What makes a good story

Recently subscribed to Neil Gaiman's blog, and reading some of the comments on it and what people have to say on other sites it got me thinking.

I'm a big fan of the Gaimanator's work, so much so that I've just ordered over €100 worth of his work off Amazon, including Vols 1 and 2 of The Sandman. Never read it but I hear its fantastic work. I already have several of his other works, including 1602, a fantastic piece set in 1602 in the Marvel Universe.

Frequently people write into him asking, How can I become a good writer, What are your secrets, blah blah blah, and to do him credit he doesn't just tell them to fup off, he does give a reasonable answer to people. But a separate question still stands of what actually makes a good story?

For me personally, its got to have characters with real depth, or at least the possibility of depth. Characters that are blatantly two dimensional are, to put it bluntly, crap. Similarly the universe it's set in needs to provide a convincing backdrop to the story, so it can't be hard sc-fi set in pinky pony land. You've got to have some real meat to the story, something that will draw you in and hold your attention, something that will physically stop you from putting that beast down until youve milked every last drop of literary goodness from it.

The more I write and think about this, the harder it actually appears to be to quantify... Obviously there are always different criteria for different people. Some of my favourites would include the almighty HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, the Discworld series, a short story called Flowers for Algernon, I am Legend, and sweet Jeebus too many to write down. But its an interesting subject, one of those things that drags you off on a tangent and wont let you go.

Maybe that means that the question itself qualifies as a story :)