An assessment tool that looks at traditional story values

In this assessment, we’re looking only at the sort of short form fiction that follows the traditional conventions.

Traditional conventions of story — most particularly as conceived of in a genre universe — rule out vignettes, character or setting sketches, meandering musings, prose poems, “shell game” forms (experimental and borrowed forms, such as “The Six Answers on the Back of a Trivia Card” or “The Body,” which consists of the footnotes to a nonexistent text), or other similarly experimental or literary endeavors lacking a complete story and character arc. These other forms can be every bit as creative and evocative, every bit as insightful. They simply represent a wider application of the concept of “story.”

Traditional or not, any short story or flash fiction piece should also artfully employ the hallmark attributes of concision and suggestion, attributes that follow from the brevity of the form.

Short stories generally run 5,000 to 10,000 words. There are various categories of flash (some of the more common: 50, 75, 250, 500, 750, 1,000), but for a piece to carry out the role of a traditional story, to be a “perfect miniature,” it’s necessary for it to spin out its tale at the upper end of that range.

The briefer the story, the more it will convey through suggestion and inference. In many flash environments, that extreme brevity is prized. In others, a fuller development along traditional lines is what’s admired.

This assessment tool

This assessment tool has two parts: the first, two short sets of questions (so, checklists), with a simple rubric looking at one high-level attribute (writing quality); the second, a rubric that wraps up the key attributes of traditional story.

Rubrics can be useful assessment tools, though the more qualities any given rubric attempts to combine, the more fragile is that rubric if used as a whole. In fact, it is generally not possible to do so.

This rubric imagines stories that are uniformly poor, average, very good, etc. on all key points. That is seldom, if ever, the case with an actual story. Stories that are weak or that fail in one way or another often exhibit a mix of successful and unsuccessful strategies. The voice might be strong, for example, but the story goes nowhere.

Think of this rubric as a sort of Platonic measure: this is how a story might scan if it were to be uniformly fine, or not so fine, across every key attribute listed. To use it, decouple the various attributes as need be. Alternatively, study it as a whole, for a better sense of how story holds together tightly or unravels, if all the attributes were to work in lockstep with one another.