David Lee Roth devised the pettiest, most indulgent contract stipulation of all time. Roth was the lead singer of the rock band Van Halen, and he took full advantage of his mega-star status when it came to devising tour contracts. More specifically, one item on the band’s list sounds so bourgeoise that Karl Marx would have had an epileptic fit were he to see it.
Roth demanded all of the brown M&Ms be taken out of the M&M bowls backstage. If he found a single brown M&M in his bowl of delicious multi-coloured candies, he’d pull the plug on the show. The band would cancel…and the promoter would have to pay all the costs!
What an asshole, right? Threatening to cancel a show because there were brown M&Ms backstage? Actually, no. Roth’s reasoning was simple. Van Halen’s tour set-up was the first uber-complicated lighting and sound rig design. Making the whole show work required serious conscientiousness. Skipping steps wasn’t an option for health and safety reasons. Therefore, if the band found brown M&Ms in their dressing room, the promoter just made a tell at the poker table. Namely, that they were incompetent wankers, and the band therefore reserved the right not to work with them.
I first encountered this story while reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande’s book, which I might review at some point in the future, is the best book written in response to the most pressing issue of our age: complexity.
For example, how do you fly an airplane, preferably without crashing it? Or perform a coronary artery bypass graft, preferably without killing the patient? Those tasks and more are incredibly complex, requiring years of specialised training to perform properly. Screwing up any one of those things could be catastrophic. The jumbo jet crashing on the airport runway in a mushroom cloud of fire and burning shrapnel is just as terrifying as a patient flatlining in the operating room. Decisions made in a matter of seconds in conditions of extreme uncertainty make the difference between life and death. How does one respond to this complexity?
Gawande’s answer: checklists.
Step-by-step checklists do the double duty of making sure people don’t skip small but important things (like removing the brown M&M’s from David Lee Roth’s dressing room) while also cutting out all of the possible actions one could do to arrive at the right answer. What do you do when a patient flatlines? Step one and then step two. Gawande is a surgeon, and his work implementing various checklists in operating rooms has slashed death rates in ORs across the world.
It got me wondering: could one assemble a checklist for finding the next literary classic? Who knows, but you don’t know if you don’t try. And so, this is my first attempt at building a checklist for judging books.
A lot of Noise.
Part of the reason checklists work in big, complex situations like piloting 747s is because there’s a clear and unambiguous goal/problem that must be solved. An engine is on fire when it shouldn’t be, so we need to make sure we don’t crash.
However, finding the next Leo Tolstoy is a lot less clear-cut. No commissioning editor tells their colleagues “quick, I just received a submission from a literary agent, grab the checklist and a fire extinguisher!” The criteria for literary geniuses are not clear, so before I can write a literary checklist for greatness, it might help to establish the goal/problem that needs to be worked on.
For one thing, trade publishers already have a goal: to earn back their advance and make a profit on the book. In order to achieve that they need to sell a gargantuan number of books. And so, they need to look at a number of things like “the market”, and whether or not retailers would stock the book. All of the factors involve guesswork and come with a double-edged sword: if the publisher takes on a book with great promise, but it doesn’t sell, they lose money. Not only that, they were duped by a turd spray-painted gold. On the flip side, if that same publisher looks at a book, passes on it, and then see it acquired by a rival publisher who makes a lot of money on it, they failed in exactly the same way: no money and they failed to spot a goldmine.
Clearly the future is unpredictable and no checklist will be a Delphic oracle, but I believe a checklist can make it much easier to find promising books as a checklist would ruthlessly push aside all of the “Noise”, irrelevant pieces of information, and find clear signals of a successful and profitable book.
Books that sell a lot are far more likely to earn reprints in the future and thus help establish them as modern classics alongside the great works which preceded them.
That’s what I’m going to be focussing on for the rest of this post. What are some factors that would indicate to you that you’re looking at real gold rather than something decidedly less golden?
THE EVER EVOLVING CHECKLIST VERSION 1
1 Eight-to-Ten Years Experience
The late K. Anders Ericsson was the expert on experts. Ericsson’s research spanning no less than forty years before his death in 2020 focussed intensely on how somebody became a chess master or a Wimbledon champion. What do these extraordinary people do to become experts?
Ericsson’s answer was what he termed “Deliberate Practice”. Deliberate Practice involves somebody taking the time to practice and relentlessly improve themselves on that subject. First they would master the basics and then, usually with an instructor’s help, take the time to focus on something that is a bit harder in that subject until they reached expert level. To way oversimplify Ericsson’s research, he calculated that it took about 10 years of effort to go from apprentice to expert.
In his book for general audiences, Peak, Ericsson has this to say about writers. “Authors and poets have usually been writing for more than a decade before they produce their best work.”
Thanks to Ericsson, we have the first item on our checklist: how long has the writer in question been practicing their craft? If it’s less than eight years minimum, reject immediately. Anything between eight and ten, give it a read. Ten years and up, pay attention like your life depends on it.
Using “ten years” as a rule-of-thumb, we can spot a number of instances of it occurring in famous novelists. J.K. Rowling has made it abundantly clear that she always harboured ambitions to be a novelist. She tried her hand at writing well before 1990 when she had the idea for what would become Harry Potter. Rowling worked on Harry Potter for around six or seven years before the release of the first novel in 1997. By the time the series was up and running, she was well beyond the expert performance rule.
Our friend Leo Tolstoy began writing around 1850 with his first novel, Childhood, published in 1852. War and Peace wouldn’t come until 1869 and Anna Karenina in 1877, well-past the expert performance indicator of ten years.
John Steinbeck had a childhood interest in reading and writing after a beloved teacher introduced him to the subject. His first work, Cup of Gold was published in 1929 while Grapes of Wrath appeared in 1939. Other masterworks like East of Eden came later still.
Margaret Mitchell’s first story, appearing while she was a journalist, came in 1922 while Gone With The Wind wasn’t published until 1936. She even wrote a novel of sorts called “Lost Layton” when she was just fifteen.
It’s not a perfect rule, but any person whose writing experience spans less than eight years minimum will have clumsier prose than a pro.
2 Does It Age Like Milk Or Wine?
Some books might be good upon release but embarrassing to read months or years later. Eventually, the sales will stop, less people will pay attention to it, it will go out of print, and it will be forgotten. Though we like to think only true works of literature were produced in the past. it turns out there’s a survivorship bias at play. For every book still in print today, there’s probably four or five books that have been forgotten.
Judging which books would age like fine wine or expired milk is therefore an important item in the checklist. Too often works of genius are rejected because of short term issues like “the market” looking unfavourably toward the book. However, this short-term thinking is also killing future classics before they have a chance to prove their worth. Even the best works weren’t magical successes immediately. For instance, The Great Gatsby was initially a commercial disaster and nearly became one of these forgotten books until F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death in 1940 prompted a reassessment. Because the book continued to be reprinted against all the odds, it hung on and cemented Fitzgerald’s legacy in death if not in life.
I’m short on the exact specifics of how long a book needs to be around to satisfy this item of the checklist. Five years? Ten years? In theory, you don’t want your children’s generation to read your book and laugh at it for being a dated disaster.
Then again, bad books just don’t sell in the first place. You’d be hard-pressed to find stone-cold classics that “don’t belong there” for one reason or another. Therefore, considering how future audiences might perceive the book is not optional.
3 Unprompted Recommendation
In the short term, advertising doesn’t work and is probably a waste of money. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration. Overadvertising is very real and it is no joke. Some studies even show the effect of political ads on voter’s behaviour is zero. In short, the general public isn’t fooled by a glitzy advertising poster on the London Underground. They know that the publisher stands to gain by them buying the book, but they don’t know if they’ll enjoy it.
A consumer, therefore, is unlikely to be swayed to try a book they heard about from a poster or some other advertising campaign. Any book they learned about via that route would be one they already wanted to buy anyway. For instance, I’m a big Michael Lewis fan, and if I see he has a new book coming out, I’m going to buy it. But how I learned about it doesn’t make a difference. At best, advertisements act like the reminders app on your phone. “Oh yeah, I have to buy Michael Lewis’s new book. Thank you for reminding me, Penguin Random House poster.” At worst, they just take up space.
But if direct advertising is ineffective, what does get people to buy a book they’ve not read before? Answer: recommendations from trusted sources, a fancy way of saying “word-of-mouth”. How does it work?
Easy. Let’s imagine there’s a new book coming out by an author you’ve never heard of. Then let’s say Steve comes up to you and says, “hey, this book is dope, give it a read.”
If Steve worked for the bookshop, you’d probably brush him off. He clearly stands to gain from you parting with ten dollars for that book. He might be selling you snake oil bound between two covers.
But if Steve was your husband and the smartest man you knew, you’d take his recommendation a little more seriously.
Therefore, the question to ask when considering if a new book has satisfied this checklist condition is simple: Would I recommend this book to a friend or family member unprompted and unasked?
If yes, the book shows much promise.
If no, it shouldn’t be passed along to the next person and it probably isn’t worth their time.
4 Clarity In All Things
I wrote a whole blog post about the importance of being able to understand a book in order for it to be good. Any person saying that a “hard” book, which they need to spend hours deciphering (especially if it’s fiction), is a good read is just plain wrong. In theory, any adult reader should be able to pick up a book and say they found the reading experience easy even if the subject matter was hard. A book that people can’t understand is the equivalent of trying to divide one by zero: an error message.
The Incomplete Conclusion
This might seem like an abrupt ending, but there’s a reason for that: checklists are constantly changing. Despite the immovability of a checklist’s order, they often need to be changed and updated for particular situations. When Gawande helped deploy an operating room checklist worldwide, the checklist contents varied wildly. It was deployed in Seattle, New Delhi, London, and Tanzania, all with different medical practices. Brute-forcing a single checklist onto every operating room while ignoring local healthcare contexts would have been absurd. The same applies to my proposed literary checklist.
It isn’t immediately clear to me whether or not I the items above are only applicable to fiction or if popular non-fiction could be included too. For all I know, I could be missing another universal trait in literary greatness which has thus far passed beneath my notice.
The contents of the checklist will change, but one thing I believe will NOT change is the efficacy of checklists for countless fields. Too often we hear stories of literary geniuses being rejected by scaredy-cat publishers who probably kicked themselves afterwards for not seeing the brilliance in front of them. Unfortunately, those publishers couldn’t read the future, and they had no way of knowing if the book could achieve greatness.
In a world where literature competes with Facebook, Netflix, and porn, a middling book just doesn’t cut it anymore. A checklist with the right criteria might help publishers and consumers more efficiently sort through the noise and find the new classics fasters.
Let’s give the checklist a chance.