Viewing stories as spacious

I'm noticing I can view a story as spacious, containing possibility. Oh, this paragraph is cool, I can see how that description of a fantasy animal gives the world a certain flavor of possibilities. This is the kind of world where you might end up needing to capture this fantasy animal. This is the kind of world where we have this medallion and it means something to these characters, there is some possibility and freedom about what that could possibly mean.

This is different from how I tend to view my own stories when reviewing them. I tend to see the story as a big bag of solid problems to be solved: This character that feels flat, that dialogue is too stilted, this feels too short, that feels too easy. What if I viewed it in a more spacious way? I'm not sure.

I'm noticing also there's a specificity to what I'm describing here. It's the story-world that I'm seeing as empty. I could also view the characters as empty. Hmm.