How One Author with Aphantasia Builds Fictional Worlds

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Being an author requires building worlds and characters for others to see in their mind. It takes incredible skill to hone the details, pick the right setting, and to tell just enough without going overboard. You want to paint a picture—for some authors that picture is vivid, while for others it’s a sketch for the reader to fill in themselves.

But for me it’s a bit different, I have to craft my stories all while I see nothing in my own mind. I have aphantasia, which means I have no inner eye or mind’s eye and cannot voluntarily create a mental picture in my mind. Think of it this way, if you tell me to imagine a banana, my mind is blank. I can’t even picture the face of my closest family members. It’s something I just cannot do. I’ve always had trouble with meditations that tell you to visualize things or others telling me to explain my vision for something better.

From what I understand, the severity of aphantasia is a scale from being able to see the general image of something in your mind all the way to being able to visualize nothing at all. I am on the most extreme edge of the scale. I don’t daydream, my thoughts come to me in words. It’s the same way with my dreams. I would say in my entire life, I’ve probably only had a handful of dreams with actual imagery (minus ones that are just memories, I can see my memories in dreams sometimes).

My mind has always been this way. So, it took me a long time to realize that my brain works differently. Every time someone told me to imagine something, I thought it was a metaphor because surely no one else could actually see pictures in their minds. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized that all that mental-imagery talk wasn’t a metaphor. My partner, my child, my mother—I found out they all have very active mental imagery. This knowledge really changed the way I look at my own mind, and made me evaluate what I now realize are coping mechanisms I’ve developed to get around aphantasia.

I’ve always created things—I was the quintessential art kid, my clothes dotted with acrylic paint acting as a secondary palette that displayed my creative endeavors for the day. The drive to create in some way has always been in me, and still is. I’m an author, a painter, a graphic artist, something within me is always humming more, more, more. But I don’t draw inspiration from my mind, instead I have to draw from things I can see.

When I started writing books, I knew that I’d have to describe places, things, people I’d never seen. And to do that, I needed tools. Because of my background in art, I knew I could draw on the crutches I’d always used for painting or drawing. I’d simply look at something from the real world and use that as my guidebook. But then came the hard part—how do I keep it all aligned as I build this world for my readers?

That’s when I drew on my project management and computer science background. For technical applications, I’ve always had to describe what a user needs in depth, while keeping in mind the technical limitations of applications used by our teams. I’d use an excel sheet to keep track of all the details, the limitations, anything I needed to reference easily. When it came time to track all the minutiae of my writing projects, it seemed natural to do the same. As I outline a new project and choose a setting, I create an excel document to go along with it. All of my outlines are incredibly in depth, along with each excel document for overall structure, I write a chapter by chapter outline to help me stay on track (since I can’t see the scenes or the story in my mind).

Google Maps is my favorite tool to get the general feel of an area, I’ll use it to highlight some of the main locations in town, streets, and architecture. This gives me the general theme of the area for my excel sheet. After that, I’ll be a bit more specific—where are my characters living? What does that look like? Years ago, I found it very helpful to build out the houses of my characters in the sims so I could remember the layout. Now, I’m a bit more vague about the layout, since it typically doesn’t matter much to my story.

For character descriptions, I used to look at celebrity images and use their descriptors. I’d focus on the look of their nose, the type of smile they had, the length of their hair. Now though, I look at stock photos and choose some main details for their appearance and focus more on their clothing choices on a day-to-day basis, rather than the structure of their face. It’s just too hard for me mentally to iron out whether or not I’m doing a good job describing facial features, and it’s incredibly hard for me to keep track of.  I add whatever characteristics I find in the reference images to my spreadsheet, too.

I’ve found that what’s been more difficult than physical descriptors is actually action or sex scenes. It’s so hard to keep track of where body parts are moving/flying. Now, when I write action scenes, I watch action movies to get ideas for how my characters should fight, how their bodies would move. In general, I find that visual media is incredibly helpful when I’m trying to plan out scenes or figure out how to describe something.

When I realized I had aphantasia, I struggled for a while with whether or not I should talk about it. But if there’s someone else out there with aphantasia that thinks that it will limit them, that they shouldn’t create art or tell their stories because of it—I want them to know that they absolutely can. Hopefully the workarounds that I’ve found can help.

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