The Committee Agrees

What professional science and fiction publishing might have in common

I spend my days as a scientist. As a scientist, particularly if you lead a team, you need to decide how to prioritize your efforts. Where to invest your time and resources. Who to recruit and what expertise you need to bring to bear. It’s tricky, because there’s a temptation to select based on consensus. To work on whatever everyone can agree is at least somewhat important. You might let a committee decide. And if you do, you’ll be working on something that other labs have already settled, but simply haven’t published yet – because that’s how long it all takes. Consensus is a lagging indicator of what was the bleeding edge of impactful about two years prior. So sometimes you need to buck the trends, find nuggets of solid, but less discussed science, and build your projects from there. Then you might be working on something new. Then you might be able to break a whole new avenue with new potential open. It’s thrilling and scary. And emotionally fraught. You’ll face doubts from very smart and well-informed people. Many of whom you’ll rely on to move the project forward.

The concept of consensus plays a role day-to-day with your team. But it also plays a key role with various committees that are important in professional science realms. Committees. Grant review committees and journal reviewers and editorial boards – similar beasts, but different letterheads.

I also write novels. Well, I try. And I’ve started to think the book business has similar characteristics to the science world - with one extra element that might make the condition a little more extreme.

The way traditional publishing locates the present focus – the “what should we do next?” – is by the all-important comp. It’s gotta be within the last five years. This book X meets book Y. The comps only point backwards – but not too far back. Old enough for a track record, but not so old that we don’t believe there’s a current market for it – even if readers are still buying that older book like crazy…because readers do buy older books like crazy.

But I think the recent past comps culture is creating a bit of a funnel; a funnel that ends in homogenized stories. Sort of the same way that science consensus-forming committees result in retread projects.

Picture two questions you could ask about a manuscript. One: is it any good? Two: does it look like things that recently did well? Those are not the same question. A book can be completely accomplished and look like nothing else on the recent list – not worse, just stranger. Less familiar. The catch is that the gate can’t really answer the first question except through the second. And really, it’s only asking about the very beginning of the second question. It’s only asking: Do the first 10 pages of this remind me of something that sold well in the past five years?

And that gate has multiple good reasons to exist. Most manuscripts that look like nothing that was recently successful look like that because they probably don’t work and probably aren’t good. There are infinite ways to write a bad book. There are many, but far fewer, ways to write a good book. Even fewer ways to write a commercially successful book. The gate isn’t out to strangle originality. It’s bailing an ocean of the simply broken, and broken is unfamiliar too. All true. But notice what it admits. The strange-and-good and the plain-broken turn up at the gate in the same coat – both unrecognizable, both failing to compare well to anything recent – and the gate owns no instrument that tells them apart. So to throw out the dead ends, which it has to, it probably throws out some interesting live ones in the same motion. Not because anyone’s a coward. Because nobody can sort the two with a ruler calibrated on the recent past. And even if they had the instrument, they wouldn’t have the time to deploy it.

But there’s another driving force to homogenization in writing fiction that science mostly skips: fiction installs the committee inside the writer’s brain.

A writing workshop is basically a standing committee that grades by the response of the room, and the room can only respond out of what the room already knows how to read. The writing workshop has rules.

Start in medias res.
Make sure the protagonist is super active.
She needs to want something. Really badly.
What are those stakes? Are they clear enough?
Avoid that exposition.
Show – how dare you tell?!
Way too many POVs. Keep it tight.
You started with the weather! What are you thinking?!

Where’s the cat? Gotta save that cat! Oh? No cat? A salamander will do.

Photo by iuliu illes on Unsplash

Eventually you really don’t need the workshop at all. It’s living rent-free in your brain. Even if you never attended. All of these workshop notes are online over and over. The architecture of stories and characters in debut novels starts to have the same progression. Like the same song, just covered differently in a different musical genre and with a different tempo. But the same melody and the same chord progression. Because that’s the song that the previous five years wrote. And don’t stray too far from the source of what sells.

The funny thing is, though, different does still sell. Like I said, the different just comes in the shape of older books.

The shelves are still stacked with bestsellers from twenty and thirty years ago that no current pipeline would touch – too long, built strange compared to recent hits, head-hopping across four points of view, doing the exact things a workshop circles in red. And people keep buying them. Year after year. Nobody seems to have checked with these readers about whether they only wanted what the workshop says is acceptable.

I won’t oversell it. That appetite isn’t proof that outlier new books would sell well. You can write it off as brand, or nostalgia, and in any case it only counts the books that already made it out the door, which is the spot where “you’re just counting the survivors” really lands. So I’ll give that up cleanly: the survivors don’t prove the case. But they’re a witness that the market will buy books that don’t match the formula.

Nobody’s a villain here, which is exactly why it lasts. The editor reads backward because the comp is the only tool she was handed. The agent picks the book the editor will be more likely to buy. The author writes the book that the agent is likely to represent. The committee doesn’t need to meet to agree.