Literary Agent Controversy
Original Ideas, Public Shame, and Wacky Pitches
Biggest “News” in Books: One Bad Tweet
This week a literary agent was fired for a tweet. This is the tweet in its entirety:
The agent has since deleted their social media account, which can only mean one thing: that all of the Book Twitter, BookTok, and the YA community have mercilessly piled onto this person. Out of a desires not to do the same, I won’t be naming the agent.
It is quite obvious why there was such a strong reaction from writers and the publishing community about this tweet. The sentiments expressed here feed into some of writers’ greatest creative anxieties and most caricatured portrayals of literary agents and editors as gatekeepers. At a base level there’s some truth to this negative reaction. This fired-off, 22-word fleeting thought is at its core mean spirited. An agent read something that’s unpublished and not for public consumption, and felt the need to advertise their dislike of the work on the internet. Worse, they implied they liked the idea of the book but further degraded the person who wrote it by saying they would prefer someone else write a better version.
And yet…
The reaction and the consequence to this agent’s one comment does not fit the crime. The best book on this subject—someone’s internet comments inadvertently ruining their lives—is Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (even though it was published eight years ago). The point that Ronson effectively makes is that, fundamentally, dragging someone to the public square to seek retribution, whether that is in the Middle Ages or the middle of the 2010s or 2020s, is not usually a healthy or appropriate response. And often, the things said in a pile-on often exceed the terribleness of the thing that was said in the first place. We shouldn’t flog someone for stealing a piece of bread (I believe that was the main lesson of Aladdin, anyway).
I am a strident defender of writers. Their jobs are extremely hard and thankless most of the time. However, the panic writers have around stolen ideas, which seems to underlie the outrage here, has always struck me as quite ridiculous as a person who reads and witnesses the writing of many novels and books (even though stealing someone’s idea is the plot of many recent, and good, novels, including a book called…The Plot). If there were a formula to writing a bestseller, if it just took “a great idea” as you often hear people who have never written a book wonder out loud, then more people would do it. The fact is that even if someone handed you the best high-concept, never-before-seen plot, you’re first time doing it you would probably mess it up. Novels are typically made of around 80,000 to 100,000 words, and so the idea that an elevator pitch of “x meets y” will turn out remotely the same for any two writers is quite ludicrous (that’s if it even makes it to a completed, coherent full manuscript). How many writers read Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Hunger Games and decided the writing wasn’t that complicated and they could do the same? How many of them succeeded in creating something even nearly as good? As an editor you read dozens of iterations of the same concepts, but the great ones stand out. Not because of their “pitch,” but because the writer is able to execute the story with more skill than the last hundred people who tried it
There’s also the chance of simultaneous invention, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Lots of people arrive to the same conclusions or even have the same profound, once-in-a-lifetime experiences— many people have probably had a transformative experience hiking the Pacific Coast Highway, but only Cheryl Strayed could have written Wild. Many young men travel across the country, and Jack Kerouac’s fame and success has doomed some of them to believing that their great literary work will come out of a very long and boring drive.
To put a point on my point I’ll quote the rapper Nas, who, fittingly, has already thought of this idea and articulated it better than I can: “No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun, It's never what you do, but how it's done.”
Last Thing…
The funniest part of this tweet is that this pitch sounds, frankly, terrible. Deliverance (a book-turned-movie famous for its upsetting portrayal of sexual violence) meets The Road (a beautifully written post-apocalyptic novel featuring many of the genre’s tropes, including marauding cannibals) are two extremely dark books that definitely don’t need to be reimagined and definitely not refashioned for young adult audiences. This pitch is like saying you want to adapt Apocalypse Now into a children’s book— you could do it, but wouldn’t the nature of turning it into a book for 1-to-3-year-olds mean getting rid of every element until it’s unrecognizable?