making critiques of your own work

What makes a good story? It’s hard to say. Different readers and different writers have different reactions to different stories. As surely as one reader loves a certain piece, someone else cannot abide it; articles on editor rejects, others embrace. Excellence is, at least to some degree, inexpressible. But not entirely. While tastes differ, it still should be possible to analyze and isolate some common characteristics of meritorious work. Writers need, “at least a sound working definition of the superior. To grandly aspire to write a great story poses too broad a challenge. If one can begin to put into words one’s ideas about excellence, if one can break down the huge overall goal into more manageable increments, then one will have a fair target at which to aim the discipline of craft and the devotion of magic”

To make a critic of your own story proved to be difficult task. Several apprehensions came to the mind of the author as to biases and being critically fair in one’s judgment. But in a way, it is of great pride to create a short story which the author humbly aimed to be a piece of writing that has a message or a thread of meaning running t{/justify}