How to evaluate a story

1. Evaluating a story

2. ► When we evaluate a story, we consider it and place
a value on it. Perhaps we decide that it is a
masterpiece, or a bit of trash, or (like most fiction
we read) a work of some value in between.
► Still, there are things we can look for in a story—
usually clear indications of its author’s competence.

3. ► Good critics of literature have at least a working knowledge of
some of its conventions.
► By conventions we mean usual devices and features of a literary
work, by which we can recognize its kind.
► When in movies or on television we watch a yam about a sinister
old mansion full of horrors, we recognize the conventions of that
long-lived species of fiction, the Gothic story.
► Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), we find the model for a legion
of heroines in the Gothic fiction of our own day. In the best-selling
Gothic romances of Victoria Holt, Phyllis A. Whitney, and others,
young women similarly find love while working as governesses in
ominous mansions.

4. ► Lacking English castles, American authors of Gothic fiction have had to
make do with dark old houses—like those in Nathaniel Hawthome's novel The
House of the Seven Gables, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow
Wallpaper," and in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, such as "The Tell-
Tale Heart."
► William Faulkner, who brought the tradition to Mississippi, gives "A Rose for
Emily" some familiar conventions: a rundown mansion, a mysterious servant,
a madwoman, a hideous secret.
► But Faulkner's story, in its portrait of an aristocrat who refuses to admit
that her world has vanished, goes far beyond Gothic conventions. Evidently,
when you set up court as a judge of stories, to recognize such conventions
will be an advantage.
► Knowing a Gothic story for what it is, you won't condemn it for lacking
"realism." And to be aware of the Gothic elements in "A Rose for Emily" may
help you see how original Faulkner manages to be, though employing some
handed-down conventions.

5. ► Is the story a piece of commercial fiction tailored to a formula, or is it
unique in its design? You can't demand the subtlety of a Katherine Anne
Porter of a writer of hard-boiled detective stories.
► Neither can you put down "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" for lacking
slam-bang action. Some stories are no more than light, entertaining bits
of fluff—no point in damning them, unless you dislike fluff or find them
written badly.
► Of course, you are within your rights to prefer solidity to fluff, or to
prefer a Porter story to a typical paperback romance by a hack writer.
James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat," though a simpler and briefer story
than Leo Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Ilych, is no less finished, complete,
and satisfactory a work of art.
► Yet, considered in another light, Tolstoi's short novel may well seem a
greater work than Thurber's. It reveals greater meaning and enfolds
more life.

6. ► Masterpieces often have flaws; and so, whenever we can, we need
to consider a story in its entirety.
► Some novels by Thomas Hardy and by Theodore Dreiser impress (on
the whole), despite passages of stilted dialogue and other clumsy
writing.
► If a story totally fails to enlist our sympathies, probably it suffers
from some basic ineptitude: choice of an inappropriate point of
view, a style ill suited to its theme, or possibly insufficient
knowledge of human beings.
► In some ineffectual stories, things important to the writer (and to
the story) remain private and unmentioned.
► In other stories, the writer's interests may be perfectly clear but
they may not interest the reader, for they are not presented with
sufficient art.

7. ► Some stories fail from sentimentality, a defect in a work whose writer
seems to feel tremendous emotion and implies that we too should feel it,
but does not provide us enough reason to share such feelings.
► Sentimentality is rampant in televised weekday afternoon soap operas,
whose characters usually palpitate with passion for reasons not quite
known, and who speak in melodramatic tones as if heralding the end of
the world.
► In some fiction, conventional objects (locks of baby hair, posthumously
awarded medals, pressed roses) frequently signal, "Let's have a good cry!"
Revisiting home after her marriage, the character Amelia in William
Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair effuses about the bed she slept in when
a virgin: "Dear little bed! how many a long night had she wept on its
pillow.’
► Teary sentimentality is more common in nineteenth-century fiction than in
ours.

8. ► We have gone to the other extreme, some critics think, into a
sentimentality of the violent and the hard-boiled.
► But in a grossly sentimental work of any kind, failure inheres
in our refusal to go along with the author's implied attitudes.
► We laugh when we are expected to cry, feel delight when we
are supposed to be horrified.

9. In evaluating a story, we may usefully ask a few questions:
► 1.What is the tone of the story? By what means and how
effectively is it communicated?
► 2.What is the point of view? Does it seem appropriate and
effective in this story? Imagine the story told from a
different point of view; would such a change be for the
worse or for the better?
► 3.Does the story show us unique and individual scenes,
events, and Characters or weary stereotypes?
► 4.Are any symbols evident? If so, do they direct us to the
story's central theme, or do they distract us from it?

10. ► 5. How appropriate to the theme of the story, and to its subject matter,
are its tone and style? Is it ever difficult or impossible to sympathize with
the attitudes of the author (insofar as we can tell what they are)?
► 6. Does our interest in the story mainly depend on following its plot, on
finding out what will happen next? Or does the author go beyond the
events to show us what they mean? Are the events (however fantastic)
credible, or are they incredibly melodramatic? Does the plot greatly
depend upon farfetched coincidence?
► 7. Has the writer caused characters, events, and settings to come alive?
Are they full of breath and motion, or simply told about in the abstract
("She was a lovable girl whose life had been highly exciting")? Unless the
story is a fable or a tale, which need no detailed description or deep
portrayal of character, then we may well expect the story to contain
enough vividly imagined detail to make us believe in it.

11. ► X.J. Kennedy
► Dana Gioia