What are the judges looking for in a short story?

I’m looking for a story that’s authentic, one that connects with the reader, one that is real to me and has been real to the author. I’m not looking for a revised version of Star Wars or Harry Potter, and sometimes you get stories like that, that are derivative. So authenticity, language skill. I think the important thing is to be able to tell the story on paper, and that’s a different technique from writing literature as such, because some people get very caught up on being editors when they should be thinking about being authors, the two are separate. And if people are trying very hard to put in lots of adjectives, and looking at sentence structure and titles and trying to be a little too self consciously clever with the story, that gets in the way of the reader. So try the technique of actually telling the story on paper, and you will find a simple strong story evolves, and then you can go back and where you need to embellish with richer language do it as an editorial stage.