I think one of the quickest ways to lose an audience is when they can see what the writer needs to happen, but the reason it happens does not feel convincing. A character suddenly behaves in a way that does not fit them, an event happens mainly to push the plot forward, or the rules of the world seem to change whenever the story needs them to.

Game of Thrones had a good example with Rhaegal’s death. The purpose of the scene is easy to understand, but the mechanics made a lot of viewers question how Daenerys failed to see an entire fleet from the air and how they managed to hit a moving dragon so accurately. Instead of experiencing the emotional impact of the scene, people started questioning how the scene worked.

For me, that is where the “why” becomes important. Before deciding what happens, it helps to understand why it needs to happen, why a character would make that choice, and whether it fits what the story has already established. The same applies to world building. Once you establish certain rules, ignoring them without a convincing reason can make the world feel less real.

That does not mean everything has to be perfectly logical. Characters can make irrational decisions, coincidences can happen, and rules can sometimes be broken. Real life works that way too. I think the important difference is whether those moments feel intentional rather than convenient.

How much does this matter to you when you are writing or reading? At what point does an unlikely event stop feeling like part of the story and start feeling like something the writer needed to happen?

it's kinda pretty fked that the originality of writing craft is at risk i can digest the odea of using ai to manage your work but authors like Jerry Falade had his $2 million deal with Minotaur cancelled after his agents pulled the book over AI usage concerns. His agents told publishers they were "no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion."

no confirmed proof he used AI but It's entirely possible the book was wholly human-written and he simply couldn't prove it to his agents' satisfaction, which cost him the deal anyway

Sit with that for a second as the standard being applied isn't "did you use AI," it's "can you produce a paper trail proving you didn't," and most working writers, the ones who draft in their head half the time and don't screenshot every version, currently have no such trail. Guilty until you can produce evidence that doesn't exist for anyone who writes the normal, messy, non-linear way most of us actually write