Aphantasia: Writing Fiction With No ‘Mind’s Eye’
By Guest | August 19, 2022 |
Please welcome longtime WU community member Marcie Geffner to the blog today. There has been a lot of buzz lately about readers who don’t “visualize” the stories they’re reading. Marcie came to us wondering if we’d like to see an exploration of the issue from a writer’s perspective. How could we say anything but yes? From her bio:
Marcie Geffner is a work-in-progress novelist, freelance writer and book reviewer. Her stories about real estate and banking have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report, among others. Her book reviews have been appeared in Publishers Weekly (nonfiction) and Kirkus (fiction). She earned a bachelor’s degree in English with high honors at UCLA and an MBA at Pepperdine University. Originally from Los Angeles, she currently lives in Ventura, California.
Read on for an in-depth ‘look’ at a fascinating subject. Thanks, Marcie!
Aphantasia: Writing Fiction With No ‘Mind’s Eye’
I’d been writing fiction for more than a decade before I encountered the term “aphantasia,” which describes a rare inability to see mental images in the mind’s eye.
I’d been instructed many times to visualize an image to meditate, relax, remember or write, but when I tried, I saw nothing. Over time, I assumed that “visualize” and “mind’s eye” were figures of speech. I didn’t know other people could literally generate images in their minds without a real-life image to look at.
Media reports suggest aphantasia affects about 2% of the population, or one of every fifty people. The condition may be genetic or the result of trauma. By their own reports, my parents see mental images; my sibling doesn’t.
People with aphantasia learn to substitute other mental processes to work around the lack of mental images to some extent. Instructed to “picture a lemon,” I can think of the color yellow and the classic shape of a lemon. Asked to “picture the letters of the alphabet,” I can sketch them in my mind’s eye, in monochrome, up to about the letter “h,” then I get a vicious headache and have to stop.
Aphantasia may be complete or partial, on a spectrum. The Aphantasia Network offers information and a self-assessment questionnaire.
As a fiction writer, my ignorance of aphantasia proved problematic and frustrating.
Conversations with my writing instructors typically went like this:
Me: I’m struggling with writing descriptions.
Instructor: Picture the scene in your mind. Write what you see.
Me: Huh?
Instructor: Just picture it.
Me: …?
So, how have I worked around aphantasia to write fiction?
Whenever possible, I visit my settings in real life and write notes about what I observe.
In writing my Fantasy novel, I stuck with Contemporary Fantasy — our world, our time — rather than write about an imagined world. Setting the story where I live, in Ventura, California, gave me plenty of places to see in real life. I scheduled time to visit my settings during the same season and at the same time of day as my characters.
When I’m unable to visit a setting, I rely on library books with pictures, Google Images, Google Earth, YouTube videos and other visual online resources as references to write descriptions. To create the fictional island in my novel, I relied in part on a U.S. Park Service video, I developed these strategies without knowing about aphantasia or having any idea why descriptions proved so difficult for me to write.
Craft books were helpful to some extent. One that stands out for me is “Description & Setting” by Ron Rozelle.
A presentation by Donald Maass at WU’s UnCon in 2019 taught me that “there’s no setting without the point-of-view character.” A light-bulb moment. I ask myself, “How does my point-of-view character see this setting?” And then I write the answer. But there’s no mental image of the answer in my mind.
Perhaps because of my Aphantasia, I have super-human abilities to detect sounds and smells that other people don’t notice. I’ve relied on my extra-sensitive senses to supplement my weaker ability to create visual descriptions.
All writers face challenges. Writing descriptions remains one of mine.
How important is your “mind’s eye” to your fiction writing? How would you write fictional descriptions if your “mind’s eye” went blind?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
Hi Marcie, when we previously talked about this, I thought I understood, but this explanation is so clear and definitive, and thus I note & stress that you have found power in this quirk that is part of you. I refuse to call it a disability. I also never learned about it in nursing school. But yes, we are all unique. And what allows us to view the world from a different angle or perspective can become a gift, never a burden. My eye surgery on my left eye at the age of five, certainly affected me at an early age. WHY? Because I can remember every aspect of it, all five days in the hospital blind, lying in bed (they covered BOTH my eyes). Later in my life, this led me to research memory in children, to write about it. I also lost my father at the age of three. Many of us would not realize that the ability to form memories does not start until around that age. All of this is to praise each of our uniqueness and “view” of the world. Thanks my friend, Beth
Beth!
Thanks for this. I cannot imagine being totally without sight for five days. That must have been a very memorable and emotional experience. As you say, we all have unique ways of seeing the world.
MG
My mind’s eye is very important to me – both with my reading and my writing. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to write without it!
Hi Davida,
It’s fascinating how you can’t imagine writing without something that I can’t imagine writing *with*. All those pictures in one’s head! So distracting! When I learned about this, I wondered: is there an off button?
Thanks for commenting.
MG
An off button, lol!
I was once told by an old-pro seventh grade teacher that she had noticed a weakening of the mind’s eye in her students over the years. When she questioned them about their mental images of the fictions they were reading, more and more students would come up blank. She attributed the loss of this faculty to the effortless absorption of TV images, removing the mind’s need to visualize, in contrast to earlier times when the young brain was forced to supply mental images while reading in order not to go without.
This is a fascinating idea. Thanks for sharing, Anna.
Anna,
I agree with Therese. This is fascinating! I wonder, then, whether it’s to some degree generational with older generations having watched a lot less TV than younger generations.
Thanks for this.
MG
Thanks for this–I don’t think I’d ever learned about aphantasia before. Your work-arounds seem like great ideas…I don’t have trouble picturing some things, but my descriptive skills are still underdeveloped, so being there at the right time of day, etc. seems like it could really help. You’ve given me much to think about!
i recall you reporting about visits to locations, now i know there was a method to that. my first stab at fiction was historical fiction. i like to visit places for accuracy and then imagine how my story would fit into that. i think all fiction is fantasy.
Alan!
Thanks for this.
I agree: all fiction is fantasy, just to a greater or lesser degree.
MG
Mike! Thanks for checking out my column. I’m so glad it interested you. You’re right: seeing something in one’s “mind’s eye” and being able to describe it in words are two different skills. One isn’t dependent on the other. MG
I’m wondering if Ernest Hemingway might have had undiagnosed aphantasia. He wrote his fiction mostly from his experiences in situ, much like you with the Ventura area. Some say his work on the Spanish Civil war and African safari was mostly autobiographical, Obviously, whatever it was didn’t keep him from greatness. Doesn’t seem to hold you back either, Marcie.
As a side, I have fond youthful memories of Ventura, Anacapa Junior High, Ojai, Sespe Creek, etc. Indeed, the area is rich with contrasting venues. You’ll do well right there.
Dan,
Thanks for this.
What an interesting idea about Hemingway. Who knows? Maybe!
I didn’t grow up in Ventura, but I imagine it would be wonderful to be a child here. I can walk to Anacapa Junior High in about 15 minutes. : )
MG
I thought everyone saw in their mind’s eye what they were writing, but then again, until my late wife informed me otherwise, I thought everyone’s mind was always thinking up stories. I didn’t know there were people who weren’t always concocting stories in their heads and seeing their characters involved in all the various aspects of the story. I just didn’t know there was a word for the “seeing” part of it. Thanks for helping to enlighten me.
Daniel,
Thanks for this. I’ve wondered about that story-telling function as well. Wouldn’t life be dull if we weren’t making up stories in our heads all the time? Then again, sometimes (3 am! story idea!), it can get annoying, too.
MG
I’m a visual writer, but I still need to reference real images to write about what they look like. So I frequently do as you do, google and youtube, to make my descriptions as accurate as possible. Writing action scenes, I don’t need to see them; those I can visualize fairly well without seeing them actually play out in front of me.
Thank you for explaining this for us. I had no idea there was such a thing. Good on you for managing an effective work around in your own writing.
Karen,
Thanks for this. I have no ability at all to visualize an action scene in my head. Writing something like that, I’d have to resort to pen-and-paper. Or more like pencil-and-paper. With an eraser. And many, many sheets of paper.
I like knowing we all think differently. We can write to our strengths and work around our weaknesses.
MG
I will go further: Aphantasia is an advantage. It obviates the idea that there is an objective reality that the writer’s job is to accurately render. It shows that pure description, as such, is unnecessary.
Rather, it allows the reality of a story to be entirely subjective, which in fact our waking reality is too. It pushes forward not what a character sees through eyes (and receives through other senses) but what a character experiences.
The giddy mood of a room is just as tangible as a blue vase on a table, and frankly does more to heighten the story dream state than all the sensory details one can catalogue. Don’t worry about Aphantasia. It sends one’s writing in a good direction.
Don!
Thanks for this. It’s encouraging to know that my quirky mind isn’t a disadvantage.
In the comments on your Aug., 3, 2022, column, “Writing Elusive Inner Moments,” you mentioned Yoon Ha Lee as a writer with aphantasia. I have his NINEFOX GAMBIT queued on my Kindle. I’m looking forward to reading it.
MG
“the idea that there is an objective reality that the writer’s job is to accurately render”
Reading this again a few days later, I wonder if that’s a particular challenge for those of us who are journalists as well as writing fiction. Can journalists write fiction? It’s so very different in so many ways.
MG
This subject is endlessly fascinating to me, in part because it’s personal. I recently went through a battery of tests with a neurologist; I have near complete aphantasia. Almost everything I remember, and everything I think, relates to language.
Therese!
Thank you so much, again, for accepting my column. Revisiting this topic today reminded me of another clue I noticed that my “mind’s eye” didn’t generate these mental pictures that other people experienced: police sketch artists. I’d always thought that was made up for TV crime shows. But no, it’s a real thing. Fascinating, indeed.
MG
We’d probably make terrible eye-witnesses, wouldn’t we? Are there “ear-witnesses”?
Thank you, again, for this uniquely fascinating post, Marcie.
Really, Therese?! That’s shocking and fascinating to me, because both of your books felt so visually compelling!
Thank you! I didn’t realize my lack of a mind’s eye was relatively rare until recently. My son is the opposite. When I asked him if he can bring up an apple, and at what level of detail, he can describe every part of it, the plate, the tablecloth under it. He can move over and around it, spin it like a top in his imagination. I have nothing like that. Rather, I know some things about an apple based on language-memory: It’s red, there’s a little dimple at the bottom, a stem at the top. There isn’t a plate or a table or any of that. I’m awesome at Pictionary. ;-)
While writing, I may have a “taste for” something in a scene, the same way you might have a taste for a specific type of food for dinner. I can almost see that thing I crave; there’s space for it somehow. Sometimes the cadence of a sentence calls for a touch of description. If the details are rich, then I almost always need to find what it is I’m trying to describe as a visual somewhere–a book, a map, a video, a photograph–and then relay that. I visit places if I can, and take a lot of notes on what I perceive so that I can draw from those later. In the case of The Moon Sisters and synesthesia, I haunted a message board for synesthetes and read about unique visual experiences from the synesthetes’ pov, until I felt comfortable with the boundaries of the condition. I also interviewed experts on synesthesia and the loss of central vision.
Back again to remind us about Chekhov’s advice: use just one or two salient details to conjure up a whole scene. The reader will then fill in the details mentally (or not, if aphantasic!) but either way, our work in that department is done, and we’re free to pay lots of attention to the characters and how they play out.
FWIW, I have abandoned stories midway in which the protagonist’s clothing is detailed from head to toe, with no apparent relevance to the narrative. Author too hung up on some two-bit craft book advice on the “need” for detailed description, perhaps.
Anna —
Thanks for this. That’s good advice to remember.
As you say, it’s the relevance that matters with all description.
I love lush clothing descriptions when there’s a purpose, maybe the story is set in the fashion industry or the clothing is rock-climbing gear, battle attire, a slinky, sexy dress in noir. Otherwise, I’m going to skim over that to get to the story.
MG
I have the opposite problem: my mind’s eye is so active that I have trouble discerning whether descriptions I’ve written are actually adequate to conjure up the scene for the reader.
Deborah–
That definitely sounds challenging! I think I’d be overwhelmed with that much “mind’s eye” information.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It’s fascinating to notice how different we all are.
MG
Marcie, what a fascinating topic. I daydream and was often punished for this. My stories unspool as a movie in my head with sights and sound, tastes and touch, smells, but it’s still hard to capture it all in words. But when the writing flows, what joy! I’m very visual and write picture books as well, and I think it would be very hard for me to be without the pictures in my head. But it sounds that your lack of being able to picture scenes hasn’t hindered you–you play on your other strengths, and as Don notes above, aphantasia might even be an advantage. You bring your unique perspective to stories. Thank you for this.
Vijaya,
I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a whole movie unspooling in one’s mind. I think it would be very distracting — but also nice at times. As you say, we all have a unique perspective. The different ways our minds work is part of that.
Thanks for this.
MG
I have aphantasia, too. Pinterest boards are a huge help for the visuals. I sometimes make a practice of looking at a thing and describing it because I’m not generally very tuned in to visual details. I have no idea what my characters look like (without a picture), but I know exactly how they sound, which I think is interesting.
Teresa,
I found Pinterest over complicated and overwhelming, but whatever works, I’d say use it, of course!
I always know whether my characters are tall or short, maybe because I’m a short person in a family of tall people. Apart from that, though, I also have no idea what they look like. It just doesn’t seem important to me when I’m writing their stories.
Thanks for this.
MG
I remember thinking I had not a bit of imagination in me when my children were young. I read them stories but left the storytelling to my husband. Years later, when I dabbled into writing, I discovered I could see realties other than the so-called object reality. I had to dwell on these other realities and still do. The images grow as I read others stories or check out photos and paintings to enrich my senses. Now, bringing what I see in my mind doesn’t easily translate into words and scenes. I’m learning and imagining brings me joy.
Christine!
I think I’ve read enough of your work elsewhere to know it’s wonderfully evocative. I imagine that seeing all those other realities in your mind’s eye must be quite wonderful and inspiring. That certainly shows in your writing, even though I can’t imagine it the quite the same way you do.
Thanks for sharing this.
MG
Wow, this is amazing!! I really struggle to picture scenes in my mind when I write and thought that made me a bad writer. I happened to Google ‘difficulty holding images in mind’ this morning and found the concept of anaphastasia. I have adhd which apparently commonly occurs with anaphastasia. Knowing about his is so empowering!
Hi Kirsty, Thanks for stopping by and posting your comment on my column. I’m glad you found it and it was helpful for you! Best of luck with your writing projects.