Episode 304: Writing Believable Ways For Characters To Miss The Obvious

In this week’s episode, we share five tips & tricks for writing believeable ways characters can overlook the obvious.

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book #6 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store:

TALONS2026

The coupon code is valid through June 8, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we’ve got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 304 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 22nd, 2026, and it’s our first new episode in two and a half weeks, so that is exciting. Today we’ll be talking about how writers can believably write characters who miss the obvious or fail to notice important facts without exasperating the reader. We also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

So let’s start off with Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book #6 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That is TALONS2026. As always, the links to my Payhip and the coupon code will be available in these show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through June 8th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook for your summer travels, we have got you covered.

Now let’s have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Since I recorded the last episode on May 6th, I’m pleased to report that Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, is done. You can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited since Half Eleven Thief is my Kindle Unlimited series (until it is finished). It’s doing quite well and thank you all for that.

Now that Dragon-Mage is finished, my main project is now Blade of Thieves. And as of this recording, I am 29,000 words into it. I think the rough draft will be 100,000 words or so, give or take. I hope to have this out in June, though it might slip to July (depending on events). My secondary project is Cloak of Frost, which will be the 15th book in the Cloak Mage series. I am 2,000 words into that and I am hoping to have that out towards the end of July, though of course that by slip to August (depending on events). So that is what I am working on right now.

In audiobook news, since I recorded the last episode, we had two audiobooks mostly come out. Cloak of Illusion (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is available at Audible, Apple, Google Play, and all the other audiobook stores. Blade of Wraiths (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is also finished. I believe as of this recording, you can get it at my Payhip store, Google Play, and Kobo (though Audible and the other audiobook stores should be following along before too much longer). As for Dragon-Mage, Leanne Woodward will be recording that in July (if all goes well). So that’s where I’m at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

00:02:38 Main Topic: Perception Failure Mode for Writers

Now let’s go to our main topic, how to write characters who miss the obvious in a way that’s believable and doesn’t exasperate the reader. When writing a story, it’s sometimes useful to have a character miss the obvious. 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 and you get bonus cliche points if she’s wearing a bikini. 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.

For example, here is a story about the time I failed to notice the obvious. 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 usually remove them until I get dressed. While using 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. Now this detail is important. My tablet is an iPad, but my phone is an Android. Gradually, I began to notice that whenever I started the day, I could hear a woman talking very 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 I frequently heard exactly the same woman whenever I went into the bathroom. That started again on my nerves, so I glanced out the window to see who it was, but I never saw anyone nearby. For that matter, it didn’t happen every day.

Then a very strange fact occurred to me. This only happened on days when I had my phone, not my iPad, and this 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. 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 and my brain wasn’t working, I failed to realize that my phone was the source of the voice. I had failed to notice the obvious. So once I had turned off the voice on the chess app, this got me to thinking. My specific example is so implausible and convoluted that it would be impossible to use in a novel since it would seem contrived, but how can you have characters in a novel fail to notice the obvious in a way that doesn’t annoy the reader? I think there are five ways you can do it.

#1: The character fails to notice something because of reasonable circumstances.

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 in question 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 or a nearby house. A character can also miss important details when he or she has no good reason to notice these details. There’s a reason that in real life many spies try to be unremarkable as possible. The brain sort of slides over the unremarkable and makes it into part of the background.

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. Stress is also a good way to have a character fail to notice something important. Job loss, an illness, a bad day, lack of sleep, and other things might mean the character is not operating at his or her best and may fail to notice important details.

#2: Missing information causes you to miss the obvious.

Insufficient information can cause a character to come to the wrong conclusion. Here’s another example from my own life. Earlier this year, I drove a 2,000 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’d driven 2,000 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 should be good.

Except when I got home, the pain got worse. I developed a fever and an uncomfortable swelling on the side of my right foot. I didn’t have tendonitis or muscle strain. I had actually developed cellulitis for some reason. If you haven’t heard of cellulitis, it’s a potentially serious infection of these subdermal skin layer. A trip to the doctor and some antibiotics later, it was better. But this is an excellent example of coming to a reasonable, 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. 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 protagonist to construct a theory about the crime only for it to be proven wrong by a single piece of additional information.

#3: All the information, wrong conclusion.

Sometimes you can have all the correct information, but you draw the wrong conclusion from it. Here’s another example from my life. As you may know, I have a lot of audiobooks available on Spotify, so if you’re a Spotify listener and want to use your audiobook hours, I have some for you. So this naturally means I get a tax form from Spotify every year. 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 and I saw no notifications about it there. Then I realized the truth, the email was fake. It had been sent to a different email address than the one I actually used for Spotify. The email was a very clever and very well written phishing attempt. The habit of never clicking on any link in an email (instead going directly to the dashboard in question) had served me well here. I had all the facts before me, but I arrived at the wrong conclusion because it was tax season and so it was reasonable to expect to get an email like that.

Now this can be used in fiction in multiple ways. Probably the most famous example is how Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy come to the wrong conclusion about each other’s motives in Pride and Prejudice. They both have all the facts but draw wrong assumptions from them.

#4: Deliberately deceived.

A character can also come to the wrong conclusion or fail to notice the obvious or if he or she is deliberately deceived. The phishing attempt I mentioned earlier was an example of this. 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. 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 the deception for reasonable reasons only to have them realize the truth later, if you do it well and make the book all the more satisfying if there were subtle clues and foreshadowing about the truth earlier in the story. That kind of rug pull is a bit like garlic in cooking. You don’t want to overdo it, but it’s highly effective when used in the proper amount.

#5: Something more important is happening.

Sometimes you don’t notice something that would otherwise be obvious because something more urgent is demanding all of your attention and focus. 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 that 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. People have varying attention spans, but every individual person has only so many things they can think about or worry about at any given time. You can use this to cause your characters to miss things they might otherwise have noticed.

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 is an evil wizard because all his attention is on fighting and he’s tired enough that he’s missing things he might otherwise catch. 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 as the character gradually realizes the truth or stumbles across clues pointing to the truth.

So those are five tips and tricks you can use to have your characters believably overlook the obvious, but there’s one bonus reason that has developed in the last 15 years or so and that bonus reason is number six: stop looking at your phone in public. In recent years, I’ve 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. I didn’t have my first smartphone until I was well into my 30s, but it still surprises me every time I see it. That said, for all that you hear about crime and disorder on the news in the United States, you can tell that the US still is by and large and for the most part 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 one 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. So if you are writing a book set in the modern era, a quick and easy way to make sure a character doesn’t notice something is to have him or her looking at [his or] her phone. Granted, you can overuse this, but this makes for a very believable technique for making sure that a character misses a detail or an event.

Conclusion

It’s annoying when a character is all-knowing, but it’s equally annoying when a character fails to notice the obvious because it’s convenient for the writer. Hopefully these five tips and one bonus tip will help to create plausible reasons for characters to overlook things and miss things they would [have] otherwise noticed. Used well, this can help you create a compelling story for your book.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcript [transcripts are available for episodes beyond Episode 228]. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on our podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we’ll see you all next week.