Writers tend to have quite an active imagination and can come up with scenarios some people wouldn’t even imagine. But we can also have unexpected blind spots in our knowledge about… quite mundane or common things.

Those blind spots might be quite simple – as a general example, I live without a car as I can easily take public transport almost anywhere I need to. As a result, I have little to no idea about what maintenance and at what intervals it would take to keep a car in a decent shape. And if I tried to write a book where cars are prominent, I’d be likely doomed to fail because, even if the writing itself was decent, I’d probably make too many factual mistakes, and the book wouldn’t really pass the beta stage. Given that I write fantasy, this particular example isn’t going to be a problem, but that’s just one to start with.

To use another example, I didn’t learn to swim as a child, and didn’t have the motivation to do so as an adult, as I don’t like crowded areas (public swimming pools are typically very crowded in hot weather) and I don’t like the idea of spending a week or two at the beach as a holiday (but you know that well already if you’ve been reading my hiking posts for a while). This might have a larger impact because it makes it harder to judge the physical difficulty and the endurance/stamina needed for swimming. Especially when bad weather enters the equation.

In both of such cases, I guess that being able to talk with someone close to you with this knowledge would be an easy fix. There are also situations where your own perception and imagination can work to a degree, if it’s a topic that’s not as factual, but something that has a lot of variance.

In this case, I’d mention the fact that I have no experience with romantic relationships, but I know what would make a healthy relationship for me, and I have been in love before (though only one-sided). And I know people in relationships, as well as having read books with all sorts of relationships between them, so that can also be used as external knowledge. Thus, writing relationships wasn’t as challenging as I feared, but I needed to keep in mind that not all of them are the same, and that people are different, and that affects their views and priorities.

It can be more problematic when things go further – I don’t remember anything before the surgery I had when I was 5, and I don’t have any close friendships with anyone with very young children (or grandchildren), so that turned out to be a major blind spot for me when one of the characters in my story has children – even though they’re just a minor appearance, a beta reader let me know that things weren’t working out. It’s one of the minor things I’ve been fixing this autumn, and it only shows how helpful a beta reader can be in a very unexpected way.

To wrap it up, I’d say the key is to be aware of your blind spots and be open to feedback, as well as to be willing to find further information and fact-check. When our imagination goes wild, it’s easy to forget that there might be mundane things that slip our attention, and these things can then be quite jarring for a reader who knows better.

I will welcome your own examples of unexpected blind spots if you have some. And even if not, keep your eyes and your mind open, fellow writers. See you next time.