I mean seeing the big picture, how everything relates to everything else; knowing which scenes feel like a natural part of the fictional universe and which seem contrived and full of “outside information” which the author has forced into the story; understanding how individual features fit into the fictional world from the point of view of someone inside the fictional world (as opposed to from the point of view of the author trying to teach readers a lesson); how the narrative tone varies throughout the course of several chapters (or even from scene to scene), and whether it should vary as much; what kind of image a character creates in the reader’s mind, if you take every written word about that character and consider all of them simultaneously (related questions: whether it matches the intended view of the character; whether they seem self-consistent and sane).
Like I said, Yudkowsky can manage his sentence- and paragraph-level writing very well; if you put small fragments of MoR up for criticism, even the fiercest critics cannot reasonably conclude that he’s absolutely hopeless at writing. But in fiction, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; a collection of superbly-written individual scenes do not a good story make.
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I mean seeing the big picture, how everything relates to everything else; knowing which scenes feel like a natural part of the fictional universe and which seem contrived and full of “outside information” which the author has forced into the story; understanding how individual features fit into the fictional world from the point of view of someone inside the fictional world (as opposed to from the point of view of the author trying to teach readers a lesson); how the narrative tone varies throughout the course of several chapters (or even from scene to scene), and whether it should vary as much; what kind of image a character creates in the reader’s mind, if you take every written word about that character and consider all of them simultaneously (related questions: whether it matches the intended view of the character; whether they seem self-consistent and sane).
Like I said, Yudkowsky can manage his sentence- and paragraph-level writing very well; if you put small fragments of MoR up for criticism, even the fiercest critics cannot reasonably conclude that he’s absolutely hopeless at writing. But in fiction, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; a collection of superbly-written individual scenes do not a good story make.