What Makes a Story Excellent? (And How to Know When You've Reached It)

Is story excellence something you "know when you see it"—or can it actually be measured?

Is excellence defined by hitting bestseller lists? Filling seats at every book tour stop? Being selected for “Best Books of 2025” lists?

Is excellence defined by getting gatekeeper approval? Getting agent representation? Landing a book deal? Winning awards?

Is excellence defined by earning money? Getting a big advance? Earning out the advance and bringing in royalties?

Or is it something else?

How can we measure that a book is good? What is the pinnacle we’re trying to reach, and how will we tell when we achieve it?

This is a big, big question, and feels in some ways impossible to answer. But I’m going to try. Because if we want to craft excellent novels, we need to know what we’re aiming for so we can recognize when we reach it and spot when we’re going off course.

Come journey with me to discover what excellent stories truly do. We’re going to get lightly philosophical so you can shape your stories to excellence too. 

You’ll hear:

• My current working definition of an excellent novel
• Why I am not actually the arbiter of excellence (even though I have really good taste)
• Why excellent books don’t always receive industry validation . . . and whether all books the industry promotes are excellent (spoiler: no)
• What readers WANT from stories
• Why stories have been essential to human survival since the beginning of storytelling
• 5 questions to ask yourself to define YOUR OWN standard of excellence

Once you’ve heard how I’m defining excellence, I’d love to hear your definition! Head to the comments on the blog post and let me know what makes a story excellent to you.

Share your standard of excellence in the comments »

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Ep. 65: Why Some Writers Resist Measuring Their Craft (And Why They Shouldn’t)
• Ep. 84: What If You Do Everything Right and the Book Launch Still Goes Wrong? with A.S. King
• Ep. 36: Your Story Has Deep Meaning. Do You Know What It Is?

Transcript

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What makes a story excellent? What is it that we love about the stories that we love? How do we measure their excellence? How do we determine some books are excellent and others aren't? Is it something ineffable, intuitive, undefinable, something where you know it when you see it, but you can't describe it in language. Is it something determined by gatekeepers agents and acquiring editors Select the most excellent books and we know we've made it when our manuscript is the one they choose. Is it something determined by readers, measurable then by number of books sold, or number of raving fans who show up to your book tour stops or is it something else? How can we measure that? A book is good. What is the pinnacle that we're trying to reach and how will we tell when we achieve it? This is a big, big question and it feels in some ways impossible to answer, but I'm going to try because if we want to craft excellence novels, we need to know what we're aiming for so we can recognize when we reach it and spot when we're going off course. come journey with me to discover what excellent stories truly do. We are going to get lightly philosophical so you can shape your stories to excellence too. Welcome to your next draft. Here's a fun fact. This is the 99th episode of your next draft. We are one episode away from 100. That is a pretty cool milestone. I also just celebrated my business's third birthday. I launched my business as an independent developmental editor and book coach On December 2nd, 2022. So I've also just passed the three year mark, which is also a pretty cool milestone. The funny thing about milestones is they feel less like end point achievements than I expected, and more like invitations or opportunities. sure on one level there's an achievement to celebrate, a chance to look at what I've built and how far I've come and give myself a pat on the back. But much more than that, I've found they're actually invitations into something bigger. They're an invitation to cast new vision, to dream bigger, to examine the foundation I've laid and imagine what I can build on it now. So I've been doing a lot of reflecting in the last few weeks, and I've been doing a lot of dreaming and vision casting, and my goodness, the future is bright. I have a lot of changes in the works that I'm really excited about. Most of them are still in early development, baby fresh, nowhere near ready to go out in the crowded public. They've gotta develop infant immune systems and learn to lift up their heads first. We're a ways away from their public view. But there's something I do want to talk about right now in all my vision casting. I've been homing in on what exactly it is that I want to help writers do. The central hub, I'm orienting around for everything I'm building, and it comes down to this. I want to help writers craft excellent novels. Exciting, right? Except that I found that pretty unsatisfying as a target. What the heck is an excellent novel? What makes a story excellent? There's something inevitable about it, right? Something mystical, magical, and I know it when I see it. An intangible sense of delight, of satisfaction of creative vision fulfilled. My business coach did not like when I wrote that I wanted to help writers fulfill their creative vision. He was like. This sounds like you're dodging making any specific promise about what you can help people do. That brought me back to excellence. I want to help writers craft excellent novels, but if I left the definition of excellence in that intangible, ineff, mystical, magical realm that wouldn't to help me or anyone, I could help writers craft books that I think are excellent, but that would just mean helping writers craft books that I personally like. Don't get me wrong. I think I have great taste and I know a good story well told when I see one. But also, I am not your gatekeeper. I am not your authority. Doling out gold stars of validation. Now, I love a good gold star as much as any type A high achieving honors student, but I don't wanna build an editing hub where I am the arbiter of excellence and writers come to me for approval. We have way too much of that already in this industry. I am not trying to replicate it. Which means that I can't build my business on promises I can't define. If you've been here for a while, you know that I love to make the subjective objective and the implicit explicit. That means my entire ethos demands that I not simply say that my goal is excellence. I must articulate and define what excellence means. We have to have a way to measure it. Otherwise, I'm leaving it as a gut feeling and my gut becomes our new authority Again, the book world is rife with gut feelings we don't need me to add to it. I think a lot about something that a friend said to me a couple years ago, he's a swing dancer, a jazz musician, and a nuclear physicist, which means he has a high degree of expertise in both art and science. And he told me the universe is not less beautiful because it can be measured. I talked about that in depth in episode 65, and I encourage you to go back and give it a listen. it dovetails really nicely with what I'm talking about today. The universe is not less beautiful because it can be measured. So for the last few weeks I've been wrestling with this, when it comes to novels, to stories, how do we measure excellence? How do we make the subjective objective? How do we translate intuition into explicit, measurable markers? What is excellence in storytelling? This is a really, really important question because there are lots of ways to measure a book's success. Did it get picked up by an agent, by a publisher? How many readers did it reach? Did it win any awards? How much money did it generate for the author? How many reviews did it get, and how many stars were those reviews? How many stops were on the book tour? How many readers showed up to those events? Many writers choose one or more of those metrics as the way to measure whether their book was successful. Those are external, obvious, and clear. They are very objective, very explicit. A book receives five reviews or 5,000 reviews. A book is picked up by an agent, but dies on submission to publishers. A book generates a hundred dollars in royalties or a$5,000 advance. These are measurable. but they do not measure excellence. I hate to say it, but it's true. There are a lot of terrible books that get traditionally published. There are some amazing books that never get the recognition they deserve. There are books that become mega popular bestsellers that are not excellent. 50 Shades of Gray was made into a movie, but if you're listening to this podcast, I doubt that you're setting 50 shades of gray as the bar that you want to reach. Gatekeeper validation. Traditional publication advances, bestseller lists, royalties, movie deals. All of these things are measurable, but they do not measure excellence, which means that if you want to write an excellent book and you set those markers as your goal, you are chasing milestones that do not align with what you actually want. Chase them too far, and I promise you, they will take you off course. for evidence of that head back to my conversation with author Amy King. She is pursuing excellence in storytelling above all else, and she is traditionally published and award-winning, but she's not getting the kind of publisher support that you would imagine would follow excellence novels. So, so far then. We've examined and discarded two possible ways to measure excellence. Excellence is not determined by Alice Sub's personal gut feeling, even though I'm really smart and have really good taste and excellence is not determined by any publishing metrics, even though the publishing industry is where most of us typically turn to find our next great read. Lots of mediocre books get published to lots of acclaim And lots of excellent books go unrecognized. What Thin is Excellence to figure it out. I went all the way back to what books do. What do we love about stories? Why do we come back to them again and again? What draws us to movies, to books, to tv, to the written word? What is it that we want from the stories we consume? I believe it's this. We want stories to make us feel. We come to stories to feel feelings. Nicole Kidman said it in that a MC theaters ad. We come to this place for magic. We come to a MC theaters to laugh, to cry, to care somehow. Heartbreak feels good in a place like this. Our heroes feel like the best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful. We come to stories to feel, this is not new. I didn't make it up and neither did Nicole Kidman Aristotle wrote about the concept of catharsis in politics and in poetics, essentially a strong emotional experience created in the audience by listening to a piece of music or watching a tragic play. We humans have known that we come to stories in order to feel things for over 2000 years. This is what we want. We want to feel and what do we need? What purpose have stories served throughout human history? Stories are survival tools. They are among the earliest of human technology. They are the way we convey ideas and experiences from one person's mind into another. They make it so that we don't have to learn every single crucial life lesson through painful and sometimes deadly trial and error, but we can instead learn from other people's experiences and make better choices accordingly. Stories are vehicles for us to see, understand and embody truth stories, transfer lived experiences from one human to another So that we don't merely observe those experiences as outsiders, but experience them empathetically as insiders. There's a quote from the essayist and Professor Elaine scar in her book, the Body in Pain, where she writes to have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt. I understand her to be writing about how physical pain actually transcends language. Like it's kind of impossible when you are in pain to describe what you are feeling in such a way that someone else can also feel it. I believe that without story, this would also be true of emotional experiences without story. To feel a great emotion would be to have certainty, but to hear that someone else feels a great emotion would be to have doubt. And yet through stories we can express emotional experiences in such a way that we can pass them from one person to the next. We can pass our certainty from one person to another. We can cultivate that experience inside someone else's mind. Can make someone else feel the things we feel. That is the magic of stories, the things stories do that makes them utterly indispensable. Stories are the vehicle by which we transfer human experience in all regards, but physical pain from one person to another. And so we need stories in order to transfer hard-earned wisdom from one human to the next, from one generation to the next. We cannot survive this complicated world without them. In other words, we need stories in order to show us truth. And so I propose this definition of excellence. An excellent story is one that makes the reader feel something true. An excellent story is one that succeeds in creating a cathartic feeling in the reader that conveys a truth about the human experience from the author's psyche to the readers. And when a story truly excels at this, it makes the reader feel that truth in such a deep and profound way that it actually creates a change in the reader themselves. Experiencing that story changes how we think about something, how we feel about something, what we do about something for the best stories that change is long lasting. Those stories stick in our minds for years and become part of our DNAA filter that shapes who we are and what we believe about the world tomorrow and tomorrow. And tomorrow by Gabrielle Zeen is like that for me, looking for Alaska by John Green, the truth about Forever by Sarah Dessan and of Green Gables by Ellen Montgomery. The greatest stories make us feel something true so profoundly that they sink into the depths of our psyche and shape how we interact with the world forevermore. and so we have a definition, something objective, something measurable, something directly connected to the heart and purpose of storytelling throughout history. And can you imagine now why excellence and industry validation don't always line up from the industry's point of view? A book they would define as excellence is one that makes a lot of money. But what if your book conveys an uncomfortable truth? That's probably not going to be a mega bestseller, not a lot of motivation to back that horse. What if your book cultivates a change within its readers that's threatening to someone in power? That's not going to benefit the industry. In fact, they might be disincentivized to back it, incentivized instead to bury it or tokenize it or reject it altogether. It would be absolutely amazing if our most creatively fulfilling dreams were also blockbuster movie makers. That powerhouse industry leaders were clamoring to support. And sometimes, yes, those align, but a lot of times they don't. And while industry validation is a perfectly reasonable thing to chase, the thing you must understand as you chase it is this, the industry is not looking for excellence. They're looking for a product they can sell. So getting validation from the industry might not mean what you want it to mean. Which brings me all the way back to where I began. What is it that I want to help writers do? What am I building my editing career around? I'm choosing to build it around excellence, not excellence by the industry's definition, but excellence by this one. An excellent story is one that makes the reader feel something true. I think that for a certain type of writer, this is where creative fulfillment really lies, that you've crafted an experience that makes your readers feel something and that something is a deep human truth. To be clear, this is a working definition. It's something I'm still honing and refining, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. I invite you to ask yourself, what makes a book excellent to you? What books do you love the most? Why do you love them? What books make you say, I want to write a book like that? What would make you feel successful as an author? What would make you feel deeply, truly proud of your book and yourself? Because remember, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day what I think that excellence is. You're not seeking my validation that your book is good. It matters what you want for your book. What would make you feel indescribably proud of your novel? I've opened up the comments on the blog post for this episode, so head over to my website@aliceslo.com slash 99 and let me know in the comments what excellence means to you. I'm really curious to hear, and if you want to dig deeper with this sort of story philosophy, which I hope you do, I encourage you to check out a couple more episodes. First, the one I mentioned earlier about my nuclear physicist Swing Dance Friends, episode 65. Why some writers Resist measuring their craft and why they shouldn't. Second my conversation with author Amy King on her experience getting her excellent novel, traditionally published, episode 84, what if you do everything right and the book launch still goes wrong? And third, for more on the books that have stuck with me personally and shaped how I see the world. Episode 36, your story has deep meaning. Do you know what it is? You can find links to all of those episodes in the show notes. So here's where I want to land the plane. Right now. My working definition of excellent storytelling is this. An excellent story is one that makes the reader feel something true so profoundly that it creates a lasting change inside the reader. I would love to hear what excellence means to you. Ask yourself what you truly want for your stories and your readers. Sit with that and chew on it a while and see what comes up. And then let me know what you're thinking in the comments on this episode@alicesudler.com slash nine nine. Here's to creating more of the books we love the most Happy editing.