That time a middle schooler corrected my plot hole at a library reading

I was reading a chapter from my fantasy novel at the public library in Cleveland, and this 12 year old raised her hand and said my magic system made no sense because the rules kept changing. She was right, I had three different explanations across five pages, and I had to stand there and admit she caught something my editor missed. Anyone else have a random stranger call out a flaw in your writing that you totally missed?

3 comments

3 Comments

noahwood1d ago

Has anyone thought about how the kid probably actually helped the author more than just fixing that one scene... because now she knows her next book needs clearer rules from the start? And @brian_hart makes a good point about editors vs researchers, but I bet the real issue is that authors get so deep in their own world they stop seeing the obvious gaps... like when you stare at a word too long and it stops looking real. That middle schooler had fresh eyes and zero ego about speaking up.

angela7281d ago

Ugh I heard this author on a podcast once who said she got a whole university English department to review her novel and then a teenager on Tumblr pointed out her timeline was off by like 400 years. Editors really do miss stuff sometimes.

brian_hart1d ago

Oh man, that story is wild but I gotta push back a little on the "editors miss stuff" part. In my experience, the difference between a university English department and a random Tumblr teenager is huge. English professors are great at literary themes and character arcs, but they're not always fact-checking timelines or specific historical details. That's more of a copy editor or researcher job. And honestly, a teenager who's super into a specific historical period will catch stuff a generalist editor would never notice. So yeah, the author probably got great feedback on her writing from those professors, but the timeline thing is just a different kind of error that slipped through the cracks.