Picking a story apart

Sticking with the the Lightspeed Magazine short story task, I identified one of my old stories with a feminist theme that I was planning on sending them.  That is, until I started to pick the story apart.  Then I realised the setting wasn't properly drawn, the baddie was a caricature, and the message was too in your face.

It's useful to pick apart published stories to find out why they were published.  Choose a story of the type you'd like to write, then read it through two or three times.  Does the story have a grabbing title?  What length is it? 

Was the first paragraph grabbing?  Did the story start in the right place - right in the middle of the action?  Was the main character clear right from the start?  Was the conflict or problem introduced early?  Whose viewpoint did the story use?  Was it first or third person?  Was the story told in past or present tense?

Is the writing serious, or colloquial, does it use slang words, or is it funny?   What was the setting of the story, and how much of it was sketched in?  How many characters were used?  Did the names the writer had given them feel right?  Was the ending satisfying, and did it resolve the problem or challenge set up at the start of the story?

These are just a few of the questions you can ask when analysing stories.  If you want to get serious about it you can make yourself a table of questions with space to write notes next to each question.  This kind of record is handy if you analyse several stories as you end up with several records you can compare to discover trends.

It might seem like a mechanical way of studying writing, but writing for publication is about providing a product that a buyer wants, and analysing already successful products is one of the best ways to do that.