Judge Things By Their Goals

Nobody takes black and white photos for evidence at a crime scene. Crime scene photography needs to be accurate. It needs to record as much information as possible. In the present day, black and white photography serves no purpose beside an artistic one. When you look at black and white photos, you should judge them on what they are trying to do, which is capture the real world in a surreal way. It plays with light and shadows. It shows you common things in novel ways. To judge black and white photography in its ability to accurately express the real world would have it fail miserably in every attempt.

This is true about everything in life, writing included. If somebody hands me a piece of writing and asks if it's good, then I have to know what it's supposed to be good at. Otherwise, I can only assume that they want to know if it's good at entertaining me, which is usually a worthless statistic.

It's easier said than done, I admit. Removing your own taste and approaching a piece of writing by any other standards does not come naturally to most people. And I will say that you can never truly remove your own taste; if writing could be approached that mechanically, people wouldn't need your opinion in the first place (nor would the world need writers at all). That said, if a romance novel takes place in space, it is still a romance novel and criticism should not include complaints that it isn't more of a sci-fi adventure story.

Judge things by their goals. Something is good when it is good at what it tries to be.