This morning, I realized for the first time that my partner of 11 years has aphantasia–difficulty picturing things in his mind’s eye. I, on the other hand, have a very vivid mental camera.
I started thinking about our different reading preferences and wondering to what degree our mind’s eyes affect them. I read a lot of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror in paperback and audio. My partner is a voracious reader of comics, graphic novels, and manga.
We also have different writing styles. I like to focus on the environment in my writing, and my partner often focuses on mechanics.
So I’m wondering: do you have aphantasia or not, or something in between? What do you like to read, and how does your inner perception affect the way you engage with the books?
I can BARELY visualize, blobby and vague and no color, mostly just shapes that I have to focus really hard to form and they don’t stay together. Imagine bad drawings on an etch-a-sketch that someone keeps shaking.
I read fantasy and romance mostly, some Sci fi. That’s what I write as well. I don’t think it affects anything honestly. I write very descriptively and I love descriptive writing that really builds the world. Even though I can’t visualize things easily, I can know that I’m thinking about the things. I can build things up in my mind as words and ideas alongside my best attempts at visualization. One area that I could maybe see being affected is that I don’t imagine what characters look like very often unless I’ve seen fanart or in the case of writing if I’ve made images or models of the characters. I have an easier time visualizing images I’ve seen so I sometimes look up fanart or make images of characters so I can better know what they look like.