Recently I got involved in editing something. They are trying several of us out as a possible new editorial team. It means selecting short stories from those submitted - a simple enough task you might think. But none of us agreed about which were the best stories and that came as quite a shock to me. I've spent all this time trying to learn a craft and coming up with quite a strong view about what constitutes quality writing, only to realise that it is all a matter of taste. Or is it? The differences in views on the 100 Best Books thread demonstrated this too, and recently another thread where some loved and some hated The Outcast by Sadie whatsisname. I'm confused dot com. What hope of finding any feedback you can rely on? I know this is obvious to you, but it is the end of life for me. Until now I thought there was some sort of benchmark. Aaaarrrgghh!

~Rod.

Yes, assuming it is technicaly proficiant (note, I've not said perfect), the rest is simply a matter of taste. If even Sebastian Barry can win the Costa award with a novel - The Secret Scripture - which one judge called 'deeply flawed' then there's hope for everyone.


- NaomiM

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tbh, it boggles the mind why some stories manage to win writing competitions.

isn't that the point of having an editorial team, Rod? If you each argue vehemently for a story you think is brilliant, the mag or anthology will be full of stories that have fired someone up, that have an edge, even if they are technically inept in places? If you judge solely on the technical pros and cons you might end up with editors' second or third choice bland well-turned pieces that offend no one and rouse no one either.

A friend of mine from the States said she simply couldn't fathom the short story form in the UK because so many people didn't write using the 'tick structure.' I'd never heard of it and I've studied the short story for years. She explained and I realised lots of stories do conform to it anyway but in the US it is taught as The Way To Structure A Short, Deviate and Thou Shalt Not See Print. I love a well crafted piece but would rather rather read or champion a roughly put together piece which blazed with life and lacked craft than a cleverly structured piece with less substance.

Good points. To some extent you have restored my faith, cherys. I'll mention your point about different viewpoints and perhaps that will save me from getting the boot. I think one of the problems was that I didn't think any of them were fantasic. Perhaps I'm too critical for that job - you need to be someone who simply loves reading lots of stories, many of which are mediocre at best. Personally I take pleasure in finding the faults in great writers.

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By the by, thank you lots for organising Tuesday.

A friend of mine from the States said she simply couldn't fathom the short story form in the UK because so many people didn't write using the 'tick structure.'

That's a new one on me, Cherys, but it may explain why some judges like Stephen King have been so dismisive of short stories that have been coming out of the US university stable in recent years.

Rod, I think it's very hard for people to separate out their subjective and objective reactions to things (and, indeed, they're not entirely separable anyway), so people can be liking or disliking things to do with whether they like the character or the subject, rather than whether the story works or doesn't. Equally and oppositely, they can be so used to thinking in terms of 'rules' being broken or kept that they overlook the fact that the best story of the lot breaks every 'rule' in the book...

But in the end, we do rely on our own intuition to ring like a bell or clank like a cracked cup, and only then work out what's good or bad. And intuition is a kind of trained, educated, subjectivity, so you're always going to get varying reactions.

FWIW, my extremely un-statistical experience of being one of three judges in a competition (although my impression is backed up by friends who are much more experienced in this stuff) is that on the whole we agreed about what should be in the top ten; what we didn't agree was which should be first out of that. I think that's very common. Most people agree that the Booker longlist, say, is a reasonably representative (if not perfect) sample of the best of the current crop this year's 'booker-type' books. But they start arguing about the shortlist, and disagree furiously about the winner...

You could have some kind of conversation of how to judge things: technical merit versus artistic impression, say. Or giving your top five marks (five for best, four for next, and so on) and then adding up everyone's... Depends how many there are, of course.

A friend of mine from the States said she simply couldn't fathom the short story form in the UK because so many people didn't write using the 'tick structure.' She explained and I realised lots of stories do conform to it anyway but in the US it is taught as The Way To Structure A Short, Deviate and Thou Shalt Not See Print.

Wow! That's scary! A horrid, dystopian vision, I'm having. I wonder if it partly comes from all the undergrad writing programmes they have - these things become horribly codified once they get into textbooks, and are examined and graded and... (says she, currently wallowing in academic CW herself)

Emma

This is a snippet from Stephen King on the state of short story writing following his stint as editor of “The Best American Short Stories 2007” - all though, to be fair, for most of the article he is in praise of the genre.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.

Thanks, Emma. I think part of the problem was that we weren't given any criteria, so now we're planning to invent some.

cherys, do you have a link for the tick structure or a reference? I'm ashamed to say I haven't heard of it. I tried google, but couldn't find anything on a cursory search. If I can learn it then I will ensure all my stories conform strictly to the structure in future.