Why Three Perspectives Make a Better Book

How a morning in Australia changed the course of my novel

Good morning from the wilderness of the Yarra River, north of Melbourne, Australia. As you can see from the video, I don’t do the Aussie inflections that well—as my Australian family is happy to tell me.

We flew in from Colorado a few days after I got home from Oregon. Friends and family to see. An event on the calendar. Some business to attend to. But none of that is what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about perspective. And how changing yours can change your creative work.

I’m sitting on a bench deep inside a huge park. The sun is just starting to break through the trees. My Kindle is next to me. My camera gear is in my bag. And my novel is in front of me in three different forms.

Here’s what I mean.

When revising The Boy Who Started Fires, I don’t just read it. I read it three ways, and each one showed me something the others missed.

First, on my computer screen. This is where most of the work happens. It’s where I write, where I revise, where I move commas around for hours. But after enough time in that view, I stop seeing what’s actually on the page.

Second, on my Kindle. I load the manuscript and let the Kindle read it aloud to me at twice the speed while I follow along on the screen. Something about hearing the words while watching them scroll catches mistakes my eyes alone would never find. Rhythms that don’t land. Pacing issues. Repeated words. Sentences that work silently but collapse when spoken.

Third, in print. I print the whole thing out and mark it up by hand. There’s something about ink on paper that makes the book feel like a book. I notice issues I had missed on screen. I see paragraphs that need to breathe.

Then I integrate everything. And then I repeat the process.

Last night, doing exactly this, I found something significant that’s going to make The Boy Who Started Fires measurably better. And I never would have caught it simply looking at the same view I’d been staring at for weeks.

This week’s tip: Read or look at your creative work through more than one lens.

This is from a writing perspective, but it can, in some way, be applied to any type of creative work.

Whatever you’re writing, print it. Have your phone or your Kindle read it aloud while you follow along. Get it off the screen where you drafted it. Your brain treats each format differently, and the format you drafted in is the one that hides problems best.

You’ll find things you’ve walked past a hundred times.

There’s a second benefit, too. It’s more fun. There’s something genuinely freeing about sitting in a park on the other side of the world and hearing your own pages read back to you. The work stops feeling like a chore and more like a discovery.

Which is how it should feel.

Thanks for tuning in.

Early morning along the Yarra, many kilometers north of Melbourne.