kinds of things brilliantly? Hell no. How would they keep up? You think an agent would be comfortable with being the lesser figure by far? Or would they feel that they were lacking? And you know that's the last thing someone who already feels like an imposter wants.

It's always other stuff, my friend. Which these people cover up with lies, as they do with everything. They'll tell someone else their book isn't for them, and wank themselves off in providing some quasi-specific reasons. Meanwhile they're representing someone who might as well just take a shit on the page. The agent doesn't understand it or love it or care about it. It's so two-faced. It's never the writing or the commercial prospects of the writing.

Thinking in terms of the latter--and being proactive in following--requires vision to some degree. And seize-the-day boldness to some degree. I'm not talking about the real kinds of assessments these people make, which go along the lines of, "This person is well connected in the publishing community, so that means their book will get reviews and intra-community buzz and gushy-lie testimonials from their fellow talentless frauds, and they're this color yippee and this nationality yippee and they went to the right school yippee."

They don't do vision. They don't have vision. They wouldn't be comfortable trying. They're not assessing what work could do in the world because of what it is. Underline that: What the work is. It's potential actual appeal. Doesn't work like that.

And people are so easily duped and incapable of thinking for themselves and brainwashed by everyone else who is doing the system's bidding often without any clue that that's what they're doing and screwing themselves over in the process if they ever actually wrote anything that's any good because a mindset isn't in place--let alone the people and infrastructure--to handle that, make the most of it. They want to be a part of that system, and get the approval of those in it. They're not thinking. Seeing.

They don't even look into it that much because they don't really care that much. They're not up at four in the AM on a Saturday so they can spend the next twelve hours working on a page of their writing to make something better. They don't think in terms of readers. They want approval. Being a writer has a much lower threshold of entry--or so people believe--than being an NBA player.

There's nowhere that you can fake it until you make like publishing. Nowhere on earth. The key within the community is to have no one think--fear--that you're legit. Because that makes them doubt themselves more.

But what's "make it" mean? Be any one of God knows how many Laura Van Den Berg types for the LVDB wannabes who are just as talentless and inconsequential in the grand scheme of anything, and have no impact outside of the walls of this gated community? Someone who can't make a dent in the world no matter the opportunities that they're undeservedly handed like they're the recipient of a charity fund for rich people?

The would-bes aren't going to rock the boat they want to sail on, never mind if there are a thousand evil acts going on all around them on that boat that make their chances of getting anywhere good, or anywhere they deserve to be if they are good, nigh on impossible. They're not committed enough to notice. To learn. They're just dabbling. What do you think Laura Van Den Berg and all the people like here are doing?

It's kind of like how people automatically say the fiction in The New Yorker is awesome. Sure it is. Until you try and read it. You take that George Saunders shit, that Tommy Orange shit, that Joshua Cohen shit up on the blog from The New Yorker, and you show it to someone and say it's by your idiot cousin, and they're going to be like, "Wow, that's so bad, tell your cousin not to give up his day job."

They aren't going to say, "Amazing, what brilliance, I need to more." If you told them that Joshua Cohen excerpt was by a Pulitzer Prize winner there's no way they'd believe you. They'd have to see it on the page or at The New Yorker's website, and they wouldn't know what to make of that. They'd still have a hard time believing. It'd be like trying to reconcile yourself to something that went against how you thought the world went or could go.

Nothing is real here, brother. Nothing is what these people want you to believe it is. They aren't what they want themselves to believe they are. And they usually know that on some level. So how do you think they're going to feel about anyone who is the real deal? It's not a real business right now. For many reasons.

Other stuff. Always.