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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on How to Write Deep Characters - Less Wrong
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Eliezer,
I'm currently re-reading HPMoR and recommending it to anyone who will listen, and I think there is another thing you got quite right. You managed to accurately portray each character's limited information and extrapolate what their decisions would be based on that limited information. There isn't any 'omniscience leakage', wherein a character knows something he shouldn't be able to because you couldn't keep your perspective as the author and their perspective as the character separated. Sustaining and developing that over 1300 pages of increasingly complex plot threads is very impressive.
Heh, every now and then I get a compliment which actually does make me feel like a proper genius in the pre-Dweckian unhealthy sense because it compliments something I accomplished with literally no effort. Likewise when somebody congratulates me on all the effort I must have put in to get HPMOR's time-travel plots straight. I do those in my head without any notes, and it doesn't feel difficult. I wonder if any other mathematician or mathematician-lite would say the same thing I would, that time-travel plots are much less complicated than even slightly serious math.
I think the reason people say they couldn't write a time travel plot is because they think about time travel for five seconds and don't come up with a plot right there.
It's rather easy to come up with plots that require backwards causality and time travel (and psychologically realistic characters, for that matter) if you devote only slightly more cognitive effort to it, such as making it into a hobby or pastime rather than a once-off throwaway thought. It looks Impressive, in the same way that memorizing an algorithm to solve a Rubik's Cube is Impressive.
I think that it's mainly that time travel plots seem a lot harder to write than they are.
Or, that because most of time travel in popular media make no sense whatsoever, people assume it must be very difficult.
They're easier to have written before they're done than they are to start afterwards.
This is true of an unsurprisingly large fraction of writing projects.