On writing: The one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater vs aphantasia

A friend and I watched Dune recently.

“That’s not how I imagined Leto,” I said of Oscar Isaac.

“What do you mean, not how you imagined him?” he said.

“Not like the picture in my mind’s eye when I read the book,” I said.

After a few follow-up questions, I learned that he didn’t have a mind’s eye.

I assumed everyone experienced a book the same way. After a while, the words on the page disappear, and you’re watching people move around places and do things. As someone explained it online, "The words describe something, and you imagine it happening as you read. That's what reading a story is.”

But for 2% of readers, no movie plays in the mind. They have aphantasia, inability to visualize imagery. (Everyone has different levels of this ability – it’s a spectrum. Some people imagine it so perfectly, that they can even smell it. That’s hyperphantasia. I’m not going to go all Oliver Sacks on you. That’s it for the psychology.)

I thought at first they must not read enough to have learned the trick. Apparently not. In an experiment, people were fitted with goggles and presented with two images, one for each eye. The brain only sees one of them. If the person was first asked to imagine something, and then presented with one image resembling their mind’s eye picture, and in the other eye an unrelated picture, most people see the related picture. Those with aphantasia see either picture, with no correlation. There is no image “generated” by imagining something. (Dreams, which don’t involve the visual processing part of the brain, are not affected by aphantasia.)

Imagine a "a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater.”

Got it?

Some of you just saw their screen. The rest of us saw a purple monster eating people. (And a few pedants saw a monster eating purple people.)

This revelation made some difference to my writing habits. Why? Because writing involves simile and metaphor and there’s a basic assumption that readers can hold the images in their head and compare them.

(Not mine - I nicked it from Facebook.)

 
The first ever mention of the “mind’s eye” is in Cicero, where he explains what makes a good simile. An orator should not speak of “Charybdis” but of “a whirlpool,” because “the eyes of the mind are more easily directed to those objects which we have seen than to those of which we have only heard.” Good advice, I always thought – but what if a reader has no mind’s eye?

Carl Zimmer, writing in the New York Times, described it as “thinking only in radio.” In online conversations, I learned that those who saw head-movies as they read loved upfront descriptions, because they could furnish the room or plant the garden in their mind and commence watching. Those who heard only the radio quickly tired of description, which to them is a list presented for no good reason. They dropped any book that failed to focus on a character’s inner life (their relationships with people, emotions, and reactions).

As a reader and a writer, I love description. Setting the scene with a Charybdis or two, ensuring flowers are correct for the season, choice of silverware or plastic forks match the characters’ current circumstances…it all adds up. But some readers will never “see” it.

One writerly trick is to “storyboard” what you’re writing, either on paper as cartoons or in your imagination. I spend an hour working out the movements of say, a fight, because someone will certainly tell me if I’m wrong.

“If he’s standing between her and the window, against the light, how could she see the gleam of a knife in his hand?”

But I learned some readers are skipping descriptions. They just want to know WHY he has a knife. Maybe a little less choreography is warranted?

Another thing writers do is critique other writers’ stories. That means deliberately slowing down to catch typos, homonyms, and poor or confusing grammar. I’ve found that critical reading snaps the internal stream of pictures for me, and text becomes a series of ciphers to be decoded. Is that what aphantasics see?

I learned a lot from watching Dune with that friend. We don’t all have the same experience when we crack open a book. And the more I try to write a description that can have only one meaning, the more likely it is that 2% of readers will throw the book against a wall.

[Written for my writing class's end-of-term presentation]