Why Writers Miss Their Own Mistake
Segun Iwasanmi@iwasanmisegun212159
4 days ago
© Segun Iwasanmi
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I once watched a friend argue with his own manuscript like two people were inside the room.
He had printed the whole thing, about eighty pages, and he was pacing around the table.
“See how smooth this line is,” he kept saying, tapping the paper like a teacher marking brilliance.
The line read Go to the pubic office publicly.
I didn’t say anything at first. I just let him continue praising the sentence. Then I asked him. “What's the name of the rat that ate l from you public?"
It took almost a full minute before he saw it. When he finally did, the room went quiet the way it does when someone notices their zipper has been open since morning.
The funny thing is that he had read that same page more than ten times.
But the brain is a loyal assistant. Once it knows what you meant to say, it stops seeing what you actually wrote. It politely corrects the sentence inside your head while your eyes keep moving like nothing happened.
That is why many books look perfect to the writer and confusing to the reader.
The writer already knows the story. The reader is meeting it for the first time. Two completely different experiences, even though both people are looking at the same words.
I remember showing him another page again later.
This time he laughed and said, “So this is how books embarrass their owners.”
Since then, whenever someone hands me a manuscript and says, “I’ve checked everything,” I usually smile a little. Not because they didn’t check. They probably did.
It’s just that sometimes the person who wrote the story is the only one who cannot see where the story is quietly misbehaving. And that small blind spot… can change how the whole book is received.
© Segun Iwasanmi | ™The Man With The Story.
Book Writer | Screen and Scriptwriter | Creative Fiction writer | Book Editor.
I help people turn rough ideas into bold stories that work
