The author still has to know what’s inside the gaps. Also, the gaps have to look coherent—they can’t appear to the reader as noise, or it simply won’t create the right impression, no matter what.
You may be overanalyzing here. I’ve never published anything that I would’ve considered sending in to a science fiction magazine—maybe I’m holding myself to too-high standards, but still, it’s not like I’m outlining the plot and building character sheets. My goal in writing online fiction is to write it quickly so it doesn’t suck up too much time (and I quite failed at this w/r/t Three Worlds Collide, but I never had the spare days to work only on the novella, which apparently comes with a really large productivity penalty).
I think Alicorn is certainly not overanalizing in the sense that fiction is always fiction and usual methods of analysis apply regardless of the author’s proclaimed intentions or the amount of resources spent at writing. On the other hand I think Eliezer’s fictions are perfectly good enough for their purpose, and while the flaws pointed out by Alicorn are certainly there I think it’s unreasonable to expect Eliezer to be like a professional fiction writer.
The author still has to know what’s inside the gaps. Also, the gaps have to look coherent—they can’t appear to the reader as noise, or it simply won’t create the right impression, no matter what.
You may be overanalyzing here. I’ve never published anything that I would’ve considered sending in to a science fiction magazine—maybe I’m holding myself to too-high standards, but still, it’s not like I’m outlining the plot and building character sheets. My goal in writing online fiction is to write it quickly so it doesn’t suck up too much time (and I quite failed at this w/r/t Three Worlds Collide, but I never had the spare days to work only on the novella, which apparently comes with a really large productivity penalty).
I think Alicorn is certainly not overanalizing in the sense that fiction is always fiction and usual methods of analysis apply regardless of the author’s proclaimed intentions or the amount of resources spent at writing. On the other hand I think Eliezer’s fictions are perfectly good enough for their purpose, and while the flaws pointed out by Alicorn are certainly there I think it’s unreasonable to expect Eliezer to be like a professional fiction writer.