Double Agent: The Relationship Between Literary Agents and Writers

If you think being a scriptwriter’s agent makes it easier to get a literary agent, think again. Literary agents tend to look askance at their professional colleagues. That one of us should presume to be ‘talented’ seems a bit rich. Agents should surely know better than to be writers, is the consensus, and particularly if the work is literary fiction. How on earth could a ten percenter, a peddler of flesh, have the sheer class to write a literary novel, and where would he/she get the attention span? 

There is also something rather unseemly about anyone with the security of a day job claiming author status. When the ‘author’ is a mere scriptwriter’s agent, as I was, eyebrows must steeple in pity. ‘Poor deluded wretch’, they think. ‘Let’s have a look at his stuff, then. Let’s enjoy a good old swig of Schadenfreude.’

Oh, and there’s something else too: an agent-author knows when their agent is faking it, not following up, giving weak editorial, bullshitting. Who wants that spotlight cast on one’s long lunch breaks and reeling mid-life crises?

For this reason, and perhaps a few others, it took me a while to get a literary agent for my first novel. I’m now on my third agent, as it happens, but that’s another story. What I wasn’t prepared for, when I landed the first one, was the other side of the relationship.

The newcomer to representation tends to idolise their agent. It’s a delectable vanity being taken on by a professional who not only says things you have been dying to hear but who specs overhead time on a bet they can sell your book. You can’t help loving this flattering new parent who understands your talent; this mighty she-lion whose frolicking cub you have become. Even though I should have known better, I had these transference feelings too. But adulation for one’s agent is partly the expression of total reliance on a person who is critical in your working life. You have to believe in them. Too much is at stake not to. Of course your agent may be admirable, but you have to love ‘em anyway, until you sack ‘em, or they sack you...

The agent/client relationship has deep narcissistic undercurrents. It’s like a quasi-marriage in which the agent is brought an egg. The agent’s ability to fertilise this egg through translation and subsidiary deals brings in more than commission. Deals are like a series of love-children and they impart to an agent a sense of fecundity and pride. It follows that a good deal generates an admiration bonanza between writer and agent in which each basks in a halogen blaze of two-way reflected glory.  

Agents are a little less keen on reflected failure. They get a little bit distracted if a book tanks. There’s a different tone on the phone. This marks a subtle difference in the overall relation to creativity.

If you love a writer’s book, you seem to love their soul, their inner beauty, everything that’s wonderful and clever about them. They’ll love you back for it, and nothing can take that away.  An agent’s love for a book only really holds if he or she sells it.  In other words, the agent’s identification with your genius as a writer isn’t quite the reverence of a satisfied reader. It depends on the agent extracting a personal result from your tome.  An agent’s true passion, it might be argued, is not for gorgeous prose or great story-telling, but for the thrill of agency, whereby literary excellence becomes cash and kudos.

As agents our self-esteem rather hangs in the balance until we deliver this, and often we don’t. Even a book that sells for a great price can do poorly in the shops and it is no real consolation that the book was wonderful.  A wonderful book is almost an abstraction without success. This paradox confuses the author/agent bond, and is subtly distancing.  In a winner takes all market the ultimate currency is heat.  Heat magnifies everything that agents cdo well and without it we grow pale and sickly. 

But even success feels different for agents and authors.

I can report that the numerous satisfactions of being an agent seem less fundamental than the rewards of authorship. Agents know this in their hearts and often feel that they are skating on the surface of life precisely because their clients are not.

Being an agent is a knack. When someone wants what you’ve got, the position of middleman grants power and power is something you learn to manipulate to maximum effect. Agents generally know better than to mistake this kind of structural leverage for innate personal majesty. The power of great writing, on the other hand, proceeds from the depths of an author’s talent and depends on nothing else. It can change lives, move and disturb, all on its own, and it outlasts the buzz of publishing deals and marketing plans. Agents are reconciled to this verity, and so behind the dynamic facade there is often a person of no illusions and surprising humility.

But naturally the suave agent’s involvement in the ‘real’ world gives them a sparkle and zing that leaves most writers looking like wall flowers. We are editors, salesmen, negotiators, contract drafters, networkers, diplomats, debt collectors, and very often writers manqués with considerable artistic judgement.  That all this protean vitality engages a quite functional layer of reality is the point. It is the worldly realm we manage in the interests of the deeper realms reached by fiction. 

What fascinates me as a writer is the subtle symbiosis of the relationship between agents and writers. It is a Janus-faced alliance joined in the author’s work but facing opposite directions: towards the creative process and the depths of human experience on the one hand, and towards the world with its opportunities and casual cruelties, its triumphs and enjoyable gossip on the other. At its best it is a collaboration that understands the craft and the anxieties of the other’s position.

The relationship between agent and author forms a strand in my novel Unfinished Business. It was only through writing the novel that I came to appreciate the existential gulf between creators and non-creators in the cultural industry. All experience is valuable to a writer. All suffering, every gnarl in the human condition, every thwack and knock can be made to fuel a creative transcendence. For the agent there is never any transcendence. There is only taking it on the chin and keeping on, a bruised perseverance, and the redemption of the kill. However well agents serve the general culture by mediating talent, their greatest achievement – the monster deal - is likely to have come from a fusion of luck and sheer nerve, which is an unsettling premise for a life’s work.

As a novelist I find the agent a more sympathetic kind of character. There is something so human about the middleman, whose fortunes are contingent on others, whose success depends on a good portion of luck. In the end, it is the agent’s renouncing of personal authenticity as he/she aligns with the mainstream that makes for a subtle tension in the soul, and for such an interesting subject.

The agent would like to serve only their own taste and claim the integrity of an author. But often the things we love go for nothing and we get over it by disengaging our passion. In the end, the market chooses. This makes us modern in the most ironic way. We are cogs in a machine professing passion but our 'passion' is pragmatic. So where has the real passion gone? This is the one of subjects of Unfinished Business.