Culture, Digested: There are too many consultants in literature

also book doulas, manuscript boot camps, and creativity coaches

There is a lot that I find objectionable about this drive to use corporate logic on artistic production – the inability to distinguish art from commodity, the exhausted surrender to materialist language, the treatment of artistic pursuits as a day job rather than immense privilege and source of joy – but none is as egregious as the presence of the literary consultant.

The literary consultant promises to solve the problem: figure out why you are blocked, why you are unpublished, why you can’t finish. They will yell at you while you artistically crossfit your way to a finished product, and they will tell you what to cut and change and reimagine to get the industry interested. And because like corporate consultants they don’t really know what they are talking about, they’ll probably suggest adapting to “what works,” meaning, what has been created and published in an oversaturated market a thousand times before.

The creativity coaches. The publishing workshops taught by “insiders.” The retreats you have to pay for. The book proposal boot camps. The manuscript managers and midwives. Book doulas (people love the word doula). The intermediary that comes before the intermediary that comes before the agent. At each point of production, there is anxiety. Is this good/will this sell/am I a total delusional loser wasting my precious time chasing a fantasy. And at each moment of anxiety, there is someone there just helpfully offering to assist dispelling it for a fee.

It's the mélange that freaks people out. Art is not just art it’s ART. It’s a divine pursuit, worshipped in our culture in a way that not even gods are anymore. (And just to be clear, we only worship the creation of art, not the art itself. We don’t even really like art.) But it’s also money. It’s also the method of everything from base survival to flourishing to establishment of social status. But it’s also lifestyle and the permission we are given to experience beauty and pleasure and the desire to inspire the envy of others so that maybe we can finally enjoy the things we have. So it’s not just writing a novel it is being a WRITER with all the implications and fantasies that support that desire, and it’s not just about writing a good novel it is about all the rest of this stuff that comes from having written a good novel. But to get any of that, you have to publish, and knowing how unfair the industry is does nothing to ease the sense of rejection and exclusion. So if you can’t get over that line yourself, why not pay someone to help?

she’s doing great, thank you for asking

If it were just one thing or another, the desire to make some money or the desire to get something out of the self and into a physical form, we would be less neurotic about all of this. And I have no problem with the therapists and teachers helping people to express an inarticulate inner world. I have no problem with the teenage girl buying a copy of The Artist’s Way and funding whatever it is that Julia Cameron wants to order on DoorDash this week. But I do have a problem with the consultants and intermediaries who have invaded publishing like McKinsey kids, ready to exploit the uncertainty and anxiety of the inexperienced.

The only way to get all of it – the accomplishment, the lifestyle, the ability to say “I’m a writer” at parties without having to get drunk first -- the idea goes, is to get the profession. If you can professionalize, you can have the whole package. And you can point to your CV with all its publishing credits, degrees awarded, awards bestowed, to prove yourself to yourself and others. Look, I’m a writer. Would a non-writer have an MFA? A story published in Glimmer Train? A tiny prize that required a $50 entry fee and slightly resembles a pyramid scheme in its structure and functionality? Absolutely not. What terrible ache exists within you that requires you to feed it with these external markers that you are a writer after all is not relevant to this column.

But the path to achieving these markers is confusing. It’s not like a job you can apply to and interview for. And because of the various publishing crises – no one knows how to sell a book, no one knows what makes a book good or not, no one knows how to appeal to any demographic other than their own and only one demographic seems capable of running publishing at a time – the system relies heavily on professional networks and intermediaries like agents, universities, and social media metrics to decide what it deems good and by that I mean what it decides it can sell.

In this uncertainty comes a flood of consultants. Consulting is the new dream job. There is a reason why so many people who go to Harvard end up in consulting. You get all the money and prestige but without the weight of responsibility. If a book flops, they blame the writer or the publisher. If a book sells incredibly well, the consultant gets to add it to their CV to sell their services to the next anxious writer.

But the consultant gets another benefit, which is the association with the glamour of the art world without financial precarity. If those who can’t, teach, then those who can barely, consult. The creativity coaches, book doulas, book proposal boot camp generals I see on Substack, Instagram, and Google Ads usually have one or two respectable credits on their CV. A few years in a major publisher or at a high profile agency, a book or two with a decent sized publisher, and then they washed out or realized there was no way to live well as a writer or didn’t want to get a real job or couldn’t pay for the all-natural, human grade dog food they like, so they decided to “use their knowledge” or experience to funnel the young and naïve into the soul-degrading process that is commodification. So we’re not even turning writing into a good commodity, like gummy vitamins or $50 scented candles. It’s becoming one of these MLMs, a slightly upgraded version of selling yoga pants out of a suburban garage.

Because it’s strange that an industry that is famous for not providing a living wage to any of its writers except a dozen stars at a time is so overstuffed with paid consultants presenting their aesthetically curated lifestyles on social media. Whether or not they produce good work is less important than the way they crank out the fantasy of the life of the mind, the artistic lifestyle, the creative journey (which for them is not syphilis and alcoholism, it’s watercolor journaling and juxtaposing a novel next to a steaming cup of tea next to a crystal all illuminated by a beam of light). But they can only maintain this lifestyle by exploiting the fantasy they help implant in the brains of others.

Like their McKinsey counterparts, the literary consultant has no real ideology, taste, or goal to speak of, other than to make a number go up or down on a chart. When the CIA was funding The Paris Review and other journals, it was to broadcast certain ideas relating to freedom and the genius of the individual. But we’ve replaced the ideology of the individual with turning the individual into a brand. Meanwhile we’ve surrendered the idea that there is anything really interesting or worth protecting about art, or some reason to hold it back from the logic of the market.

The one thing that remains constant is how overly confident we all are that we are resistant to influence. Sure, we’ll take the money, we’ll compromise for the sake of survival or comfort, we’ll talk about our brand, but it’s not like we’re going to change. We’ll be the same. On the inside. We’re certain.

Recommended:

• The 13^th Step podcast has been in the news, because the journalists putting the show together had their houses vandalized and their families harassed. Their original reporting was on a man who made millions on addiction recovery centers, while also sexually assaulting women in recovery. The podcast gets into just how wildly profitable these centers are becoming, despite rarely seeming to take care of their patients.

• We are right on schedule for rebranding eugenics. So that’s exciting.

• I had a long flight recently, so I listened to some of the CIA’s podcast, The Langley Files. I think the reception of the podcast was not as cheery as they had hoped, because they have been on a pretty erratic release schedule. It is about as horrifying and yet boring as you probably expect. Not anywhere as good as the episode of Hysterical about Havana Syndrome, though.

• If you have a chance to go to Mantova, you should have the cake.