The thought police

Sensitivity reader. There are no two words more certain to get a reaction from anyone involved in publishing. Sensitivity readers check manuscripts for bias, stereotypes and inaccuracies about minority groups of which, to use the current jargon, those readers have “lived experience”. And their existence is, depending on where you stand, a gross infringement of an author’s right to free speech as part of publishers’ craven surrender to online lynch mobs, or a necessary corrective to a still largely homogenous industry which cares little for marginalised voices.

Several high-profile novelists have come out against the practice. Lionel Shriver said “the day my novels are sent to a sensitivity reader is the day I quit.” John Boyne’s take is that “no serious writer would ever allow their work to be so sanitised.” Kate Clanchy, whose former publisher Picador brought in sensitivity readers after she was accused of using racial tropes in her 2019 memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, wrote in UnHerd of her feedback from those readers. One of them “trails a noisy stream of alerts, like a lorry reversing”: another says that Clanchy should not “use ‘handicap’ in its ordinary sense of ‘impede’ (infraction level 2, serious).”

This is all in a certain way grimly amusing stuff, and Clanchy may be said to have earned the right to laugh bitterly. When the racism accusations against her first aired, various authors weighed in to defend or criticise, leading to some vicious online spats which spiralled far beyond the bounds of one woman and her memoir. But as a skilled writer, she knows exactly the effect that reproducing the above excerpts will have had. They tap into so many tropes beloved of culture warriors, as indeed does the phrase “sensitivity readers” itself. It implies spoiled, weedy snowflake millennials who put their own feelings above everything else and can’t bear even to countenance something they may find offensive, let alone engage with it. “Sensitivity” in this context is something negative, selfish, entitled and self-indulgent, but also with overtones of both Orwell and Huxley, a Thought Police tasked with enforcing universal blandness.

Many writers like to provoke and unsettle, to challenge people as well as comfort them. But there need be no discord between this and the use of “sensitivity readers”, especially if you start with a writer’s most basic tool: language. Think of them as “authenticity readers” – which is what they are – and the entire narrative around them changes. I, and almost every writer I know, am at great pains to get even the smallest things right: the other day I spent an (exceptionally happy and nerdy) hour looking up train times between Stoke-on-Trent and Euston in 1948. I don’t hold with the adage “write what you know” – the entire point of novel writing is to invent and explore new worlds – but the phrase makes perfect sense when flipped. Know what you write. Make your milieu and your characters as authentic, believable and complex as you can.

To this end, why would you not seek the counsel of someone who already knows more about a subject than you do? If I’ve got something badly wrong in a book, I’d far rather know while still writing it (and be told this as part of a confidential communique) than once it’s out there and it’s open season. I’ve used such readers before and will use them again. My most recent novel, a love story set in North Korea called The Law Of The Heart, was read by someone with huge first-hand experience of the country (though given political sensitivities there he asked not to be identified), and he provided reams of exceptionally helpful notes. I’m just finishing the next one, Half Way Tree, set in Jamaica and Britain over three separate timelines, and will certainly ask for the process to be repeated with a suitable reader.

Lambasting sensitivity readers as proscriptive dictatorial killjoys is not only to misunderstand their role: it’s also to assign them substantially more clout than they actually have. Rebecca McNally, publishing director for Bloomsbury Children’s Books, said: “we don’t expect [sensitivity readers] to make books bulletproof, and don’t expect authors to implement all the sensitivity reader’s recommendations.” No publisher – certainly no reputable publisher – orders an author to incorporate every item in a sensitivity reader’s report. That’s not how it works, and that’s not how any of the editing process works. A book is worked on by at least two editors, one on a macro level (structure, pacing, characters, themes) and the other on a micro (typos, mistakes, confusing passages). Non-fiction books often get a libel read too. In this respect, a sensitivity read is just another layer of input, and the same rules apply.

An author has three choices when dealing with an editorial suggestion: accept it, reject it, or agree with the problem identified but find a new way to solve it. In the course of a quarter century as a professional writer, my responses in those three categories run roughly 50-25-25. Sometimes conversations get heated as people fight their corners, but that’s neither unusual nor necessarily unhealthy. It’s a collaborative process – “an intelligent, informed dialogue,” as McNally puts it, and everybody involved wants the finished product to be as good as it can be.

Sensitivity readers exist because in-house editorial staff are predominantly white, liberal and female

Ah, critics say: but what are a sensitivity reader’s qualifications? You may as well ask the same thing about any editor working in the trade. There are no exams, no diplomas, no kitemarks. People are skilled or they’re not: any specific comment can be either helpful or useless, and there is no guarantee that seniority or experience makes the first more likely than the second. Indeed, when I was writing a TV script many years ago, it was a running joke between the four of us in the room (the director, the producer, the script editor and me) that we could always tell from how far up the food chain any given suggestion had come, and not in a positive way either.

The underlying problem, of course, is that sensitivity readers exist at least partly because in-house editorial staff are predominantly of a given type: white, liberal and female. For all the talk about the need for greater diversity in publishing – a need which is very real and has been so for decades – actually doing something about it proves much harder. Publishing salaries are so low, and the industry so London-centric, that the career better suits those with some kind of external financial resources, be that family money or a higher-earning partner.

This effective outsourcing of diversity is also perhaps a factor in why so many publishers are so scared of provoking Twitterstorms: they may not feel they have the credentials to be robust in defending their position. (Certain sensitivity readers advertising their services as “hire me to prevent Twitter calling out your book” doesn’t help, either: it makes the practice sound cynical and insincere).

The toxicity of discourse on Twitter is arguably viler and more corrosive than on any other social media platform, and to see an often willingly-outraged mob in full cry, wielding their 5G smartphones like the pitchforks de nos jours, is never an edifying sight. I long for the day when those under attack stand their ground and remember which two words Macbeth uses after his famous “full of sound and fury” quote. A Twitterstorm may not signify precisely nothing, but it is still made by a relatively small number of people and blows over pretty quickly.

So in an ideal world, one of properly diverse publishing houses and social media exchanges conducted with a civil and genuine desire to listen and learn, perhaps we wouldn’t need sensitivity readers at all. But the world is as it is and not as we would like it to be (enter, perhaps, the novelist with their imaginary existences). And in those terms, an author who objects to a sensitivity reader might reflect that the problem isn’t with the person who reads the words, but with the person who writes them.

Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. His latest novel, “The Law Of The Heart”, is out now