Warning: Spoilers for The Changeling Tree

Having gone through the whole of The Changeling Tree series now, and (I hope) improved the characterisation and dialogue and cut out a load of unnecessary stuff as mentioned in a previous post, I was struck by a few other things that were missing. Because I'd written drafts of two other books since I last looked at these, I wasn't surprised by what I found.

1. I hadn't described what my characters looked like.
I've previously written about having aphantasia, which is also described as mind's eye blindness. Until recently, I had no idea that the mind's eye was anything other than a metaphor. I don't see pictures in my head, I don't see anything when I dream, and I had blithely assumed that everyone else was the same.

When I'm reading, I tend to skim the descriptive passages and if they go on too long, I'll skip them altogether. It always seems clunky and unnecessary to me to have a passage describing Louisa's flowing brown hair, with just a hint of curl and a glint of gold when it catches the light, not to mention her piercing blue eyes, full lips and determined chin. And don't get me started on Bottega Veneta handbags and Jimmy Choos (I had to google those). My brain translates this as 'She has some [probably expensive] accessories'. I know brands carry all sorts of social information, but because I don't understand the nuances, it seems best to steer clear of them altogether in my writing as well as in my life. What I hadn't realised about personal appearance though, was that other readers need that stuff so they can conjure up images in their minds.

Finding out about aphantasia has also explained why I'm not very good at remembering faces and probably why I have to remember routes by using a list of names and instructions (e.g. turn left onto Green St) rather than picturing a map in my head, which apparently other people do. All I can say is thank you satnav.

On the plus side, I think my lack of mental images means I'm more verbal. I think in words instead, and that has to be a good thing for a writer. If you asked me what my characters looked like, I could tell you in words, but I couldn't draw you a picture (even if I could draw).

2. I hadn't described locations and layouts
Again, and probably for the same reasons, I'm not that interested in interior décor or in where things are in relation to each other. In addition to the aphantasia, I have absolutely no sense of direction -- there is nothing in my head telling me which way I'm facing. It's not directional dyslexia, I don't think, because I can tell left from right. And I do have positional memory -- I'll know that the bit of text I'm looking for was at the top of a right-hand page -- I just don't have an internal compass.

That means I'm reliant on visual cues for finding my way around, and normally that's fine. I don't have any problem on familiar routes, but my internal directional system consists of a series of separate routes which don't necessarily connect up with one another. So, if I'm going somewhere new and I haven't got a map to rely on, I'll usually go to somewhere familiar nearby and find my way from there. I can look at a street-map and figure out that if I take a zig-zaggy route of right turns I'll be going in the general direction I want to be, but if you asked me to point to where I started when I get there, I'd be making a logical guess rather than an instinctive one.

Anyhow, that means that I tend to base my fictional settings on familiar real-life locations. I always modify them in some way, by putting a stately home where there isn't one or by moving a café round the corner from where it is and turning it into a bookshop, but essentially I know my way around these fictional locations because I'm inserting the buildings and landscapes I need into real locations.

What this means, in combination with the aphantasia, is that I don't describe how places look much either. It might sound like the same thing, but I do have a firmer sense of where things are in relation to each other than I have of how my characters look. What I need to figure out is whether readers actually need to know that you turn right into Green St and then left into Blue St on the way to the bank, or whether you turn right or left at the top of the stairs. These are things that I do know the answers to, but I don't want to bore everyone else with.

3. Stage directions
This is just laziness, probably. I hadn't put in 'said Rose', 'Tracy asked', and so on, enough for readers to keep track of who said what. I think this is actually another product of the aphantasia -- it's not that I can hear the characters' voices in my head, but they do speak in ways that are distinctive to me.

The first, and I know this is geeky, is that I've tried to make sure the characters are only using words that they could have been familiar with. It was tempting to keep on playing with the misunderstandings that might arise from the way words would have changed in meaning, but I appreciate that this was more for my amusement than anyone else's unless I wanted to provide footnotes, which are not generally associated with hilarity. Rose, Tracy and Peggy do sometimes misinterpret one another or fail to understand entirely, but I'm hoping it flows smoothly and doesn't interrupt the dialogue.

In some authors' work, there's nothing to distinguish the characters' voices from each other; other authors insert indications of pronunciation or little verbal tics to indicate who's speaking, which can be irritating if it's too heavy handed. I'm trying to do the second, but obviously hoping not to irritate my readers with it. For example, because of when she was born, Rose is more concerned with political correctness than Tracy and Peggy. In additional to her moralistic view of the world, Peggy uses more precise grammar and syntax than the other two. Tracy tends towards passive aggression and uses slang from the 70s and 80s.

Scientists suggest (and this is real-life human ones) that about 2% of people are aphantastic. Perhaps those are the readers I ought to be writing for.