In the introduction to the Best American Short Stories 2025 annual, Celeste Ng writes about skipping reading the introductions when she’s read the anthology in the past. Even more interesting, she describes the criteria for good fiction she discovered in the process of making her selections. These criteria can be aspirational; they might be expectations we set for ourselves. Excerpts are below. I’ve added numbers and altered paragraphing.
[1] First and foremost, the story had to grab me. Sometimes this meant an unforgettable premise, or a propulsive plot, or characters so fully drawn that I felt I would know them if I met them on the street. Sometimes it was charm, or humor, or an unexpected twist. The stories that ended up in the Yes pile were ones I couldn’t get out of my head, that I kept thinking about days or even weeks after reading them.
[2] Second, the story had to feel complete…. I wanted a sense that the writer had considered the story holistically, that every choice had been made deliberately, and that all the pieces fit together, even if the… [whole] picture wasn’t fully revealed. And by the time I reached the last line, I needed to understand something more about the situation than I did at the start…
[3] Third, the language of this story had to be of the very highest caliber. If a piece didn’t have sentences that startled or surprised me, or images that took my breath away with their absolute rightness, they usually didn’t make the cut….
[4] And finally … stories had to have heft … They didn’t have to be serious or sad… But I had to feel that this story and these characters were deeply important to the author, not just a thought experiment or a whim…. I also tend to gravitate towards stories that are in conversation with big topics, whether that means our current moment or broad-reaching and eternal themes…. The very best stories engage with more than just the purely personal, and this is what turns a good story into a great story.
Writing Fiction 