what are some specific criteria for evaluating a piece of fiction that can be used repeatedly?

The great difficulty here is that there are no absolutes. The same piece could be achingly poetic or achingly dull, depending on whether it's part of a literary drama or a high-octane adventure.

That makes it very difficult to give "specific criteria" for evaluating. There's no rubric that covers hard SF and slipstream.

Nonetheless, you can evaluate fiction, and justify your evaluations. I've got some experience both as a beta reader and as a reviewer, and I've got two insights I think will address your question.

The best evaluation you can give is your own reaction.

Precisely because fiction is so subjective, and has so many different shapes and forms, you don't really want to say "This piece was terrible." You want to say "This piece was terrible for me." What you want to get across is not how the story fails, but how it failed you.

The reason this is helpful is because your response is subjective, but it's also factual. It may be wrong to say "This is boring," "this is ludicrous," "this is heavy-handed," because other people may react differently -- but it is perfectly correct, and indeed unarguable, that you found it boring, or ludicrous, or heavy-handed.

The better you are able to describe your own reaction while reading, the more helpful your feedback will be. Consider, just as an example:

At the beginning I was interested in how Sarah's relation with the stepmother would develop. Then when Sarah's friend won the lottery it was funny at the beginning, but then I got tired of it as it dragged on. Then when the stepmother stole the lottery ticket, that really jarred me, because it didn't seem to me like something she'd do; it didn't fit in for me with why the conflict was interesting to begin with. That kind of threw me out of the story; I don't have many reactions to the final climax because by that point I just didn't care about Sarah and her stepmother any more.

You had a lot of references to downtown Miami that I thought were really well done; I recognized a bunch of them and I think you nailed them.

The little brother was really annoying; I don't know if that's what you were going for, but I just wanted him gone every time he showed up.

As much as you're capable of, be specific on what you're reacting to and what the reaction is. "The stepmother stealing the lottery ticket felt out-of-character to me" is much clearer than "I felt like the stepmother's character wasn't consistent and bounced all over the place."

The clearer you are, the more specific you are, and as long as you focus on your own reaction, you will find that your feedback is helpful and also avoids being insulting. You're not dismissing the person's work or ripping it apart, you're keying onto particular details and reacting to them naturally.

This kind of criticism also makes it very clear how in one story you can say "OMG this car chase is absolutely AWESOME I am LOVING IT" and in another you can say "The car chase was very energetic but felt detached from the rest of the story, and I was frustrated because I was really waiting to find out what happened to Dianne."

The criteria to evaluate by is "did this piece achieve its intended goal."

The reasons there are no hard-fast rules is because different stories are trying to do different things. "I didn't connect with the characters" may be irrelevant if you're going for zany satire; "There's no plot" might be the whole point of naturalistic literary fiction; "This isn't scientifically accurate" may not be an actual issue to the author's intended audience.

For every story you're evaluating, you must first answer the question: What is this story trying to do? What is it trying to be?

Once you can answer that question, then you can start asking "Does it accomplish that?".

That's you're specific criteria: Identify the goal. Then ask whether it achieves that goal, how it succeeds and how it fails.

(If you cannot identify the goal, that's an important criticism in and of itself. The questions "Where is this going? Why am I reading this?" are important ones, and often missed.)

You can break this down - identify the goal for a particular scene or snippet:

The opening of The Force Awakens is obviously trying to draw us into the novel. It opens on Leia, introducing her as being in a precarious position and desperate for Luke's support. <-- This is the snippet's goal.

It took me a few read-overs to realize that we're meant to identify Leia and Luke. To me, this felt really generic and bombastic - broad statements like "she needed him" and "the New Republic stood on the verge of implosion" don't really set a scene for me; they just seem like McGuffins whose details will be filled in later. "She needed X," "something bad is happening to Y". I'd much prefer opening on strong specifics that ground me in a scene, or speak about concrete action rather than broad, vague "Save the New Republic."

On the other hand, the trick of figuring out who's being spoken of is nice - slotting the beloved characters into new positions, letting that click.

Let's be honest; nobody who reads the first page of a Star Wars novelization is going to put it down at the first page. This sets the scene, establishes tension, re-introduces characters we know. I don't like the vagueness, but you're probably fine as long as you bring us to a concrete scene soon. <-- This is your evaluation - it does an OK job of getting the reader to turn the page, which is all it's meant to do.

posted almost 8 years ago

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