Check Your Blind Spots
How to Make Sure Your Readers See What You Envision on the Page
The only car accident I’ve ever caused was because of a blind spot. I was on my way to a mixer for a potential internship, and forgot to check my blind spot before switching lanes. Luckily, it was a low-speed crash and no one was injured. Not-so-luckily, my trusty Dodge Spirit sustained a bent axle that would’ve cost more to fix than replace. I loved that car, and having to scrap it sucked.
Just like a blind spot wrecked my beloved car, blind spots in your writing can ruin your story. Fortunately, your manuscript is much more resilient than my old car, and you have more than a split second to check for issues.
Why Writers Have Blind Spots
As the author, you know everything about your story. It came from you. It lives in your head. The problem with all that knowledge is that you know what you intended to convey. So it’s hard to see whether you actually got it down on the page when you read your own work.
One way to get around this curse of knowledge is to work with a book coach who can point out the problem areas. As a coach, I act like those built-in blind spot sensors most cars have now. The mirrors on my Mazda have a little light that turns on when someone’s next to me, and if I put my blinker on, two little beeps remind me not to move over. I do the same thing for my clients with in-line comments, editorial notes, and 1:1 discussions.
Another way is to set your manuscript aside for enough time that your eyes are fresh, and to know what you’re looking for when you pick it back up.
Five Common Blind Spots for Writers
Here are the five most common blind spots I see in writers. Learn how to identify them in your own writing, and how to fix them:
You Know What Your Character Is Thinking, But It’s Not on the Page
Reading is an opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes. Readers want to go through your story as the main character. They want to feel what that character feels and think what they’re thinking. The only way to give readers the experience they crave is to let them inside your character’s head.
The solution to this is to include more inner monologue, or interiority. Most writers think they’ve put way more of this in than they actually have. To gauge whether you have enough, use a book you love as a baseline. Choose a book in your genre and open it to a similar scene (i.e. action, conversation, intimate) and highlight all the interiority. Then do the same for your scene. Do you have a similar amount of text highlighted in both?
Nothing Happens (a.k.a. The Chapter Takes Place Inside a Floating Head)
This is sort of the opposite of not having enough interiority, but you’d be surprised how many writers alternate between the two. First, you have a chapter with minimal thoughts and tons of action, and then there’s a chapter where the character reflects on just what happened.
I’m not saying your whole story needs to be action, action, action. There will absolutely be quieter scenes and moments of reflection in your story. But you still need conflict in those scenes. Your character might not be running for their life, but they still need a goal. Instead of writing an entire chapter that takes place while your character is sitting on the couch thinking, send them on an errand. Better yet, have something they encounter on that errand challenge them. Ideally, in a way that shifts their perspective and helps them decide their next course of action.
The Backstory Balancing Act: Information Dumps vs. Not Enough
Backstory is another tightrope to walk. You have to give the reader enough information to understand what’s going on, but they’ll lose interest if you include too much.
It’s super tempting to write down everything you know about a character when you introduce them, or share every detail about the world or magic system as you think of it. You can do this when you’re drafting if you want to stay in the flow, but don’t forget to come back and cull the extra details during edits.
On the other hand, sometimes a bit of backstory is extremely relevant to the choice or action a character makes. Like with interiority, since you know what happened in the past, you might not realize that the reader doesn’t.
The Trap of the Big Reveal
Twists and surprises are great, but they work best when your point-of-view character learns about them right along with your reader. (Yes, you can have an unreliable narrator, but that’s pretty uncommon in romance novels.)
The trap many writers fall into is giving their point-of-view character a big secret that they hide from the reader, too. This becomes an issue because the secret drives your character’s actions throughout the whole story. Which means the character is constantly alluding to the secret, but not telling the reader what it is. When I point this out to a writer, they usually say something like, “But she’s going to reveal that to John in chapter 28.” The problem is, readers hate to feel like they’re being left out. Besides that, the anticipation you feel around that big reveal is really about John’s reaction to Susie’s secret. Which means you can build more tension and excitement if you let the reader anticipate John’s reaction, too.
There are good reasons to keep secrets from readers, of course, but unless you have one, let the reader in on it early. You build more tension when the reader knows there’s a showdown to anticipate.
Managing the Passage of Time
You can’t show every single step of a character’s day, or your novel will be eight thousand pages long (and no one will read it because it’ll be boring). Knowing which moments to zoom in on, which moments to summarize, and which to skip entirely is an art. Ultimately, the moments that matter most to your character are the ones to zoom in on.
One benefit of the high-level outline I create before I start writing is that it saves me from following my character around through parts of their day that don’t matter. Once they’re written in, those unnecessary bits can be hard to untangle. If you can’t force yourself to do an outline, make sure you ask a trusted alpha reader to point out the slow spots. Can you pull the critical details out of the slow scene and move them somewhere else (and cut the rest)?
Jumping to the good parts necessitates grounding the reader in time and place, and that’s challenging, too. You know when and where the characters are in relation to the previous scene. Make sure your reader does, too. This doesn’t mean you have to start every chapter with a variation on, “Three days later, George stood in his living room.” (That would get old fast.) But within the first few sentences of the new scene, the reader should understand roughly when and where the action takes place.
Your Work Needs a Second Set of Eyes
Even though I’m trained to see these things in other people’s manuscripts, I have trouble seeing them in my own. A developmental editor or book coach will be the best at flagging your blind spots, but not everyone can afford one. Next best is a critique partner or beta reader who knows what to look for. To make sure they do, send them a link to this blog post along with your manuscript, and ask them to identify these specific issues in your story.
(If you noticed I didn’t suggest a line or copy editor, that’s not an oversight. Big picture items like this aren’t their main focus, so they’re not obligated to call them out. That doesn’t mean line and copy editors don’t have an important role to play, just that developmental feedback isn’t usually part of their job.)