There was the agent—a woman—who spoke with a lisp and looked at me as though I was the scum of the earth. To her I was a stupid upstart who no doubt thought I had written the novel of the year. Before she even saw me at the writers’ conference, she had decided to put me in my place and make sure I knew how worthless I and my writing were. After slagging off my plot, she fell silent. She sat back in her chair and stared at me. I looked back at her. She had finished with me… and well before our time was up. I said I wouldn’t take up any more of her time and left. Did she notch me up as another would-be novelist dealt with? She had no intention of even giving me the tiniest hint of encouragement. She wanted me gone and that was that. I went away thinking it had been humiliating and that I had wasted time and money. I had also come face-to-face with one of the worst people I had ever met in my whole life. I could ask how a person like that can even live with herself, but of course she could and she did.
Then there was the rather senior agent of an equally senior and very famous writer. There was an expensive fee to meet briefly with him at a literary festival. He had evidently been out for a very boozy lunch prior to our meeting. He had a faint odour of alcohol about him and his eyelids drooped as we talked. I probed a little to find out whether or not he had read my submission. He had not, but he was a good waffler. He had had years of experience of bullshitting people. He was due to see another four people that afternoon. It was a nice little earner.
And another one, probably sent against his will to a writers’ conference to represent his agency. He knew little or nothing about writing and complained that I hadn’t sent a synopsis of my novel. Without that, he said, my submission was incomplete. What was in fact incomplete was his reading of my work. The synopsis was included as per the instructions originally provided. He simply hadn’t looked beyond the first page. At that time, Wolf Hall had done the rounds and had been a great success. By any chance, he asked, did I have a novel tucked away somewhere about the Tudors, because that was what everyone wanted to read.
All these agents were a waste of space, holding down jobs for the boys or for the girls, some of them with third-class degrees in English Literature and no idea about what to do next in their lives. Precious too were the agents who requested postal or online submissions but never replied even with a ‘No’. I think I may have started submitting around 2001, giving up around 2013 after publishing multiple short stories, writing a novel, winning various competitions, and getting an MA in Creative Writing. Sometimes life tells you just to get on with things on your own. If you’re going to write, you’re going to write.
From: The Anti-Writing Coach (work-in-progress)
