Analysis of The Block
The Block took me over a week to write, across multiple short sessions. My focus was on using character dialogue to describe the situation, rather than the narrator explaining everything.
My initial reflections are:
- Lots of dialogue. Mission accomplished! (I didn't say it had to be good dialogue.)
- No story structure. It's still an "and then this happened" type of story.
- It lacks physical descriptions of all the characters beyond gender.
It was a challenge to focus on using the characters' interactions to surface information about the world, rather than just telling the reader about the lack of food, fuel and the breakdown of law and order. Especially without adding details to their conversations that would be unnecessary for characters living in that world. For example, they all know why the checkpoints exist, so there's no reason for any of them to mention it. As a result the reader doesn't know, but that's okay as it wasn't relevant to that story, beyond giving a reason why Sydney had stopped for the night. That's where I went wrong with The Queue. I tried to explain anything that a reader may wonder about, even though many things weren't relevant to what the characters were doing at that point in time.
A repeated weakness is the story structure, or rather, lack of one. I've recently watched the TV series Paradise and it's fun to notice certain stages in episodes, while still being absorbed in the story. For example, an episode sets up some sort of danger or conflict, the character gets through it and starts to relax, and then something unexpected happens that ramps up the tension again. That tension build-up and resolution is missing from my stories so far and they just sound like a sequence of events.
Also missing are physical descriptions of characters. I wonder if it's because I don't have a visual imagination. When reading stories I am unable to picture the setting or the characters, and the descriptive passages wash over my head as a result. I zoom straight into the actions and dialogue. What I held in my mind while writing The Block was the physical positions of all the people and objects. The moment when the characters looked up and saw the sky full of drones was written after I realised they were in the middle of the countryside and things would be visible to them across a vast distance. In the same way that Sydney was focused on getting to where Jerry was after being woken so suddenly, I had blinkered vision, seeing only what I had already placed in the scene.
I fed the story into AI to identify areas that I missed in my reflections.
AI Critique of The Block
AI CRITIQUE — Entry 2
Story: "The Block" · Rated: 16 Sep 2026 · Rater: Claude (Opus 4.8)
Bands: Emerging → Developing → Solid → Strong
Prose & sentence craft — DEVELOPING
Cleaner at the sentence level than the exposition mode allows later, and the dialogue moves naturally. But control slips under pressure: typos and grammar wobble in places ("that's is Stan," "back back online"), and the register drops into flatness exactly when it should tighten ("This is so cool!" "Nice," "this thing does everything!"). To level up: proof-pass for the mechanical errors, and when wonder arrives, resist letting characters narrate it in placeholder enthusiasm — let the described object carry it.
Show vs. tell — SOLID
A real jump from Entry 1. The block is discovered almost entirely through action — tapping options, the seamless opening, the on-demand food — and the biggest revelation (waste becoming food) lands because a character reads a percentage meter climb, not because the narrator explains matter-conversion. That's showing a rule through use. To level up: the radio broadcast at the end reverts to pure tell, retrofitting scope onto what the scene already implied; trust the reader to extrapolate from one lay-by.
Structure & pacing — DEVELOPING
The two-part shape works — a quiet human night, then the strange dawn — and the campfire opening earns its length by making the deprivation concrete before the cornucopia arrives. But the back half loosens into a feature tour: option by option, each tapped and remarked upon, pacing going slack as novelty substitutes for tension. Nothing is at stake once the block proves benign. To level up: let something resist — a limit, a cost, a disagreement over use — so discovery has friction.
Character — DEVELOPING
Up a band. Lucy in particular emerges as a person — the mother-hen generosity ("we couldn't eat knowing you were both going without"), the practical read on the waste tank — and Jerry's boyish enthusiasm and Stan's lorry-guarded wariness are distinct enough to track by behaviour, not just name. Sydney stays the quiet observer-anchor. To level up: the three campers still cluster tonally once the block appears; differentiate how each reacts to the impossible, not just how each behaves at camp.
Voice & tone control — SOLID
Held consistently: the same ordinariness-under-strain register from Entry 1, wisely refusing to spike into awe. The shared-beans scene has genuine warmth without sentimentality. Note for calibration: the ending here does reach outward (the radio widening to global scope), but through diegetic means — a broadcast the characters hear — so it isn't the authorial-reassurance lapse from Entry 1. Different mechanism; not counted against the pattern.
World-integration — SOLID
The strongest category. The unit's rules — one toilet per block, matter budget depleting and refilling, swap-out waste containers, dynamic assembly instructions — are almost all revealed through the characters solving practical problems (Lucy refilling the camper's tank is the standout: setting-logic and character-competence in one move). This is exactly the lived-experience discovery the rubric prizes. To level up: the closing broadcast lectures the mechanics the scene had already taught ("reactivated by recycling any type of waste" was shown minutes earlier) — cut what's been dramatised.
Highlights
- The waste-to-food realisation, delivered through a climbing percentage meter rather than exposition — the single best craft moment across both entries.
- The shared beans establishing scarcity as felt experience, so the block's abundance lands with weight rather than as spectacle.
The one edit
Cut or heavily trim the radio broadcast. Everything essential — the units are everywhere, they're not of Earth — the scene can deliver in a fraction of the space, and the broadcast re-explains mechanics (recycling reactivation, the food/water/toilet options) already dramatised at the lay-by. End closer to the characters looking at each other as the implication lands; let the global scope stay implied by the sky full of drones you already showed.
Pattern to watch
Authorial reassurance at the ending — did not recur here (the outward reach was diegetic, via the broadcast). Held at appearance count: 1.
My additional takeaways from the AI critique:
- The radio broadcast at the end was too heavy handed, much like all my exposition in The Queue. I added this section because I wanted that sense of "this is happening everywhere", there's nothing unique about these four people on the side of the road. The whole world is going through this experience of confusion and curiosity, then amazement and wonder.
- "Nice" is not a descriptive word. I hear echoes of GCSE English feedback.
- Characters actually need character, some sort of personality.
In conclusion, I have a lot to work on. In the next story I'll focus on structure and pacing.