The Awesomeness Score: A Rubric for Measuring a Story’s Power

I’m constantly trying to assess the value of story ideas and completed stories. As an editor, I want to pick stories that are the most inviting and enjoyable. As an author, I need a way to guess the story’s power and value before I write it — and after I write it.

I can talk about aspects or values that a great story should have. Truthfully though a great story doesn’t need to have all of these aspects. Also prose and story structure are tightly integrated. You can’t just make something better unless you change everything. Sometimes that just isn’t possible. A story can succeed spectacularly well in one aspect and still be a mediocre story. You can have a great premise or a great character or a great plot twist, but the rest of the story can be so-so. Sometimes wit and eloquence makes a bad story great — or at least worth reading. Even a story may be lacking in some of the fundamentals (great style, succinct writing, memorable character, etc.) but still be a compelling read.

A story could have great ideas or insights into humanity and still be dull. Conversely, a story can be fun to read or entertaining, and be utterly forgettable. Novelty — do you really need it? Some stories can be amazing and yet be predictable or unoriginal. A plot could be fascinating, but the protagonist could be wooden or speak in cliches.

In education rubrics have taken over grades, especially in a subject as wishy washy as writing. You can’t really assign a numerical value to a work of art, but it’s nice to set criteria and assign relative importance to them. I prepared a literary rubric for evaluating stories by myself and others as a nice way to rank and compare. It’s possible that self-evaluations may be inherently flawed. Writers may be too close to their own work to be properly able to assign it a value. Even if I am scoring other people’s stories, I may appreciate certain story aspects that most readers don’t care about.

I have spent a day or two coming up with a rubric or scale which I can live with.

Awesomeness Score =3 X (SUM OF PRIMARY QUALITIES) + (SUM OF BONUS QUALITIES) – (SUM OF UNDESIRABLE QUALITIES)

Primary Qualities: 1-5 points each x 3 (5-15 points)

I picked 5 important criteria for scoring a story. I’d like to think that these criteria are independent of one another, but that is not exactly true. Sometimes what makes a story excellent in one aspect will make another aspect excellent as well. Also, some of these criteria attempt to be about intrinsic qualities, while others are more about the response they provoke in a reader. Let me list these quickly.

I put primary qualities on a 5 point scale (with 5 being best). Then I multiplied the total by 3 (so a 4 would really be a 12, etc. ) Another thing. It’s often possible for a great story to be totally deficient in one criterion, so there’s nothing wrong with ranking such a story low on that quality. The point of this whole exercise is to provide a scoring system that allows unusual works to be rated highly. But no story can be everything.

• Ease of Reading. A story published in 2024 needs to be inviting for the contemporary reader. The reader can’t be expected to work hard to get immersed in a story. Contemporary readers are impatient and lazy. They could be watching a movie or playing a video game. An ornate or unusual style (say something like Faulkner) can be appreciated for what it is, and maybe a reader can warm up to it, but the first duty for a story is to be read. Frankly, if you need to be a grad student with a free weekend to get into something, that is asking a lot. This involves a simple style, unambiguous meanings, brevity, apparent structure. So what about Proust? Faulkner? Joyce? Personally I’d rank most of Faulkner a 1, Proust a 2, Joyce a 1 or 2. On the other hand, Milan Kundera would be a 5; so would Stephen King and some of Kurt Vonnegut. On the other hand, I don’t think the stories of King or Vonnegut as inherently better, just different.
• So what? Insights into the Human Condition? Why was a story worth the writer’s time to write (and the reader to read)? Ideally it should be clear what the reader learns about the human condition or the world after finishing the story. Often what the writer thinks may not be what the reader thinks, but isn’t it the writer’s job to justify the value of the story to the reader? By the end, the reader should be able to say, “This was important for me to read because …” Maybe there are uncertainties or no clear answers. Maybe the insight is that all insights are flawed or limited. Maybe the point of a story is simply to recognize that X is more important than Y. Underlying this is the sense that the story accurately conveyed some truth about the real world even though it’s just a story. It’s not always necessary for a story to convey truths about external reality. But it helps and certainly makes the reader feel that reading it was worth doing.
• Insights into Character? It’s always great when a character or several characters strike you as life-life and memorable. The reader has to want to meet this character and see how and why he changed over time. Sure, a character may be a witch or a demon or a rat or a dead person, but the character should arouse some feeling in the reader (positive or negative), and the story should allow the reader to see how events change that character’s perspective. Sometimes an author can vary viewpoints in a longer story or novel and thus provide insights into more than one character. But it’s hard enough to portray just one character.
• Enjoyment/Pleasure/Thrill. Basically a good story should have something amazing or sexy — something that makes the dreary act of reading worth it. It can be a fun plot point or an achievement by one of the characters. It can be a super power or revelation or a consummation of love. It can be a lovely fantasy or a sensual thrill or the unraveling of a mystery. I guess you could call it a “climax” or “resolution” or maybe just a transcendent moment. In truth though a number of stories don’t produce good feelings; they can be dark or sad or tragic. In those cases, the “pleasure of the text” can provide nothing more than a catharsis. Stories don’t need to bring some kind of literary high, but really it helps. If a story is grim or about a depressing subject like war, it can still be worth reading; it just won’t score high on this quality. Often this quality is delivered in a specific scene or chapter; it does not have to provide constant excitement or enjoyment.
• Surprise/Suspense. A good story should offer something unexpected or disconcerting or shocking. It’s similar to suspense — not knowing what’s going to happen, but wanting to find out. The paradox is that you have to create expectations in order to subvert them. I could write a book loaded with surprises, but if I did that, nothing would be surprising. I have to create a baseline and a narrative pattern in order to subvert it. Are surprises or suspense always necessary? No, but they help the reader keep reading.

So each primary quality has 1-5 points (all of which are multiplied by 3). Because you have 5 primary qualities, then the score range for all of them would be 25-75 points.

Bonus: Nice to have qualities (0-4 points each)

Below are some nice-to-have qualities for a story. They are not as crucial to making a story enjoyable. For this reason they can add from 0-4 bonus points to the overall score.

• Style/Eloquence/Wit/Poetry/Verbal Pyrotechnics. Sometimes you can read something mediocre and yet still be wowed by the wit and eloquence. Sometimes it manifests as wit; sometimes it manifests as verbal ebullience or poetic descriptions. It is easy to recognize the wit in Oscar Wilde, or the ebullience of James Joyce or the careful language of Henry James. These qualities can sometimes make up for shortcomings in plot or character. As much as these qualities are a delight to find, they are not really required for a story (aside from a certain compactness). This was a lesson I learned late in my writing career. Not all sentences have to shine — especially if it’s a building block for a story or dramatic moment. Sometimes in fact this eloquence can be distracting or make a story hard to read. Proust and James and Joyce can be fun to read, but also strenuous.
• Informative/Educational. Fiction can sometimes educate a reader about certain aspects of society or innovations or cultural habits that a reader wouldn’t normally come in contact with. A novel can bear witness or offer insight into how people turned out a certain way. Doctors can educate readers about diseases or what happens in a hospital; a computer expert can reveal the process to investigate a computer hacking. An erotic novel can reveal the strange kinks of certain couples. Sometimes this consciousness-raising has political significance. Sometimes the informational value of a literary work matters less than its aesthetic qualities. On the other hand, it can be fun to learn about new places and societies (real or imagined). A story can teach you about beauty pageants or prisons or Egyptology or skateboarding.
• Worldbuilding — Sense of the World. Some fiction — especially science fiction or adventure novels — can present a world that is convincing and easy to imagine inhabiting. The ability to build a world within a novel can be a challenge. How do you describe a world and present the story simultaneously? Most readers don’t want to read a chapter that simply describes all the buildings and forests. The author typically doesn’t have that luxury. Instead the author must reveal things gradually while the plot is taking place. A good storyteller can do it in a way that doesn’t seem forced or slow. In movies worldbuilding has a lot to do with visuals and sound and special effects. But in fiction you have to mention just the right amount of detail that suggests a reality without drowning the reader in unnecessary detail.
• Crazy Novelty. Sometimes a literary technique or story premise is so unusual that a reader will enjoy it as such (regardless of what it means or how well it is executed). Author Alberto Balengo wrote a story about a breakfast taco that takes over the world– maximum points for originality! But that does not make the story good or worth reading. Stories need to have a fresh perspective and relatable characters, but absolute novelty is not necessary (especially if it results in reader confusion). It’s a nice bonus, but that’s all.

Subtractions: Undesirable qualities (0-3 Points)

Here’s a list of qualities a story might possess that render them less interesting and beautiful and readable. This can be subjective, depending on the individual. I don’t know why I assigned 0-3 points for these qualities, except to mean that the presence of these qualities is not fatal for making a good story. But I think that most readers notice these shortcomings.

• The Story Drags. There may be many reasons that a story may drag. There might be too much exposition, too much description, too much emphasis on minutia, too much dialogue, too much introspection. There’s a mismatch between what the author thinks is needed and what the reader thinks is needed. Sometimes in fact the reader’s laziness or inattention may be to blame. Often the underlying problem is that the reader is not sufficiently invested in the story or character to care about these details. Often this may be due to reader incompetence in constructing transitions. Sometimes a good story can have great parts and parts that drag. No story can maintain a high level of interest. Sometimes a little dullness is necessary to convey a sense of waiting and to throw out a number of details to distract from other important details. For example, a mystery needs to have enough red herrings to throw the reader off track. Perhaps the reader can truly gauge how much a story drags after finishing it. Maybe during the second read what seemed to drag now seems more interesting or important.
• Cliched Emotions. Often a reader can anticipate what the emotional tone of a story will be. If the emotional stimulants or catharsis are too predictable, the reader can grow bored. Not every event or emotion needs to be a surprise, but if the emotional journey follows a predictable path, it becomes less important. Sometimes in fact a story needs to deliver exactly what is promised. Sometimes there is only a limited number of ways to express emotions in extreme situations. But the path to getting there needs to be interesting and insightful. If not, then the emotional reactions can seem forced and cliched.
• Stereotyped Characters. Not every character needs to be unique and interesting. Secondary characters (flat characters) may have only one or two qualities which are revealed in a story. Sometimes an author has no choice but to include several characters which the reader will never need to know. Even the major characters can be predictable and easy to figure out. Some of this involves an author’s lack of effort or laziness; some of it may simply be that the character does not really need to be individualized. Think of a head cheerleader, an Arthurian knight, a janitor, an elderly Southern lady, an astronaut. I often hear that characters in sci fi novels are not memorable or individualized. Maybe so, but they do need to be for the story to work?

Similar to the cliched emotions listed above, for the characters to come alive and be identifiable, they have to run counter to stereotype in some way. Think of who the head cheerleader at a high school who everyone wants to date. Did you think of her with the high school quarterback or some athlete? What about the head of the chess team? Or a lesbian? Or a dorky high musician in the high school jazz band? Maybe she doesn’t want to date at all? Maybe she wants to date a brooding poet? A protagonist can have simple or identifiable goals or desires, but the more that this character conforms to social expectations, the less likely the reader will find her to be complex and interesting.

What this All Means

So what is the point of this exercise?

I recently edited a story collection by a distinguished author. I had to choose which stories would go into the anthology from dozens. I wanted to showcase the author’s best, yet many of the stories were uneven or even unpleasant. They were not bad stories per se, just not fun or enlightening to read. Some of the stories were maudlin or cruel or unimportant. (To be fair, some of these stories were written during the writer’s early years when he was still getting the hang of things). The scoring system provided a way for me to rank the stories among several criteria, and that was helpful. I ended up leaving a few low-ranked stories in the collection because they were so special and remarkable despite the low score. After I did this, I applied this scoring system to other story collections I edited (and to one I even wrote myself). I wanted to check whether the final score gibed with my impressions about the values of individual stories. Did some stories end up scoring higher than I would have thought? I thought I did a good job of creating criteria that could be considered independently. But sometimes a positive quality can be less important than one might think…or maybe it could even turn out to be a negative.

This scoring system also gave me a way to evaluate or rank my own stories and story ideas. On another level, the scoring system and the formula —

Total Score =3 X (SUM OF PRIMARY QUALITIES) + (SUM OF BONUS QUALITIES) – (SUM OF UNDESIRABLE QUALITIES)

revealed my personal aesthetic and values for fiction. For example, I give more importance to Pleasure and Ease of Reading and less importance to Novelty and Eloquence and Information. I suspect that sci fi readers might reverse these things. Indeed, I’m not very sympathetic to genres like mystery (which is reflected mainly in how I designated the So What? criteria as a primary quality). A good detective story might entertain and inform, but it’s doubtful that it would reveal some deep existential truth.

I could have changed the mathematical parts of this scoring formula. These are totally arbitrary things that reflect my intuition. Curiously, after scoring a group of stories one day, on another day I scored the same stories again — to see if a new day might have caused me to score them differently. Actually the way I scored seemed pretty consistent — although I feel pretty sure that another reader might assign a totally different score. This rubric is highly personal.

Changing Literary Standards

Over the last decade I have become aware of how literary standards have been changing. It has reached the point where I am no longer sure whether I know what a younger reader might consider good.

Here are some things that seem to have changed.

There’s a lot more overlap between “literary” and “genre” fiction. This is only a vague sense, but I feel like the typical genre story is much better written than it used to be. Also I find that a higher percent of stories are associated with a specific genre that not.

Readers have become more female (in the USA). Silly me, I used to think that being an author was a masculine sport, but with more females going to college and studying the humanities and occupying prominent positions in the publishing world, the woman’s perspective is beginning to prevail. Who knows what that means? More family sagas, less swashbuckling, more fantasy over sci fi, less explicit sex. These are generalizations; perhaps I’m way offbase. I definitely am aware of how the feminization of the book world has changed how certain stories are received. It used to be that females would end up having to read a lot of male-centered fiction (especially before the 20th century) while male readers would generally ignore female authors. In that sense females would be more ambidextrous in being able to read both kinds of books. Now it seems that the tables have been turned; females no longer need to read traditionally male kinds of stories, and it is the male reader who needs to be more flexible about what he reads.

More transmedia storytelling. (i.e., videogames, TV shows, movies). I guess I should be grateful that more studios are trying to adapt books to other mediums. In the 20th century it was probably true that authors adopted cinematic techniques in their narratives. But now it’s more than that. Books written today are not just incorporating cinematic storytelling effects, they are being written specifically to facilitate adaptation into another medium. Sure, when you’re adapting a novel, you need to rethink and even re-imagine a lot of things. But mainstream publishers gravitate towards works that are easy to adapt into other mediums. This is not a bad thing, but I think if a work has less drama and dialogue and more internal action, they are less likely to be touched by a big publisher. Conversely, I think there is more tolerance for literary works created for a specific shared universe (Marvel comics, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.)

More rehash of magic and literary tropes. Let me pick two phenomena to illustrate: Zombies and Time Travel. I simply fail to understand why so many books and TV shows are made about zombies. (I even wrote a funny story about the phenomenon). And yet they do. Time Travel continues to be popular if only because it is fun and easy to write. (Here’s my rant about time travel movies). Sure, it is fun to imagine some character in the past being handed information about what will happen 10 or 20 years later. All an author really needs to do is hand-waving about the technology, then do research about the time period being described.

Zombies continues to be popular on TV and movies because they are soulless and therefore not deserving of human compassion. (The same for Daleks, and robots and such). So you can kill them all you want and never have to grapple with ethical questions. That turns all zombie stories into videogames.

Magic and fantasy have a place in literary works even (especially?) for adults. But somehow having a magic potion or superpower seems less disruptive than time travel themes — which disrupt the very nature of narrative. In a way, when someone edits and sequences a movie or story, they are already moving time around to decide upon the optimal sequence — in terms of flashbacks and foreshadowing. They don’t need to insert a new system for going through time. I mean, when Rip Van Winkle fell asleep and awoke again, he was essentially travelling through time — and the author didn’t need to subvert physical reality.

Personal Preferences

I’m a fussy reader. Sometimes I dismiss certain types of stories because of what they are or appear to be. Some of it is based upon past experience. Some of it has to do with my peculiar emotional and intellectual needs. Also, I’m kind of lazy. I don’t want to read the same kind of story more than once. When I think that a story by an unknown author is going to use a familiar recipe, I toss it aside.

Better authors often write variants of the same story over and over. That’s probably okay. Previous experience with an author can make a reader more amenable to whatever the author writes about — regardless of genre or subject matter. If Raymond Carver were to write a piece of hard science fiction or an erotica story, I’d be happy to read it — if only for curiosity’s sake. At the same time, if I were asked to read a Western novel or a vampire story, chances are that I will read it with condescension (or even contempt). I bring a lot of biases with me as a reader¹.

These reading biases may affect the way I score stories. It could potentially color the score I give for enjoyment/pleasure/thrill. Also ease of reading and crazy/novelty can be subjective. Ultimately though, these criteria — while dependent on individual reading biases to some extent, nonetheless can be assessed — especially in comparison with other stories. I might belong to the rarefied few who find pleasure and even thrill from reading a Henry James story, but how would my score on this criteria compare to a story by Philip K Dick or Stephen King or Max Schulman? Chances are, stories by these 3 authors would receive a higher score on that criteria even from someone who loves Henry James.

In a way though, scoring a story depends on these individual preferences. My scores may not align with those of other readers (even if they are internally consistent). Even though I have tried my best to identify discrete criteria, other readers can come up with other meaningful criteria. Here (off the top of my head) are some alternative criteria for assessing a story’s awesomeness:

• Ability to raise relevant social questions
• Ability to highlight overlooked aspects of society
• Ability to emotionally involve the reader (to stir romantic feelings or sadness)
• Ability to expose the individual to harsh realities
• Ability to explore the repercussions of a new technology or social phenomenon
• Ability to help make an older time period seem real or fresh
• Ability to get into the mind of a well-known figure from the past
• Ability to expose the reader to a variety of perspectives with different value systems
• Ability to teach an important life lesson.
• Ability to convey an overall sense of the world (as absurd, beautiful, horrifying, etc.)
• Ability to illustrate a fundamental spiritual truth of the world
• Ability to introduce a mystery and show how the secret behind this mystery is solved

These are all valid criteria for assessing a story, but they are more thematic and maybe more about consciousness-raising.

In contrast, the criteria I proposed originally are more about techniques and whether a story elicits an emotional response. There’s some overlap between my criteria and the thematic criteria. For example, the So What? Insights into the Human Condition criteria encompass a lot of the thematic issues about justice and morality and social consciousness. On the other hand, I can imagine stories that rank highly on my criteria not being particularly effective at engaging with the themes listed above.

One limitation of using thematic criteria is that it seems to encourage the writing of stories which check as many boxes as possible. A single story can’t be expected to do everything for all people. In fact, some stories are only good at doing one or two things very well. That’s perfectly all right. (Indeed, it seems to argue against tabulating an overall score regardless of the criteria).

Criteria for Longer Forms and Different Media

A longer and more expansive form like the novel offers more possibilities than a short story. The novel can contain stories, verse, dialogue, digressions, essays. It can alternate between characters and show their interactions. A good novel can tackle lots of different themes and moods and characters and conflicts without devolving into chaos. The best novels can sequence events in a way that seem natural and effortless. Perhaps the longer sprawling novels from the 19th century might seem unwieldly to 21st century readers, but then again, the 19th century didn’t have movies and Netflix to distract them.

The “awesomeness” score I have introduced might work for short stories, but what about novels or movies? What about serial storytelling — which keeps expanding to include more characters and places and plots?

Consider two examples of serial (transmedia) storytelling: Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both began as very successful TV series, and then they branched out into other TV shows and episodes with different characters and plots. Now they have branched out into novels and graphic novels and by now probably audio plays and video games. Conversely, some classic literature has led to countless adaptations and serializations (King Arthur and Sherlock Holmes are two that come to mind).

A novel is more self-contained (and easier to consider individually), but later novels in a series can benefit from having readymade characters and backstory from previous volumes. It’s no longer necessary to clutter a book with exposition. If everything is structured the right way, it becomes relatively easy to extend the storyverse indefinitely.

Some criteria pertain mainly to the reading experience and a narrative’s textual qualities. Although movies and TV shows provide ample opportunity for witty dialogue and eloquence, written prose can also bring subjectivity, stream-of-consciousness and private thoughts. Diction and the very sequence of words can introduce mystery, ambiguity, attitude.

On the other hand, some of these criteria apply equally well to the visual medium. Plot and character matter just as much in a movie as in a story or novel. So does pacing, novelty and the element of surprise.

Similarly, if you wanted to invent an awesomeness score for visual storytelling, you can probably list some criteria specific to the genre — color, visual composition, production design, the flow of movement, the use of sound. You could also talk about the quality of acting and the overall ability to evoke a world.

Conclusion: So what?!

I already mentioned that I created this rubric for a very practical reason — trying to decide which stories to include in a story collection by Jack Matthews. (BTW, that ebook is called Boxes of Time — more information here). But I expanded on the idea purely as an intellectual exercise — and perhaps for my entertainment and edification.

I used the word “rubric” from education terminology, but the analogy is not quite precise. When a teacher makes a rubric, it implies that these are the main ways to score an assignment or test — and indeed, that students need to know what the rubric is when doing the assignment.

But you can’t really do that when writing a story. I can’t just decide, “Hey, I’m going to write a story that is easy to read and high in suspense and insight into characters.” It doesn’t really help the writer to know beforehand what criteria is important for making a good story; you need a good story first!

The writer (and I guess the AI chatbot) will generate lots of premises or characters or conflicts; that requires a certain level of talent. But it’s also important to intuit which ideas have legs — and can quickly run on their own volition. It’s impossible to know these things with 100% unless you actually do it. There have been times when I have been less than enthusiastic about a story idea, but as I try to write it out, I find a lot of interesting things underneath the premise. I have been pleasantly surprised when this happens — and discover that I have turned out to have written a wonderful story — almost by accident. Let me clear: this does not happen often. Sometimes I begin with a semi-decent idea, and it just putters away into insignificance — (and I feel the guilt and shame of not having turned it into something better).

It can be challenging to know how much time and energy to devote to a single idea. Time is very limited. Maybe the commercially successful author has enough financial stability to flesh out many story ideas regardless of the rewards, but most writers don’t have that luxury. They can only pursue a small subset of their dreams. So they better damn be sure that these are the ideas they absolutely want to write about.

It’s not just for creative projects. What about essays or blogposts? (It is true, several times during the writing of this essay, I asked myself, shouldn’t I be doing X or Y instead?) You would think that in the creative world it is generally better to finish everything you do. But I abandon projects all the time — but sometimes not voluntarily. It just happens. Life becomes busy, and then when things settle down, I lack the motivation to pick the old thing up and flesh it out and polish it.

The awesomeness rubric also serves as a reality check for my ongoing ideas and help me to prioritize my time. A score is just a number. It’s something I assign arbitrarily. But it’s also a temperature check to let me know whether I still think an ongoing idea still feels awesome.

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Notes:

1. Despite my judginess, it’s fun to cleanse the palate by reading something light-hearted and unchallenging — and yes, occasionally I stumble upon something far more brilliant than I could have imagined. ↩︎