Originally published on chadanctil.com. Aphantasia is the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present. I am a horror writer with aphantasia. Before we get started, I want you to try something. Close your eyes and picture a skull (I write horror, remember?). What do you see?
For over 90% of the population, you pictured a skull of some sort in your mind’s eye—from cartoony white grinning Halloween skulls to ancient, moldering skulls deep within a candlelit crypt. Maybe my fantasy author friends saw a misshapen troll skull or the impressive skull of a majestic dragon deep within a treasure cave. For my crime writer friends… you can keep what you saw to yourselves, thanks.
For most people, it’s easy to imagine visual images, to picture people or places or monsters or spaceships in your head. The ‘mind’s eye’ is a powerful tool that we start using in childhood, and most people don’t even think about it. I know I didn’t.
However, if you are like me or the other aphants out there you see nothing. A blank screen, or maybe the snowy nothing of an old television tuned to the wrong channel. Try as I might, I will never see that skull.
The Early Years, Before I Knew About Aphantasia
Of course, I know what a skull looks like, I can recognize one, describe one, even draw one—but I can’t ‘picture one. It probably sounds weird—I know it did to me, and then a few years ago I found a video on the internet (thanks internet!) that said ‘You may have aphantasia!’ and I watched the video, and it turns out I DO have aphantasia, and it explained so many things to me! When I found out that aphantasia was a thing, so much of what I had experienced throughout my life finally made sense. Let’s start with dreams. When I was younger, I thought people were liars. People would tell me about their amazing dreams, being on the Titanic or being in an adventure with some action star, or even just having dinner at an old favorite restaurant that no longer existed.
I listened to them going into sometimes intricate detail about all these nocturnal adventures and imaginings and I just assumed it was all bullshit—they were just making it up. Friends, family, school chums, just making up these wild tales for attention or whatever reasons they had... because I never saw anything when I slept. I wished I could, but when I went to sleep at night and woke up in the morning, that was it—no dreams, no pictures, just sleep. With very few exceptions, that’s true for me today as well.
And dream journals? Wow, did I think that was a scam… a whole industry devoted to what—jotting down make-believe stories to tell other people and ‘interpret’ what the make-believe stories meant? For the longest time, I thought that was literally insane.
It turns out, it wasn’t that people were making it up, it’s that my brain just wouldn’t give up the goods. Whether asleep or awake, my ‘theater of the mind’ was closed for renovations.
Even at home, before we knew what aphantasia was, my wife would get so annoyed with me because she would try to explain how something should be configured, or where something should be placed, and unless I was looking right at it or she drew it on paper, I just couldn’t picture it, I didn’t ‘get it’, and she’d be frustrated because she couldn’t explain it clearly enough for me to ‘see’ it. It was like asking the blind guy to pick out the red car, but we didn’t know that at the time.
And speaking of cars, I am also HORRIBLE with directions and have had trouble driving places without GPS, even places I’ve been before unless I’ve been there a BUNCH of times. I always chalked it up to the generic ‘bad sense of direction’ trope, but with aphantasia, I realized—I have a hard time navigating because I can’t picture the directions, I can’t see the turns and landmarks in advance—it’s all just ‘road’. I don’t have that internal GPS saying, ‘Yeah, in 2 miles you’ll see that water tower’ or whatever.
I’m a Writer With Aphantasia, but I Can Still Describe People, Places, and Things
So now that we’ve established what aphantasia is and explained how it has impacted my life even before I knew what it was… how does a guy who literally cannot mentally visualize things become a fiction writer? How does that work when being a fiction writer with aphantasia—especially a horror or fantasy writer—is literally about describing places and things that do not exist, and I can’t ‘see’ things that do not exist, how is that even possible?
It’s a great question, and honestly, I think when a person has stories they need to tell, they find a way to tell them. Being a storyteller is all about finding a way for your story to be heard, seen, or read, in whatever ways you are able to do that.
Looking back, I believe my inability to visualize a scene made parts of my writing stronger. Writing coaches and editors have always told me my ability to write characters and dialog and emotion is really strong, and that makes sense—I can’t tell you specifically what my main character looks like, but I can tell you 100 different things about what they’re thinking, how they feel, what their favorite movie is, what kind of wine they drink when they’re sad, even what games they play on their phone.
As a writer with aphantasia, I can’t picture how a run-down building or abandoned subway tunnel looks, beyond the obvious rotten boards and cracked tile, but I can tell you how it smells, and how the atmosphere feels, and how the sound echoes around the room when a mirror breaks. I use those kinds of details to fill in the scene so that if I am lacking in visual detail—which I probably am—my reader still gets a full and engaging picture of the scene.
Nobody really talks about their imagination or their ability to visualize, right? It’s an ephemeral thing; we all just assume everyone can do it the same way they can. Because of that, I never heard of aphantasia until I was in my 40s, and so I never realized there was anything ‘different’ about my process, or the way I imagine things or create things, so I never felt I had to ‘compensate’ for anything; my writing just evolved naturally into the way I write best, and it continues to evolve just like any other writer.
How a Writer With Aphantasia Might Utilize AI
The growth of AI has been scary for a lot of artistic types, for many good and obvious reasons. While I will never use AI to write for me—I know I’m better at writing than AI will ever be—I have started using it to generate pictures of the scenes I’m trying to imagine, so I can capture more visual details to add into the written description. It’s amazing the little details you miss when you can’t ‘see’ something in your mind, so I might not think about how a certain reflection or a shadowy corner could add to the mood or feeling of the scene until I’m actually looking at the scene, or a picture of it. So that’s writing with aphantasia, in a nutshell—you focus on the non-visual aspects to tell your story, and where you need visuals you pull from experience and from other things you’ve seen or heard or read, and you craft your words carefully to convey a feeling or an idea.
I know this kind of writing isn’t for every reader—if you’re the kind of reader who likes to read three pages of descriptions of how the dinner table is set, with a paragraph of intricate detail laid out for every dish, I’m probably not the author you’re looking for. If you like writing—especially horror—that is tight, character-driven, and full of depth and emotion, then I think you’ll enjoy what I have to offer.
So if you’re like me or the other less than 5% of the population with aphantasia and you feel the drive to create and tell stories, be it with words, visuals, or through sculpture, then do it! Find your way to tell that story that’s inside you, and you will be amazed at what you can accomplish!
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