To “have eyes in the back of one’s head” is an idiom meaning to be particularly observant or intuitive.
It’s also oddly appropriate that we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads. As organisms, humans are born with blind spots. Our individual perspectives, identities, and belief systems are incomplete. We need one another to have a full picture of the world we inhabit.
I see this reality all the time in my writing class. We are marvelous, insightful creatures when handing out feedback and advice to strangers, never mind the people we know deeply. To our friends and loved ones, we are often painfully perceptive.
Yet we can’t see that we misspelled the word “critique” on our own rough draft. We can’t spot the grammatical mistake we make repeatedly. We are too close to our own creations.
I know how wildly my perspective on my own work shifts. These words unfolding under my fingers look and sound good to me now, but will read unfinished and even terrible in my same eyes by the time the sun sets. In fact, you are not reading what I initially wrote, but the result of many revisions since that first draft.
I have a group of readers and a system of revisions for important pieces of writing. I have readers who know how to grasp the whole of a piece and they receive early drafts. They can tell me if I should bother to continue on this road. I also have readers who can’t see beyond a typo who only get a final draft for proofing.
That we need others is a hard lesson to teach students who want to believe in self-sufficiency, and pursuing feedback isn’t just about pages. There are photo editors, and film editors, critics and curators helping authors filter their ideas. There are BFFs who know the important decisions we have to make in our lives and our inability to make those without counsel too.
It’s not just lawyers; a person who decides to do anything alone “has a fool for a client.”
The 180° view is such an apt character trait because no matter where humans stand, we miss half the picture. The strongest of us suffer for lack of vulnerability. The most open need the more cautious. Every characteristic needs its balance or we would come to ruin.
The more I teach, the more I realize my lessons—at least my writing lessons—are about balance, to address the variety of obstructed views in my students. Some need to learn restraint, while others need to let go of their restraint.
This belief in feedback and balance is complicated by another observation I’ve made as a writing teacher: We all see ourselves as complex and nuanced individuals, while we stereotype and simplify those around us in order to function. It seems wrong that the cursory, outside view should have better insight than the direct experience, but it does.
The genre of travel writing is yet another example. Writers write better in foreign lands. Take any keen-eyed immigrant from a faraway country and drop that person into your small neighborhood, neighbors, and culture, and they will instantly have an understanding and assessment that you and yours cannot.
Outsiders see the whole like no one else. Their sense of awareness is heightened by their unfamiliarity. That’s why all good writing is the writing of a tourist to an extent. The great writers work to distance themselves from their time and place and observe without local bias.
It’s possible to scrutinize and edit your own work over time. The distance of a few days or weeks turns us from writers to readers, from participants to spectators. Yet we work so often for a deadline, time is unavailable, so we need that second pair of eyes.
We need one another. It’s the most obvious, saccharine, greeting card. It is both frightening and heartening, ironic and poetic.
If you surround yourself with readers you trust, who can evaluate your efforts like outsiders, and to whom you can return the favor, the faster all of you will achieve the things you set out to do.