What Do You Do When Your Brain Can’t See?
The pursuit of writing when your mind’s eye is blind.
When I was a teenager, I read a lot of things. I read the Ender’s Game series, novels based on the Myst video game, and a seemingly endless stream of Star Wars novels. I enjoyed science fiction and fantasy above most others.
Most of all, I loved Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchet, and I hated Tolkien. When the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I forced my way through the Fellowship of the Ring to give it a shot. When I got done, I swore I’d never read another work by him again.
Much later in life, I have lost my taste for books and developed a love for shorter fiction and factual pieces. I still fondly remember reading and re-reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the assorted Discworld books, and I wonder what happened.
One of the interesting revelations that I’ve had recently is that I can’t get mental images. Trying to envision the face of my wife, a person that I see literally every day, is impossible for me. Imagining scenes from books is a frustrating exercise in futility.
It’s called aphantasia, for anyone who can relate to this, and some lovely people in the UK are researching it. Essentially, my mind’s eye is blind. I think in words and feelings as opposed to pictures. It’s like having a blind narrator in my head who’s telling a story from memory.
I think this is why my taste in books is what it is. Adams and Pratchet specialized in witty narrative quirks and wordplay. Tolkien spent two pages describing what was out the east window before dedicating another two pages to what was out the north window. Trying to get a sense of the world he built was endlessly frustrating for me because I couldn’t see it.
I think, in many ways, this affects my writing. Those familiar with my past work may get a sense of this, but I tend to write my pieces in a conversational style. Depending on the piece, it could feasibly be something that I am explaining in a monologue to a small group of people. I like to think my pieces could feasibly end with “thank you for coming to my TED talk.”
I also like playing with my styles, writing pieces from various perspectives or using a mock journalistic style. I enjoy wordplay, metaphors, and puns in my daily life and social media posts. For my job, I write more technical pieces that I try to imbue with a bit of life to make them interesting.
In short, I write how I imagine my audience would want to read. For articles like this, it’s a conversational style. For my job, it’s a thoughtful narrative that concisely conveys my points. For social media, it’s jokes, puns, and vulgarity (sometimes all at the same time).
For me, writing is an exercise in voice. It’s like someone who does impressions: you learn the quirks of somebody’s narrative style. Their use of language and punctuation gives you hints as to who they are as a person.
Reading the dry journalistic narrative of an Associated Press article followed by a social media piece about a personal experience with sexual abuse is an interesting exercise in the use of language. Strict adherence to a style manual contrasted with raw, unfiltered, and poorly punctuated personal experience creates a strange juxtaposition between utility and emotion.
In both pieces, the writer’s voice is expressed differently. The AP piece is machined and polished to a mirror finish, reflecting the facts with as few blemishes as possible. The social media piece is an outpouring of emotion and feelings unhindered by things like comma rules and proper grammar. For me, the appeal is learning to emulate both styles.
In some ways, I think that’s what drew me to writing. For me, it was a means to learn how to better express what was in my head and learn how to get into other people’s heads. Learning the ins and outs of the English language helps me better speak (and write) my mind. It gives me an outlet.
Put differently: when a picture is worth a thousand words but you can’t paint a picture to save your life, you’d better get writing.
