When writing a story, it is sometimes useful to have a character miss the obvious.<\/p>\n
Of course, if done badly this can sometimes inspire exasperation in the audience, like the cliche of the woman going alone into the basement with a flickering candle to reset the circuit breaker while a serial killer is on the loose. (Bonus cliche points if she is wearing a bikini.)<\/p>\n
The trick is to have the character miss the obvious in a believable way that matches the circumstances. The obvious might be obvious, but it is often obvious only in hindsight.<\/p>\n
For example, here is a story about the time I failed to notice the obvious.<\/p>\n
In the morning I typically get up, use the restroom, and then get dressed to go to the gym. I normally sleep with earplugs, and don’t remove them until I get dressed. While going into the restroom, I will bring my phone or my tablet, depending on which is closer at hand, and play chess puzzles to help my brain wake up.<\/p>\n
Important details: my tablet is an iPad, but my phone is an Android.<\/p>\n
Gradually I began to notice that whenever I went into the bathroom, I could hear a woman talking loudly outside the window. At first I thought nothing of it – the house is fairly close to the sidewalk, so I often hear people talking as they walk past. However, as the days passed, I noticed that I frequently heard exactly the same woman whenever I went to the restroom.<\/p>\n
That started to get on my nerves, so I glanced out the window to see who it was, but I never spotted anyone. For that matter, it didn’t happen every day.<\/p>\n
Then a very strange fact occurred to me – it only happened on days when I had my phone, not my iPad.<\/p>\n
That led me to discover the truth. The chess app had been updated to have the virtual “chess coach” talk to you as you played chess puzzles. My iPad and my phone were on mute, but on Android, apps can sometimes override the system mute setting to make noise. So my phone was talking to me as I did chess puzzles, and because I still had my earplugs in and hadn’t enjoyed my morning coffee yet, I failed to realized that my phone was the source of the voice.<\/p>\n
I had failed to notice the obvious.<\/p>\n
So, once I had turned off the voice on the chess app, this got me to thinking. How can you have characters in a novel fail to notice the obvious in a way that doesn’t annoy the reader?<\/p>\n
I think there are 5 ways you can do it.<\/p>\n
1.) The Character Fails To Notice Something Because Of Reasonable Circumstances.<\/p>\n
Human perception is quite fallible, and more so when we are stressed. It’s common knowledge that if five people witness a crime, there will be five contradictory accounts of what happened based on what the individual witness happened to notice. For example, if you see a car accident in front of you, that will dominate your attention and cause you to miss background details, like the color of a nearby parked car.<\/p>\n
A character can also miss important details when he or she had no good reason to notice them. There’s a reason that in Real Life, many spies try to be as unremarkable as possible. The brain sort of slides over the unremarkable and makes it into park of the background.<\/p>\n
This can also work in mundane settings. For example, if a character is an electrician, he won’t know what accounting software his clients use because he has no reason to know or care, especially if he gets paid on time.<\/p>\n
Stress is also a good way to have a character fail to notice something important. A job loss, illness, a bad day, lack of sleep, and other things might mean the character is not at his or her best and will fail to notice important details.<\/p>\n
2.) Missing Information.<\/p>\n
Insufficient information can cause a character to come to the wrong conclusion.<\/p>\n
Here’s another example from my own life. Earlier this year, I drove a 2000 mile road trip in a few days, and towards the end my right foot and leg started to hurt. The explanation for that, I thought, was obviously that I had driven 2000 miles in four days and put too much unaccustomed strain on my right foot. Once I got home, I would take a few days to rest and it ought to be good.<\/p>\n
Except when I got home, the pain got worse, I developed a fever, and an uncomfortable swelling on the side of my foot. I didn’t have tendonitis or muscle strain, I actually had developed cellulitis for some reason. (If you haven’t heard of cellulitis, it’s a potentially serious infection of the subdermal skin layer.) A trip to the doctor and some antibiotics later, it was better.<\/p>\n
But this is an excellent example of coming to a reasonable but nonetheless wrong conclusion based on the available facts. Considering the amount of driving and walking I had been doing, it was perfectly reasonable to assume that I had strained something in my leg, but that wasn’t what was happening at all. All the facts I knew were correct, but I was missing the key fact (the infection) and so had come to the wrong conclusion.<\/p>\n
This is a technique you can use in fiction quite easily, and it’s common in detective and mystery novels. It’s common for the protagonists to construct a theory, only for it to be proven wrong by a single piece of wrong information.<\/p>\n
3.) All The Information, Wrong Conclusion.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you can have all the correct information, but draw the wrong conclusion from it.<\/p>\n
Here’s another example from my life. As you may know, I have a lot of audiobooks on Spotify, so naturally this means I get a tax form from Spotify. During the run-up to the 2026 tax season, I got an email from Spotify saying that my tax information was wrong and needed to be updated, which was baffling because my tax information had not changed. So I logged into the dashboard, but nothing seemed amiss.<\/p>\n
Then I realized the truth – the email was fake. It had been sent to a different email address than the one I actually use for Spotify. The email was a very clever and well written phishing attempt. (The habit of never clicking on any link in an email and instead going directly to the dashboard in question had served me well here!)<\/p>\n
I had all the facts before me, but I had arrived at the wrong conclusion because it was tax season and so it was reasonable to expect to get an email like that.<\/p>\n
This can be used in fiction in multiple ways. Probably one of the most famous examples is how Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy come to the wrong conclusion about each other’s motives in PRIDE & PREJUDICE. They both have all the facts, but draw the wrong assumptions from them.<\/p>\n
4.) Deliberately Deceived<\/p>\n
A character can also come to the wrong conclusion or fail to notice the obvious if he or she is deliberately deceived.<\/p>\n
The phishing attempt I mentioned earlier was an example of this.<\/p>\n
Having a character be believably deceived (and indeed deceiving the reader as well) is a very useful technique in fiction. Agatha Christie was very good at this in her mystery novels. For example, in THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, THE ABC MURDERS and MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, the characters and the readers are operating under assumptions for most of the book that turn out to be the result of deceptions on the part of some of the characters.<\/p>\n
Granted, using this method can be kind of a rug-pull for the reader. However, there’s nothing wrong with a rug-pull if it’s done well. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a common saying that the obvious is only obvious in hindsight. If you have the characters believing a deception, only to have them realize the truth later, if you do it well it will make the book all the more satisfying if there were subtle clues and foreshadowing about it earlier in the story.<\/p>\n
That kind of rug-pull is a bit like garlic in cooking- highly effective when applied in the proper amount, but you definitely don’t want to overdo it.<\/p>\n
5.) Something More Important Is Happening.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you don’t notice something that would be otherwise obvious because something more urgent is demanding all your attention.<\/p>\n
I think this is one of the biggest reasons people miss the obvious, and it’s very relatable. In my earlier bout with cellulitis, I didn’t realize the obvious truth (I was getting cellulitis) because I was focused on something more important at the time, namely not accidentally driving my car into an overpass embankment for the next thousand miles or so.<\/p>\n
People have varying attention spans, but every individual person has only so many things they can think or worry about at any given time. You can use this to cause your characters to miss things they might have otherwise noticed.<\/p>\n
For example, imagine a village in a fantasy book. There’s an evil wizard living incognito in the village, and he’s summoning tribes of goblins to destroy the village. The protagonist is busy trying to fight off the goblins, so he overlooks the subtle hints that one of his neighbors in an evil wizard because all of his attention is on fighting and he’s tired enough that he’s missing things he might otherwise catch.<\/p>\n
In this example, the problems are linked. The goblins are attacking the village because the evil wizard is summoning them. Having linked problems like that can help drive the plot forward and provide narrative tension.<\/p>\n
Finally, one bonus reason that has developed in the last fifteen years or so.<\/p>\n
6.) Stop Looking At Your Phone In Public.<\/p>\n
In recent years, I have become amazed at how many people allow themselves to be utterly mesmerized by their phones in public. I suppose I’m old enough that it’s a generational thing.<\/p>\n
That said, for all that you hear about crime and disorder on the news in the US, you can tell the US is still by and large a pretty safe country, because people are so comfortable focusing on their phones in public and ignoring their surroundings. Safety experts will tell you that the number #1 thing you can do to keep yourself safe in a public place is to maintain situational awareness, and yet an astonishingly large number of people simply don’t do that in favor of looking at their phones.<\/p>\n
So if you are writing a book set in modern times, a quick and easy way to make sure a character doesn’t notice something is to have him or her staring at a phone. Granted, you can overuse this, but it makes for a very believable technique for making sure a character misses a detail or an event.<\/p>\n
CONCLUSION<\/p>\n
It’s annoying when a character is all-knowing, but it’s equally annoying when a character fails to notice the obvious. Hopefully, these five tips (and one bonus tip) will help to create plausible reasons for characters to overlook things and miss things they would otherwise notice. Used well, this can help you create a compelling story for your book.<\/p>\n
-JM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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