Judging a book

Years ago I was asked to be a judge for a nov­el con­test. I was one judge of among, I believe, sev­en. I nev­er met them and, for that mat­ter, nev­er knew who they were. The con­test was for the best book in a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­go­ry, for a long-lived orga­ni­za­tion the name of which has no rel­e­vance to this sto­ry. In any case, I was asked to judge among some 250 nov­els from a giv­en year. The judg­ment was made in this fash­ion: each judge read a book, and then scored it on a 1–10 scale, 10 being high­est. The book with the high­est total score was declared the win­ner. Though there was no com­mu­ni­ca­tion among judges, the com­plete tal­ly would be known to all.

When the final tal­ly was shared, the inde­pen­dent judges had by and large vot­ed for the same ten books in the top ten rank­ings. That’s to say all the judges pret­ty much eval­u­at­ed the 250 books in the same way. More­over, when I read the books I soon real­ized that a good nov­el announced itself very quick­ly, and a poor work did much the same. I was aston­ished. Did my own work announce itself—from the point of view of quality—so quick­ly? Assum­ing that was so—and here’s the ques­tion I am posing—why, I asked myself, could I not eval­u­ate my own work so well and so fast? I’d love to have your answer. Then I’ll tell you what I think.