Subjectivity Is No Excuse: Actionable Feedback with the Publishability Index™

Reading is subjective, but that's no excuse for weak feedback. Good feedback is comprehensive, precise, and consistent, and it aims for incremental improvement, not a rival to Moby-Dick. Like graders sharing a rubric, readers share expectations of what a story should be, captured in the universal story template. Bardsy's Publishability Index™ makes those expectations explicit: 23 dimensions across seven elements, each with a good and a great standard. Work through it yourself, with friends, or with our editors, spot-check key chapters with retelling, and revise until your manuscript is publishable.

Making universal expectations explicit delivers actionable feedback.

In light of our current first-chapter anthology contest, today's post looks at feedback; specifically, how Bardsy's Publishability Index™ (PI) works and why it delivers comprehensive, precise, and consistent recommendations. To preview: readers share common expectations, which can be codified into a rubric for evaluating stories.

Let's face it, writing a novel is isolating. Generally, we work alone, sometimes bringing in fellow authors for comments. We seek feedback to break this isolation and bring us closer to our audiences. We know it's essential, too: our suggested spiral writing process has a place for feedback in every loop as we iterate toward a compelling manuscript.

Subjectivity Is No Excuse for Weak Feedback

If feedback matters this much, why is great feedback so hard to get? When it comes to evaluating our writing, the standards seem obvious. We want input that is:

1. Comprehensive: it covers every aspect of the story while making a holistic call: does this story need more work or is it ready to publish?

2. Precise: instead of vague likes or dislikes, it pinpoints the issues and leads to fixes while leaving strengths untouched.

3. Consistent: it gives each story the same diagnosis regardless of who reads it or when, unlike a moody editor who changes their mind after a three-martini lunch.

Often the claim that reading is subjective interferes with all three standards. Subjectivity, here, means reading is uniquely personal. In this view, you can discuss books, but no one's comments are better than anyone else's. Some take this further, arguing that subjective experience cannot be understood by others, so systematizing feedback is a fool's errand. Put bluntly, they use subjectivity as an excuse for not thinking about what a story should look like.

We believe that these views are beyond counterproductive: if one reading says nothing about another, no one could give feedback at all. Yes, novels deserve to be taken on their own terms, but that reality should not keep us from making suggestions based on an explicit framework, a common ideal story. Note that some preferences, like genre, really are personal. However, we are focusing on a story's "shape," not its content, so genre is not part of this discussion. In sum, we can aim for comprehensive, precise, and consistent feedback even though reading is subjective.

The key to meeting these standards is to narrow feedback's scope. Good feedback doesn't judge whether your novel is the greatest of all time, a rival to Moby-Dick; rather, it assesses how well it satisfies readers. More importantly, actionable feedback points to areas where a novel could be more satisfying. In short, the goal is incremental improvement, taking writing from what it is to what it could be with the right changes.

A Lesson from Grading Thousands of Blue Books

So how do you judge subjective work properly? Teaching large lecture courses offers a parallel. We've graded blue books, the stapled booklets in which students write pages of exam essays, at Yale, UCLA, and other schools. This leaves the instructor with a large stack, as many as 500 blue books, and a team of graders. The challenge: to grade them all fairly, so "better" answers get higher marks.

The time-tested method to assign grades has four steps: first, define what makes an answer better; second, codify those features as a rubric (a scoring guide graders share); third, test iteratively on small samples; and, finally, grade the lot. In thousands, if not tens of thousands, of grades, we've rarely seen a justified complaint.

Why do rubrics work so well? The answer is scope. Graders aren't comparing apples to oranges. They're comparing apples to slightly different apples, just as feedback should compare your novel to a slightly better version of itself, which your editor can foresee.

The Universal Story Template Captures Reader Expectations

Everyone has some implicit idea as to what makes a great story. To restate the subjectivity excuse: each of our ideals differs; put another way, we can't agree on what a great story looks like. Authors must think carefully about this issue. Consider one potential ideal, in the form of this definition of story: a character overcomes obstacles and changes. Sounds good, perhaps, but imperfect: it covers only three of the five story elements. It omits the story's world and theme. In other words, its bias translates to overlooking two elements. Another, worse version of bias is "be me" feedback: write the way I write or want to read. Such feedback is imprecise. It usually doesn't go past "I like this, I don't like that." You can't act on it save to imitate the commenter. We want the opposite: the broadest possible definition, with minimal biases so you can be you and write the story you want, and write it effectively.

Just as good graders work from an agreed idea of a good answer, nearly all readers work from an idea of what a story should be, which is their version of the universal story template. Recall that fairy tales, across cultures and centuries, open with some version of "once upon a time." This omnipresence (along with other cues) suggests that people share the same basic expectations of a story. See our fairy tale cues post, which details this concept.

Here's the key point. Anyone commenting on your story compares it to an implicit ideal. They ask questions like: is there a main character, and is that character fully developed? Does the plot have a beginning, middle, and end? Is it resolved, or are there loose ends? Was the reader ever confused or bored? All feedback, then, tries to bring your story closer to the commenter's personal vision by identifying gaps between where it is and where it could be. Our goal is to find the commonality in these personal ideals and make it explicit.

Building the PI, a Rubric for Stories

With faith in a common ideal, we set out to meet the three standards by developing a rubric for stories. Advice on creative writing is plentiful; there are hundreds of books on writing, if not thousands. First, we read everything we could find, a multiyear project. We noted each piece of advice, which is really a claim about what readers want, i.e., do this and they'll be happier. Next, we developed the broadest definition of story: a coherent combination of five elements (character, world, conflict, theme, and plot). Finally, we used our definition to organize that wisdom, resolving some vagueness and inconsistency along the way.

With a prototype in hand, we blind-tested the rubric for good storytelling. We gave editors the same stories, checking their feedback against the rubric. Of course, we iterated over and over, revising the rubric until editors agreed on successive sample stories. Each reading can be subjective, yet the common ideal leads every one of our editors to give nearly the same feedback on a given story. This consistency is even stronger when it comes to prioritizing the top issue, which our testing bears out.

Inside the Publishability Index: 7 Elements, 23 Dimensions

Think of the Publishability Index™ as a checklist of conventions. It covers seven elements: the five from our definition plus language and coherence.

Character
World
Conflict
Theme
Plot
Language
Coherence

This last element is critical yet underdeveloped in other writing advice. Coherence addresses how the elements fit together. In addition, each element breaks down into dimensions, specific aspects such as a character's backstory, 23 in all. Finally, each dimension has two standards, good and great. We worded them carefully so writers and editors alike can accept them.

The PI is free at bardsy.com/stories/pub. Apply it yourself, with friends, or with professionals, including our editors. The online version lets you work through the dimensions, store your results, and update them as you revise. Try it on your current project, or enter our anthology contest and have an editor do it for you.

Applying the Publishability Index: A Backstory Example

How does this work in practice? Take backstory, the second of the character dimensions. We've distilled it into two standards:

1. Good: Main characters with pasts that inform their identities

2. Great: Relevant histories that spur individual change and action

Applying a standard takes holistic thinking. Think about every scene in which the character appears. Then reflect, assess, and note. Does the past inform who this character is? If so, the good standard is met; if not, consider a change. Then look for the great standard: a strong link between who the character was, who they are, and what they do.

Consider Mary, who brought a semi-autobiographical manuscript to our editors. Its protagonist had an acceptable past, meeting the good standard. Yet that history stayed separate from the plot and lacked specificity. In revising, she elevated a few backstory details and tied those to her character's key decisions. Now the past drives what the character does, increasing the story's coherence and making it more impactful.

With backstory complete, move to the next dimension, and the next, until you've worked through all 23. You should revise and repeat the PI, possibly using spiral writing, until your manuscript needs no more changes. At that point, it's publishable, hence the name. 😊

Publishability Index or Retelling? Use Both

How does the PI fit with retelling, the other practice we recommend for obtaining actionable feedback? In retelling, authors ask a volunteer to retell a chapter in their own words while they observe what the volunteer remembers, how they feel, and how invested they are. It's a litmus test to see whether a chapter works. The PI goes broader and deeper, addressing a whole story. We suggest spot-checking key chapters with retelling until they work, then working through the whole novel with the PI as quality assurance.

Remember: reading is subjective, and so is every comment you'll receive. Yet, like graders working from a common rubric, readers judge your novel against the same shared expectations. Make those expectations explicit, and feedback becomes sufficiently comprehensive, precise, and consistent to act on with confidence. And don't forget to enter the anthology contest.

We look forward to your thoughts or questions at joinus@bardsy.com.

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