Have you ever had a fight with a friend or partner where at one point one of you said, “Well, obviously I meant this when I said that!”?
We all long to be understood, but communication goes awry all the time. It’s frustrating when someone doesn’t know what we mean, but it’s even more frustrating when someone expects us to read their minds.
At least in person you can talk things through. In writing, it’s between the reader and the words.
Writers make the Mind Reading Fallacy when they omit key information, details, imagery, or anything else pertinent to their prose that the reader needs to know. As the name implies, you basically require the reader to read your mind in order to follow what you’re saying.
This is a problem for obvious reasons. First, it introduces a high probability of error which, as described above, you aren’t there to correct.
Second, it causes the reader to lose trust in your authority and competence. They feel like you’re not really in control of your prose. You’re asking the reader to go out on a limb to fill in relevant detail, and that makes them feel like you’re not guiding them so much as saying “Trust me” and then pulling a hood over their head.
What Causes the Mind Reading Fallacy?
By “mind reading,” I mean something like requiring implausible or overly large inferences from your reader. Instead of feeling like they have been given a clue to meaning in your work, they feel like there’s a hole, and instead of enjoying the process of pulling together clues, they are anxiously jumping over the holes and guessing at what was supposed to be there.
It’s a tricky situation, because the opposite, not trusting your reader, is also a problem. Fortunately, you can limit your liability if you understand how this problem emerges.
Writing Too Quickly
The simplest and “most innocent” cause of the mind reading fallacy is writing too quickly. You have a scene or idea in your head that you’re eager to get down on the page, and you don’t realize that you’re not writing as clearly or fully as you’re thinking.
Our thoughts bounce around from idea to idea like gas particles, and they accrue meaning through both reason and association. It’s often those associations that provide a context or background that your reader needs.
Example 1: Writing Too Quickly
I once had a life coach who started his book with something like:
I sat in a coffee shop with my life in turmoil. My world was spinning around me. I didn’t understand how I had gotten here, how my best intentions and my efforts at integrity had led me to such a disaster.
I felt like I was at a crossroad, but I couldn’t see the destination of either choice. It was like I was standing at a cliff’s edge with a blindfold on. I knew my next step would either put me on solid ground or send me tumbling to my doom, but I couldn’t see where I was putting my foot.
Then a friend sat down, and I was able to unburden myself to him. It was a mercy to let it all out, to have someone hear my story and not abandon me to my fate.
This is an author who feels this moment in his head very clearly, but he’s in such a hurry to get to the life lessons he wants to teach that he’s not looking back to make sure he’s taking us there naturally.
If we have any empathy at all, we can feel some drama, sure. But we don’t really know what’s going on. Instead of entering fully into his situation, we’re scanning for clues about what the situation is. What tension the scene has comes from telling rather than showing. Without the concrete details, all those metaphors feel vague and, unfortunately, clichéd.
Example 1 Revised
Compare that with this:
I sat in a coffee shop letting my coffee grow cold. Every time I tried to take a sip, my hand shook so much it began to spill. Last night in bed my wife had reached over to kiss me and had that little twinkle in her eye, but suddenly I felt the old panic, the old dirtiness. I suddenly thought of him and I wanted to hide. I turned away from her, as I had so many times before. She fell asleep feeling unwanted; I fell asleep feeling unworthy.
For 40 years I had struggled to create a life that had nothing to do with my unthinkable past, and for 40 years I was always the worst part of my own life. Anything good I had I would turn against, dare it to abandon me and prove my worst fears about myself true.
I don’t know what made this day so much different. It was like the part of me plugging holes in the dam of my spirit had finally gotten too exhausted to keep going, and now the dam was threatening to break.
I could feel myself at a crossroad. In one direction, a past I hadn’t dealt with and the wake of destruction I had left as a consequence. In the other, vulnerability, exposure, the chance the people I loved most would turn from me in horror and I’d be alone again.
That’s when my friend sat down, and after some small talk, he asked, “Hey, how are you doing?” and I could tell he really wanted to know. That was the other piece. I was tired of holding back the flood, but I also had so much love in my life that I finally felt safe letting someone in.
Note how the revision doesn’t stop to tell you everything you need to know. There’s time to do that later. But it gives you enough to enter the moment and start to feel its significance. It’s a little longer in the sample, but in reality it gathers up substance from later in the same section, so it’s not really much longer. More importantly, the metaphors become more specific and forceful, and in fact we don’t need as many as we started with anymore.
Conversational Style
Another version of this same idea is writing conversationally. We do this when we want to appear friendly, approachable, fun, etc. However, in conversation we often leave things out because they don’t appear important to us even if they’re important to the other person. Or we imply things that the other may or may not be able to infer.
The result, unfortunately, can be vague storytelling or jumping around logically or even just unclear sentences.
Think back to that coffee with your friend. If they’re a good friend, chances are you share a high degree of context such that you can use certain terms or make certain allusions and that friend will know exactly what you mean.
Yet, it’s still true that you will both sometimes misunderstand one another. You’ll ask a clarifying question, and your friend will fill in some of the context to help you understand.
Context, here, means the electron-cloud of ideas, feelings, experiences, cultural references, etc. that encircles a single statement or word. In conversation, we can shift context constantly, and we say we’re “tracking” with the other person. In writing, you can’t assume the reader will track with you.
Getting Too Clever For Your Own Good
Another common cause of the mind reading fallacy is trying to be subtle or coy and not quite hitting the mark. The reader knows you’re trying to imply something, but there’s just not enough information to understand what that is.
I see this most often when a fiction author is trying to imitate a hard-boiled voice such as Dashiell Hammett’s or Raymond Chandler’s. Those guys are great at what they do, so it’s no surprise they inspire imitators.
Here’s a more or less random passage from Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Marlowe has been running around town getting absolutely nowhere in his investigation:
I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string. …
I called George Peters…. He wasn’t in. I left a phony name and a right telephone number. An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach. I was a grain of sand on the desert of oblivion. I was a two-gun cowpoke fresh out of bullets.
Chandler is really indulging himself here, but he’s still effective. The cockroach image comes right from Marlowe’s shoddy apartment. The cowpoke is his rural counterpart. Only the desert image feels entirely unmotivated or extra.
Even Hammett and Chandler are sometimes hard to get, either because the metaphor doesn’t quite land or because the slang is so old we simply don’t understand it.
What the Mind Reading Fallacy is Not
I can hear the English majors and other nonconformists saying, “But what if you want the reader to distrust you? What if it’s part of the concept?”
We have to distinguish between literary form and literary ability. Literary studies has a concept called the unreliable narrator, a voice that at some point inspires the reader’s distrust. In order to have a successful unreliable narrator, however, you have to have a competent and reliable author.
IOW, an author needs to demonstrate literary ability to pull off introducing distrust into the literary form of their manuscript. We have to believe that the author wants us to read against the grain of the narrator, as it were. We don’t want to feel like the author doesn’t have a handle on what’s going on. Readers will pick up on an author who hides their inability to fully realize their vision behind an unreliable narrator. And they won’t like it one bit.
This is also not about being “subtle.” Subtlety involves hints, foreshadowing, understatement, and circumlocution. It’s another technique that requires skill and is not the same as being vague. Again, the difference is that being vague makes the reader think you aren’t in control, while being subtle gives the reader the pleasure of reading between the lines and tracing the clues you’re leaving.
Preventing and Fixing Mind Reading
Listen carefully to the reporters on This American Life. Their subjects often respond to a question with a general answer, so you’ll hear them ask follow-up questions that dig for more specific detail, including elements of story, sensory detail, and for them to straight up say what they mean rather than leaving any meaning unclear.
Without that follow up, you would be left filling in a lot of the story for yourself. You might produce a satisfying story that way, but you couldn’t say you were confident it was the story the reporter was trying to tell.
Ask, “What does the reader need to know?”
To fix this problem of requiring your audience to read your mind, you need to get out of your head and into theirs. Instead of simply writing what makes sense to you, think about what your reader needs to know and then figure out how to communicate that.
Think of yourself as the narrator as a guide through your book. I chose the feature image of people riding through a desert because in some ways a book is a desert of words. Of course we can make out some sense — the horizon, sand dunes, mountains, valleys, an oasis, etc. — but without a guide to take us through, we can’t be faulted if we feel a bit lost.
In nonfiction, the question is often, “What does the reader need to know next?” Nonfiction tends to be more linear, so you can go one step at a time.
Sometimes that step is actually a step backward, like backing up in time or zooming out of a subject to fill in some details. Sometimes it is signaling that you’re going to address a question later so that the reader doesn’t get distracted by it for the time being.
It may be a definition, an example, a summary. You get the idea.
In fiction, there’s a follow up question. You put a character in a situation and ask, “What does the reader need to know?” You realize there are background details, setting details, narrative information pertaining to your theme, etc. that all come to bear upon this moment. It feels like an awfully long list of things the reader needs to know.
Part of the power and pleasure of fiction is how we can communicate information through story elements rather than just saying it. Thus, the follow up question is, “How do I show my reader this?”
You might see another fiction rule hiding in there: Show, don’t tell. The trick is how to communicate all that detail through character, setting, plot, action, and, yes, dialogue. Some information may need to come out in that scene. Some may need to be dribbled out in earlier scenes. Some might be better saved for later but should be raised as a question at this stage.
Write For Your Reader
The point is that you need to think about what your reader does and does not know. You may think it goes without saying, but the reader doesn’t know what you know. This is actually a somewhat sophisticated writing skill to develop. You have to imagine someone who doesn’t know something you know, which is a little like saying “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” You also have to imagine what interpretive steps a reader would take to learn the information you want them to have or to have the experience you want them to have.
Photo by Y K on Unsplash
