The Reader Doesn't Know What the Writer Knows

Plus, a book review and book excerpt!

Sometime ago, I started writing the eighth story in my GHOST Group series. This series is about a group of kids who create a ghosthunting club to investigate the many hauntings in their haunted town. Unfortunately, I struggled writing this story, and after I picked it up again just recently to tackle yet again and hopefully finish writing it, I soon learned why.

One of the things I wrote in my book 365 Tips for Writers is that the reader doesn’t know what the writer knows. While I was trying to make this tip apply to both the writer of fiction and nonfiction, this tip heavily applies to writing fiction. The writer may know what a character is seeing, thinking, smelling, hearing, doing, tasting and feeling, but unless that’s included in the story, the reader won’t know this.

And I discovered, as I reviewed what I’d written for this story, that these elements were missing all over the place. There was A LOT the reader would not be aware of and maybe even confused by.

I knew what a character saw when she looked at her drawing and decided it was perfect, but the reader didn’t.

I knew what another character saw and smelled when he entered a freshly cleaned kitchen, but the reader didn’t.

Why? Because these details were missing from the story!

As I realized this mistake, I was reminded of a couple of other stories I once started reading, and why this very thing made me stop reading them.

In one story, there were two characters talking. The writer, bless their heart, decided to stop using dialogue tags, leaving readers in the dark on who was speaking. Normally, readers notice the last person talking and just assume the next string of dialogue was coming from the other person talking. That’s how I went with it to get through that scene. But it was when, surprise! A THIRD character entered the conversation and the writer STILL did not use dialogue tags that I lost interest in reading any more of that story. I could not figure out who was talking! (And, yes, it was nothing but dialogue, without anyone doing anything, feeling anything, thinking anything or seeing anything.)

In the other story, a ghostly little girl reveals to her father her hidden remains buried in the basement. The father suddenly runs up to the bedroom where his wife is sleeping, awakens her, and yells accusations at her that she had killed their daughter. The wife’s first words? “I told you I didn’t want any children!”

That was where the writer lost me. A NORMAL person would want to know why her husband woke her up screaming these accusations at her. And if she was guilty, she would likely deny it at first. Even if her husband had the remains to prove he’d found what was left of a person, the guilty party could still say there is no way to prove it was the remains of their previously missing child. She would deny it to buy herself some time.

But instead of readers being made aware of these thoughts or feelings (and there are lots more that would come into play here), the wife instead responded with the claim that she had never wanted children anyway, thereby incriminating herself.

While it’s true that writers need to keep certain things from the reader in order to hold interest, failing to share what a character is thinking, seeing, feeling, tasting, hearing and doing should not be one of them. Even if the character is trying to keep a weapon hidden or feeling uneasy that their cover might be blown, there are certain ways you can still write about these things without dropping the ball on your character’s guilt or identity.

When I’m reading a story, I want to be COMPLETELY in the story. I want to see what the characters see. I want to know and feel what the characters know and feel. This helps me to stay in a story and it will hold my interest a lot better than some character immediately confessing to a murder that we knew nothing about in the first place.

What’s New This Week

I had an article published in the January 3, 2025 issue of FundsforWriters: “How Disabled Writers Can Turn a Disability into an Ability to Earn Money from Their Writing” Check it out here.

Book Updates

My dinosaur children’s book was accepted for publication! Yay! It will be published sometime this year by Baynam Books Press (formerly Unveiling Dreams).

Work continues on the novels I started writing last year. The erotic horror novel is my main focus at this time. I am also writing a new horror poetry book.

As for revision, I am revising both the YA horror novel as well as the GHOST Group books. I’m hoping to get them all submitted soon!

And please note that this is the LAST MONTH we are accepting short stories for the “first time living on your own” anthology! The deadline is January 31! Check out this graphic for more info:

Book Reviews

My review of Christmas Eve Carnage by John Lynch is on Amazon.

What’s New at SPARREW?

Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares a new take on an old grammar maxim in her Tricky Edits column that was published in the December issue of the SPARREW Newsletter!

Check it out here.

This Week’s Book Promo

Here is an excerpt from the very first GHOST Group story, “The Ghost of Sarah Travers.”

Interested in learning more about this book? Go here.

The GHOST Group One

“The Ghost of Sarah Travers”

Copyright © 2013 by Dawn Colclasure

“Look! That looks like a ghost, doesn’t it?”

Cassie Carlton studied the picture, chewing a bite of her tuna fish salad sandwich. Her friend Jenny seemed to have lost interest in eating her lunch, leaving her blue lunchbox unopened on the table. She seemed more interested in a picture she held up in front of Cassie now, a picture she’d brought from home. A picture that supposedly had a ghost in it, so of course that was what

had Jenny’s full attention right now, instead of food. Anything ghost always had Jenny’s full attention.

Cassie was used to it. She and Jenny had been friends since kindergarten, and for as long as she’d known her, Jenny had an interest in ghosts that went – well, a little overboard when it came to the definition of interest. It was more like an obsession. Anything ghost—movies, TV shows, books, websites, T-shirts, and

all that—always caught Jenny’s eyes and ears. So did the stuff in the secret file cabinet her mom had at work, where she kept files from all of her ghost-hunting investigations. For a brief moment, Cassie started to wonder if those files were in alphabetical order. The group had done so many paranormal investigations in

Sarah Town that there had to be hundreds of files about each one. Files that, if arranged correctly and in order, would be easier to manage.

One such investigation the group had done resulted in some pretty solid evidence of paranormal activity. There were voices captured on recordings and videos of shadows moving around. They’d even gotten a few pictures with images that appeared to be ghostly. Jenny now held up one such picture for Cassie to

examine.

She studied the picture. The spot Jenny pointed at might have looked like what many people think is a ghost in a picture, except it looked more like a smudge. You couldn’t even see anything resembling the ghost of a person in that smudgy circle in the photo. There weren’t any arms, legs or even a head anywhere in all that mess.

She shrugged, shaking her head. “It doesn’t prove anything,” she said.

Jenny slumped, frowning. “It proves that there is energy,” she said. “It proves something. One time, my mom had something like this in another one of her pictures, and when she zoomed in on it on her computer, she saw a man’s face!”

Thanks for reading! See you next weekend.