Imagine a tree. What kind of tree is it? Is it summer or winter? What's the background like? Is it day or night? Can you change the color of the tree? Change the time of day, the background, the season? Can you put birds in the tree?
Okay, now that you've completed that... From a Scale of 0 to 10, how detailed and easily changeable were the mental images? 0 is absolutely nothing, no image at all, and 10 is as vivid as if the tree was right in front of you.
Now, for those of you like me who answered zero... You have aphantasia. Congrats! Aphantasia is basically the inability to see things in your mind, you just see a blank space up there no matter you do. 1 to 10, you have varying levels of inner sight, and good for you! Don't take it for granted!
So now that you know if you have aphantasia or not, how does that have anything to do with writing? Well, it's mostly just a useful thing to note, but sometimes it can actually suck. So see below for the list of places it affects my writing (and reading!)
1. Worldbuilding
Yep, worldbuilding. I have a pretty good dislike for describing surroundings, or worse, creating a fantasy world. I can't see any of this in my head, and I don't see any of it in my head when I read either, so for me describing or creating a world is useless. However, most people do actually see that world in their mind... So someone's gotta tell them what it looks like.
My remedy for this has two pieces... One, you find pictures of the setting or even have the setting be your own town. Something you can physically see for yourself and describe from the picture. This is much easier than making something up and hoping it's consistent every time I mention something.
Second and lastly, when I'm working on my first draft, I write how I naturally write. Everything is in the character's heads, all about their thoughts and emotions, and small snippets of out in the world. (Personally, I'd love a book like that, because again... I connect to these people emotionally, I enter their mental world, not the outer one. So if someone cut all the scenery and put more emphasis on the people, I'd love that book to the ends of the earth! But everyone's not me, so...) Then, number one on my list of editing is to go in and add more world details. What do people look like, what does this prison look like, what do the woods look like? And then I describe those pictures more deeply and have someone read it to make sure I'm doing it right.
2. Le Crie
That's a random title thing up there... But yes, true. I can't see my precious characters.
A while ago I heard someone say something along the lines of, "I'm never going to watch The Hunger Games movies because it'd ruin my mental image of the characters!" I honestly thought they were either crazy or overly dramatic... What mental image? I've read hundreds of books, and have never once seen a "mental image". If you gave me a picture of Katniss Everdeen with Bella Swan and no hints like a bow and arrow, there's no way I'd be able to tell them apart! Now that I know that seeing characters is a very real thing, just not for me, that random title comes into play. I can't see Jamie or Sabrina either and have no idea what they look like, aside from the pictures on their character pages. Thing is, those pictures aren't perfect, and I don't know what exactly is wrong with them. But those aren't the real Jamie and Sabrina, that's all I know... And I can't draw them or have someone else draw them, because there's no image and I have no idea how to describe them aside from the basics...
What I've learned from this, anyways, is that I have to find a picture and build a character off the picture. Not build a character and try to find a person who looks similar enough. And then with reading, you just hope there's a picture on the cover or a movie adaption or forget the idea of actually seeing them.
3. Fight Scenes
These suck... Because they're so suspenseful and action-packed, holding so much of the future of the story, and I can't visualize them. It's very difficult to describe the moves and get the pacing right when I feel like I'm watching a movie with the sound on and my eyes closed. Like, someone got hit, but who? How? Where? What's happening now?? There are too many "in a blur" "quicker than I could see" etc. in every fight/action scene because it happens so fast and I can't see it. Yes, it's very frustrating, but there is a solution!
That solution is basically finding characters in a book or movie that have similar powers and kind of copying the scene. What I do is copy the scene, add a few changes: maybe some dialogue, brief description, change up the order, get someone stabbed in a different place, etc. But just taking the basic essence of an already successful fight and sticking your characters in is actually very efficient. I don't know if it's plagiarism or not... But if you change it enough you should be fine.
4. In Reading - Fantasy and Large Casts
In writing, I can find ways around this. Research, extensive editing, and having someone else read it. In reading, however, I'm just stuck. (Beware: Large rant ahead. Only read if you want to, for some reason! Thanks!)
There are certain books, such as Lord of The Rings, that everyone loves and I just don't get it. Up until now, I hadn't given why much thought, but now I know. There are so many places, inhuman creatures, and people in general that I get lost in the journey. My mind gets bored of hearing descriptions of places and people that I can't see, and by the time I get all the details of one place straight, they've moved onto another! (To make this clearer, I don't see things in my mind, but I memorize facts. The room is large, doors are here and here, second floor, blank walls, etc. And I like to feel I know the surroundings so I'm not left in the middle of a fight wondering if that doorway has always been there or if it was a convenient escape. So I can innerly yell at their stupidity of missing that door if they don't use it.) And then with so many characters, again, I connect emotionally with them and remember them based on personality and all. When you have a lot of characters mainly distinguishable by the fact that one's an elf and one's a human, but they act similarly and don't give me anything to connect with, they just blur together and I hate that.
So I don't like fantasy because so much is based on the unique looks of the character's and world, there are new rules, and I can't see any of it. It's much simpler to read about a bunch of humans in an average town so I can feel I already have a sense of how the world works/looks, and move on with the story instead of getting caught up in the details.
This was a very interesting look into Aphantasia. I didn’t know anything about it before this(not that I’m claiming to be an expert after just reading your piece, haha). It’s really hard to imagine not being able to visualize things like that. Like if someone has synesthesia tried to imagine someone who didn’t, or vice versa. The closest I could come to understanding it would be that in one book series I read, the point of view is sometimes from a blind character, and I kind of cease imagining things visually. The writing tips could be applied even for people who don’t have Aphantasia, so thanks for that as well.
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