A Pox On The Foul And Pestilent Gatekeepers

Courtney Sender on Why the Industry Hardly Ever Knows Best

Dear Republic,

As we work to dismantle the literary industry brick by bloody brick, we move on from the MFAs to a richer and somewhat more elusive target — the vast apparatus of industry gatekeepers. Courtney Sender goes straight after their raison d’être — their ability to evaluate quality.

-ROL

A POX ON THE FOUL AND PESTILENT GATEKEEPERS

As the White Male Novelist essay makes the rounds, one common rejoinder I’ve been hearing to it is: If you’re not getting published, just write a better book.

This advice is almost always wrong.

When it comes to the publishing world, “write a better book” is rarely actually the problem or the solution, at least not above a certain threshold of basic quality.

That threshold is: 1) Can a reader read your book all the way through and make sense of it? and 2) Is the prose remotely readable? (Plenty of highly praised and even awarded books fail my own “is the prose readable?” test, hence “remotely.”)

Of course, “writing a better book” should always be the singular goal of any writer, simply because it’s valuable in itself. It’s the valuable goal, because it has nothing to do with the publishing trends or the current zeitgeist or any particular gatekeeper or marketing budget. Any real writer wants to remove the “remotely” from criteria two. They want to add a criteria three, which is depth and weight that isn’t artificially or politically imposed, but that arises organically from the work as a result of something hard and true and human.

But so many extraordinarily mediocre books get published, and so many simply extraordinary books languish on the writer’s hard drive, that “writing a better book” isn’t the answer to not-getting-published as long as you’re above that threshold. “Writing another book, which is hopefully better because hopefully you’ve kept getting better” is certainly the only way to get another bite at the apple. But whether the apple yields is just as much random luck the second and third and fourth time as it was the first.

The Gatekeepers

The argument to “just write a better book” is, knowingly or not, based on an inherent trust that the gatekeepers get it right. (If they said no, there was a reason, and that reason was: you weren’t good enough. If they said yes, there was a reason, and that reason was: you were.)

There’s something appealing about this belief. It makes the world orderly, for one. It gives reason to failure. It tells us that quality is the feature that dictates a book’s fate in the world, and I think we all want a healthy publishing climate in which quality is rewarded.

Unfortunately, it simply isn’t true.

*

Who are these gatekeepers? I’m talking here mostly about agents and editors. The publishing world has a ziggurat structure, such that there are steep drop-offs from stage to stage as you ascend. Those stages are, roughly: writer with a dream; to writer with a manuscript; to writer with an agent; to writer with an editor/publisher. From there, we move to writer with sales or writer with prestige, which may converge or may stay separate. Then writer with longevity. A second book, or a third. Writer with prizes. Writer with fan base. Writer invited to speak at conferences. Etc., etc., Skip or invert some of these steps, the basic premise is the same: many people get to each lower level, and many fewer rise to the next.

The question is: what is the quality that dictates whether a writer makes the jump from writer-with-manuscript to writer-with-agent and, ultimately, writer-with-publisher? Is it merit, or is it something else? That other force could be the actual market, the gatekeepers’ incorrect perception of or active desire to shape the market, the gatekeepers’ earnest and wrong perception of merit, or some random force.

Answer: It is all of the above. Sometimes, those other forces happen to intersect with merit. But not always. Not even mostly.

*

What does it mean to deserve? To have merit?

Surely, we might argue, some degree of deserving and merit is culturally mediated. Are you responsive to the zeitgeist around you? Can you catch fire, hit lightning, get people today to respond to your work?

If your work is not responsive to the culture in this way, then maybe your “merit” is of a different kind. (I happen to think there’s merit to be found elsewhere. Mostly in voice—the idiosyncratic perspective or worldview—and in compelling plotting. Above all, literature lives in the axiom that in the specific lies the universal, which doesn’t allow our characters to be mere avatars of an identity category.)

But let’s stick with this idea of culturally-mediated merit for a moment.

One version of the white male writer discourse says that culture is simply not interested in these experiences right now. They’ve been done to death. We want other kinds of stories.

But another version says, who is making this assessment of “culture”? And is that assessment real, or artificial? Is it coming from gatekeepers who are severing rather than building bridges between a writer and an existing audience that wants to read their work, if that work were to be available?

Are the gatekeepers, in other words, superimposing their ideas about an idealized market onto the real one, failing to see the actual market that could exist, if those books were given a chance?

Identity is a part of this story. But failure to accurately see and assess quality work is another, perhaps bigger part. And it has long pre-existed the current moment.

Bridge-Building, Bridge-Severing

I was recently the youngest and least-qualified guest at a gathering in New York for writers, editors, and journalists who are concerned about the sudden antisemitism in the literary, publishing, and adjacent academic worlds (e.g. of literary journals, many housed in the academy). We discussed, among other things, the “soft BDS” of who simply isn’t reviewed, isn’t offered agent representation, isn’t offered the book contract, isn’t invited to the reading or the panel. Unprovable and untraceable absence.

Why invite boycotts of your new release or your conference panel, when you could instead invite an author whose identity is less contested, and who would fill the client list / bookshelf / review section just as well?

But at that gathering, we arrived at an interesting point: Jewish readers are one cohort of the public that actually buys books.

This reveals something significant. The disconnect is often not between the writers and their potential audience. It’s actually an artificial disconnect, imposed by the gatekeepers who stand between the writer and their potential audience.

Gatekeepers—agents, editors, and publishers—are supposed to serve as the bridge between the writer and their readers. They are valuable for a few reasons: they have more marketing, advertising, and distribution networks and resources than any individual writer, especially one just starting out; their imprimatur should mean something about the quality contained between the covers; they should be adept at choosing the books that readers will want. To some degree, the last two points are always in tension with each other.

The Hardest Argument

The idea that the gatekeepers pass on good work that would have an audience, and that they are often wrong in their decisions to reject, is one of the hardest to make people believe. In my experience, people have a reflexive aversion to the idea.

We all know that Van Gogh only managed to sell one canvas in his life, I’ll argue. Yet we think the gatekeepers wouldn’t miss him today?

Essentially, many will answer: Yes. Today’s Van Gogh will necessarily rise to the top.

By what process?

Time. Keep going. Keep getting better until you’re ready.

And how many Van Goghs are never discovered after their deaths, either?

Your answer here rests solely on your belief in the fairness and orderliness of the world. But my answer is: Many. Most.

Back to the Future the screenplay was tossed out of every studio. What is this? the screenwriters were told. Comedy, family, sci-fi, romance? There’s no market for this.

It’s largely because they’d met Steven Spielberg at school, and he gave the movie a leg up with his own production company, that they eventually got into studio and became a blockbuster and a cult classic. Clearly, there was a market for it all along.

See? The critics of my idea will say. The mechanism is time. Stay in the game long enough, eventually you meet a Spielberg.

I find this reasoning absurd. Why would we assume the norm is meeting the Spielberg, rather than that the norm is meeting no one and remaining in obscurity?

The key takeaway is that Back to the Future was the same film the whole time, when it was languishing in obscurity as nothing but a screenplay, when it was told there’s no market and no audience for this; and when it was produced and became the highest-grossing movie of the year and when it’s replayed now forty years later. If it had quality at any of these points, it had quality at all of these points.

Gatekeepers are not visionaries.

*

I have a friend from graduate school who wrote one of the best new novels I’ve read in the past 15 years. It’s an American Don Quixote, about a salesman of wind in North Dakota, with a story that moves from California to the East Coast. It hangs together. It has a death scene that I think about regularly, that taught me something about death. Years after reading it, I still think about passages from it regularly, as new experiences in my own life trigger the memory.

It couldn’t even get an agent. The book was about 140,000 words, and she was told it was unsaleable. (Tell that to A Little Life, a staggeringly structurally lopsided book I happen to love, whose publication was a small miracle at 300k words. Again: The market exists if the book is good, and if given a chance.)

At the time, I happened to have offers of representation from three agencies, and I told all of them: if you think my book is good, you have to see my friend’s. It’s better.

So she had a vouched-for person vouching for her, and still, she got not one offer of agent representation. No one was even willing to try.

She spent years after that editing the manuscript. After all, she’d been told it wasn’t good enough. “Just write a better book,” she was told. She edited it down to under 100k words, as she was told. She still couldn’t get anyone to try with it. I read the version that was shorter, as she was instructed it had to be, to be better. It was worse.

So there was a great book, and no one has gotten the chance to read it. If I ever have the ability to, I will try to get it into the world. (My friend and literary critic

Naomi Kanakia

has read the same manuscript and might do the same; we talk about its undeserved fate all the time.) No one needs this book. And so we get other books that are worse, and told they are better.

What Happens Next?

The difficulty of arguing that great books often go nowhere is that we can only use success stories as proof. Back to the Future and Van Gogh and John Kennedy O’Toole and Herman Melville and F. Scott Fitzgerald are more convincing case studies than my friend, precisely because they are the outliers who got discovered in the end. My friend who didn’t—which, I’m arguing, is the more prevalent experience—doesn’t have the weight of proof that she was, indeed, good. She’s got my word, and the word of other friends who read the manuscript. Not even, at this point, her own word.

And this brings me to the real tragedy: what doesn’t get written. The internal self-censorship, the not-even-trying. Or something more insidious: the trying, but zeal-lessly, without the wind of unencumbered inspiration billowing the sails.

Writers like my friend—who are discouraged instead of encouraged when they write something great, who then lose confidence, who try to shrink their writing rather than expand it—often don’t write their next great book. This is the loss.

Yes, writers need a thick skin. Yes, rejection is the name of the game. Yes, a real writer can grit their teeth and sit down to the desk again, whether anyone will ever read them or not.

Yet there is something undoubtedly spurring about knowing that someone wants what you have to say. And there’s something undoubtedly stultifying about being told no one will hear you. Some are fueled by this, yes. Some shift into the mode of I’ll-prove-them-wrong.

But it’s sensible to be discouraged when you are pushed off the ziggurat, in response to work that is better than the work of those who kept rising up.

You should keep writing anyway. Maybe the zeitgeist will catch up, and maybe it won’t. Writing has inherent value and dignity, if it’s something the author is writing with maximal complexity and honesty.

And you should always keep getting better.

But there’s no threshold at which you’re ready, and the ground cedes. No one is bound inevitably to have a book in the world. When it comes to publishing, no one will inevitably deserve a book contract, no matter how deserving the work becomes.

Courtney Sender runs The Craft Lab for Writers Substack, podcast, and writers’ groups. She is a MacDowell fellow, and her essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Ploughshares, AGNI, iHeartMedia, and others. Her first book, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me, came out last year.