Short stories have long TAILS (a feedback system) · 1:55am Jul 28th, 2015
Many a reviewer has encountered the difficulty of providing useful feedback to an author that is concise and minimizing of bias. Having been introduced to the HITEC and HORSE systems as devised by the esteemed Horizon, I have judged their merit and compiled a fork of my own with the catchy acronym of TAILS.
To start, let us see what the two existing systems share and what in them works:
Normalized values: The different categories are all normalized against one another, letting an author see -- numerically or visually -- how they compare against one another. What regions, for example, are comparatively strong or weak in a given work... what needs improvement.
Few categories: By having a small set of categories to assess, the reader/reviewer can more easily break down the components and normalize the scores; the author also need not concern him/herself with dozens of aspects that could easily overlap in confusing ways.
Distinct categories: Related to the above, limiting overlap of the categories makes the feedback more accessible.
Issues I have with HITEC (Hook, Idea, Technical, Execution, and Consistency) :
IDEA: While Idea tries to be unbiased, it is forced to rely on novelty or compelling nature of the idea -- both of which put peculiar emphasis or prejudice on the core concepts in the work. For the mnemonic to really work, its meaning should be immediate, without having to juggle semantics as you ride the unicycle over the flames of objectivity.
CONSISTENCY: As was discussed even in the replies to the concept, this is a concept that is difficult to quantify. Furthermore, it is difficult to apply to short (or hyper-short) stories in particular. Surely a better solution can be found.
HOOK: Hook is an odd case, as it can be interpreted as a special union of Execution and Idea. This violates the principle of minimizing overlap of the categories. While at first this seems a valuable category to have, as first impressions are fantastically important, it leaves something to be desired.
EXECUTION and TECHNICAL: These two are self-explanatory and stand well enough on their own merit -- no problems here per se.
Issues I have with HORSE (Hook, Originality, 'Riting, Structure, and Execution) :
One can clearly see the influences of HITEC in the design of HORSE, but I posit that the failings have not been remedied. As Execution is passed basically without modification and 'Riting is an alias for Technical, and I will exclude them from mention below.
HOOK: Hook in HORSE has been modified to apply more generally to first-impressions in general. This, I feel, combines the worst aspects of Hook and Idea from HITEC: it is a union of aspects that would be better disambiguated and has potential for significant bias. Furthermore the ability to market one's work is impossible to adjudge in events such as the writeoffs, with the exception of Title Case (and title choice) which would fall under 'Riting or Execution.
ORIGINALITY: Originality has again the unanticipated and inappropriate empahses as found in HITEC's Idea. Why are you trying to pass judgement on an idea, when it is the skill in conveying that idea that is the concern?
STRUCTURE: This is a category with the right soul -- not just mastery of the language, but of scenes, subtext, pacing, tone, &c. -- that sets it apart as genuinely interesting in HORSE. It also suggests a pattern that leads to the successor...
TAILS—the scoped assessment system.
The interplay of Structure and 'Riting/Technical in HORSE and HITEC suggests a mechanism to approach various components of writing skills, as pertaining to scope. What is scope? Scope, in this instance, breaks down a work as follows:
Symbols->Words->Passages->Scenes->Whole
Symbols are the most basic elements: the letters and punctuation characters that fill the page.
Words are comprised of symbols, separated by (or interspersed with) symbols.
Passages are assemblages of words, be they sentences, idioms, subordinate clauses, or paragraphs.
Scenes are self-supporting regions of passages. They could be true scenes separated by scene breaks, a discursive or expository aside, a section some would recognize as a beat, and so on.
Whole is, as one can deduce, the entirety of the work; a structure of one or more scenes that comprises the work.
With this breakdown, one can then look at what writing skills span different regions. Technical correctness would seem to cover at least symbols and words -- typos and failed punctuation would be obvious failures there. Structure would definitely apply to the whole, but a moment of thought also reveals that scenes themselves have a certain structure. That would seem to leave gaps, however, so, you may be asking, can we fill them? YES WE CAN. Spanning the gap between words and scenes—Technical and Structure—is Language. Language is how the author uses his or her words to present tone, guide the reader's thought through diction and phrasing, flavor the experience with flat facts or evocative idioms and alliteration.
This leaves us with TLS, Technical, Language, and Structure. Not a very evocative idiom, one will admit, and seems to be overly focused on the particulars of manipulating text. Let us then turn to what that text achieves, and how one could assess skill.
DID THE WORK MAKE YOU FEEL ANYTHING? This seems a basic question to ask, and all the above largely ignores an attempt to answer it. Enter Impact. Impact address the effectiveness of the text to draw out an emotion from its ideas and execution. Note that it is not asking how or what you felt, only that the text was effective. Furthermore, can you step away from the text for a little bit -- minutes, weeks -- and still have an impression from the experience? (If yes, there was probably some Impact, good or bad)
Additionally, DID THE IDEAS GET ACROSS? At a glance this seems to be a rephrasing of Impact, but it carries an important distinction. Impact may or may not follow from clarity of the idea, though it is likely. Clarity in conveyance comes from Abstract: How effectively is the essence, or abstract, of the work presented in a manner that is accessible (in keeping with tone and themes).
By including Abstract and Impact, both of which largely address the Whole of a work, we arrive at all the characters for our system: TLSIA. 'Tilsa' would be a strange pun... After some re-arrangement, we arrive at the acronym of TAILS. Fitting, as you pin the tail on the donkey. Or, story, in this case.
TAILS, outlined :
Technical (Correctness) {Symbols .. Words} : Correctness of the text; spelling, punctuation. These are the aspects that concern proofreaders. Are words spelled properly (or deliberately misspelled/malformed for effect), and so on.
Abstract (Clarity) {Whole} : Clarity of the text; effectiveness in conveying the desired ideas. Can apply as well to tone and theme.
Impact (Consequence) {Whole} : Potency of the text; memorability or novelty of the ideas/themes/characters of the work. Ability to engender the appropriate feeling in keeping with its aim.
Language (Congruency) {Words .. Passages} : Sophistication of the text OR congruency with tone/ideas/voice; consistency (or self-consistency within disparate regions or from individual voices) of diction and phrasing.
Structure (Composition) {Passages .. Whole} : Composition of text at large; coherence of ideas and/or narrative. Pertinence of each scene, passage, and word to achieve the work's intended goal. Procession and/or guidance of reading experience to the desired outcome.
Like the HORSE and HITEC systems, TAILS normalizes the five categories to a sum of no more or less than 100, in intervals of five points. To ease the ranking process, I include a list of values one can use as a baseline, filled in first before attempting to make the numbers come out right:
outstanding
strong
appreciable
mediocre
poor
abysmal
Unlike the final values, these can (and should!) all be written in as absolute values. I find it makes the normalizing process much easier.
In addition to the ranking system of TAILS, a final clarifier is used, to give context to the numbers and to summarize the quality of the work at large. Taken largely verbatim from HORSE:
Misaimed — The null category. For reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your prose, this reviewer is likely not part of your target audience and will fundamentally never appreciate this story.
Needs Work — I feel this has substantial flaws to iron out, but all writeoff stories are basically first drafts, and with editing, every story has the potential for greatness. Keep it up!
Flawed but Fun — I saw substantial problems here, and you probably should brace for a poor score in the overall competition, but this got the most important thing right: it entertained me. Thank you!
Almost There — I can already see the greatness in this one, but there are some specific things holding it back, and they should be pretty easy to address with editing. I look forward to seeing the result!
Solid — I felt this did what it set out to do. Good job! It didn't grab me the way my top tier did, but there might be style preferences or minor editing issues at play.
Top Contender — Stood out from the pack. Enjoyable and well-constructed!
Case examples from Writeoff 38:
Waiting on a Hatching
T-30 A-20 I-20 L-15 S-15 (Solid)
(T:outstanding, A:strong, I:strong, L:appreciable, S:appreciable)
A Note in a Drawer
T-35 A-15 I-20 L-10 S-20 (Misaimed)
(for private use only: T:strong, A:poor, I:mediocre, L:poor, S:mediocre)
Colt you gotta wonder
T-30 A-20 I-10 L-20 S-20 (Needs work)
(T:appreciable, A:mediocre, I:poor, L:mediocre, S:mediocre)
Schoolyard Crush
T-20 A-20 I-20 L-20 S-20 (Top tier)
(T:outstanding, A:outstanding, I:outstanding, L:strong, S:strong; I couldn't decide which I could deduct in good conscience)
Survey
T-15 A-20 I-15 L-25 S-25 (Almost there)
(T:appreciable, A:strong, I:appreciable, L:strong, S:strong)
Coming soon:
Colors!
Pre-formatted templates!
More detailed example(s)!
Please leave your comments and suggestions, as well as any stories you want this system turned to address (by someone other than yourself, I guess)!
Cool! A few reactions in no particular order.
1) Good to see others making the skeleton of my system their own! I look forward to seeing it in deeper practice. Doing a full round of writeoff reviews with HITEC was what really helped me shake the dust off and turn it into HORSE.
2) I am soooooo tempted to rebrand HORSE into HEADS by finding synonyms for Originality and 'Ritin.
3) My initial impression is that Abstract and Structure are going to give you trouble. The distinction between them seems like hair-splitting to me; you define one as "Clarity of the text" and the other includes "coherence of ideas and/or narrative". Can you provide an example of a story (real or hypothetical) which has very divergent A/S scores, and why?
4) I'm tempted to leap into a defense of Hook -- as you say, first impressions are fantastically important; go into a bunch of popular multi-chapter stories and look at the drop-off between chapters 1 and 2 -- but the beauty of the system is that if you don't think it's valuable, do what you did and fork it.
I WILL say that Hook is still significant in a Writeoff context. I use it to judge the first few paragraphs, which I've noticed have an outsized impact on my engagement (and thus my scoring). If the first few sentences are riddled with what you'd call poor Technical -- even if the rest of the story is totally clean -- I'm basically holding the laptop at arm's length and pushing myself through the story while cringing. If there's a weather opening ("It was a sunny day in Ponyville") without the weather being relevant, or it throws a whole scene at me without anything to catch my attention, I sharpen my claws and start skimming with an eye on what to fix. That lost engagement hurts the story no matter the overall quality.
For an extreme example of why prose matters for Hook: a long while ago I read AugieDog's In Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps, made it halfway through the first scene, and bailed less than 500 words in. The premise sounded interesting and the description was pretty good, but the prose (and Blueblood being Blueblood) just lost me. When another curator recommended it to the RCL a year later, I opened it up with dread and pushed myself through the first scene ... and then discovered that I had stopped right before it got amazing. I ended up giving it our top possible score.
5) Anyway, I'm curious to have you unleash this on one of my stories (I assume you've read a bunch in the Writeoffs, if nothing else). Specifically, the one that you disliked the most, because where the Five-Letter System shines is in spotlighting areas that need improvement. If I ask you to fling it at a good/great story, it's just going to result in an even mush. ^.^
In return (and if you can clarify the A/S question), I'll throw a TAILS score at Cold as Starlight to make sure I'm doing it right.
3275507
Regarding Hook, I posit that focusing on a particular subset of the work is antithetical to the aim of providing feedback on a writer's skill (or, execution in a given instance). If Structure, Technical correctness, and Abstract are sound, it should follow that the hook is effective. Hook as a category, I argue, violates the single-responsibility principle and is constrained by incidental location of text rather than scope of the textual space.
To clarify my criticism of Hook as used in HORSE in particular, Hook is presented furthermore as a category that assesses only first impressions -- including the ability to market a story with its description and optional cover-art. Naturally, this 'marketability' is a null point as pertaining to at least the writeoff entries with the possible exception of an appropriate title.
As for your concern regarding Abstract and Structure, I thank you for bringing it up! The two do seem similar at first, and it took some closer reading (and a little more thought) to determine what differentiates them in a manner in keeping with scope and categorical single-responsibility. To answer, I will begin with a metaphor in architecture. An artist -- in this case, an architect -- has a vision. Plans are drawn up, the work is undertaken, and the project is concluded. Structure, in keeping with its scope, would look at how the elements are assembled: do the components fit properly, are the rooms and corridors arranged logically (or, to an internal logic), does everything serve its purpose. Abstract, then, focuses on the whole: is it a parking garage or an office building or a house as was intended.
To bring this analogy back to text, Abstract is concerned with the clarity of the text in presenting the intended ideas -- is the author's intent conveyed. Structure, in contrast, concerns itself with the mechanics of the work -- does each beat process believably, is the pacing appropriate, do the scenes build upon (or counter) each other in keeping with (what we would believe would be) the author's intent.
As for how these two work in practice... the current samples indicate minor divergence in the scores; one might discard my TAILS of 'Didn't Plan That Out,' as it was only the second I'd ever addressed with the system, so the remainder have at most a separation of 5 points. (I have deleted my notes, so I cannot say with certainty if any of the 'absolute' scores had variation greater than one rank.) However, I could imagine a story where the the scenes are well-built and ordered while leaving the reader bemused as to the point of the whole thing as having strong Structure and weak Abstract; it is more difficult to conceive of a work with strong Abstract and weak Structure, I might guess that a story with well-presented ideas but lack of sense in its events might earn such a score... (Had it arrived at a conclusion, "Colt you gotta wonder" might have has significant S<A disparity.)
I will see what I can do to make this distinction more evident in the outline above. And maybe remember it, myself!
EDIT: would you prefer I turn TAILS on your writeoff entries or your work published here on fimfic?
3277895
So what I'm hearing you say is that the difference is that Structure isn't holistic, that it should scope Passages … Scenes? That Abstract tells you whether the Structure contributes to the purpose of the story, and Structure tells you whether each component works effectively as a component?
Technical -> Language -> Structure -> Abstract = Tree -> Forest -> Ecosystem -> Planet?
(If so, might want to update the system description accordingly.)
3280602
I had originally and ever thought of Structure as being holistic, at least in part (because that's not a contradiction of terms!), but your above seems sound and, at a glance, in keeping with my design goals… I will explore this a bit more and 'get back to you on that,' as they say.
What? Do you mean you judge only the skill in conveying an idea, and not the idea itself? That's a personal preference, not a fact.
I like keeping the hook separate, because the division by function is more important in this case than the division by other principles. Division by function is more understandable than division by an ontology of writing anyway. I see what you're getting at, though. You've got five categories with minimal overlap, and adding 'hook' seems to mar the purity of the system. I dunno; I feel like you're putting the cart before the horse in emphasizing purity of system over stuff that helps a writer make a better story.
Still, 6 seems too many components, and it's hard to see which is dispensible. Hook just doesn't fit with the others.
Ultimately, I think I don't like rating systems much.
Numerics aren't helpful to me as a writer.
Marketability is a tiny fraction of "hook", so you shouldn't use it to dismiss Hook.