As someone with Aphantasia it can be a bit of a challenge to get into a book. Unlike that post about staring at paper and hallucinating, they really are just words on a page for me. Despite this, I’ve still managed to maintain my love of reading throughout my life, but I won’t lie, it can be very difficult to choose a book over other mediums of entertainment at times. Does anyone else go through this as well? What do you do to help engross yourself in a story when there isn’t a mental movie to pull you in?
I find myself more drawn to character driven narratives, because I don’t really have to “picture” anything. I can get sucked in to written conversations and mental conflict and internal/interpersonal drama, so it doesn’t really matter that I don’t actually hallucinate the faces of the characters.
This works for me even in more action oriented stories as long as the action is secondary to the characters. But yeah, if it’s a bunch of scenic descriptions and kinetic action I get bored lol
I definitely feel this, like I love the Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien’s 2 page scene descriptions are really difficult to pay attention to lol. Something I’ve actually found to be really good for this is reading plays. They typically don’t contain much scene description, and mostly focus on dynamics between characters
I agree. I’ve been an avid reader my entire life and the lack of ability to visualize what’s being described by words hasn’t been detrimental. Lengthy descriptions of scenery does tend to get pretty tedious though.
I have very limited ability to visualise - it’s like I can tell you what the lines of a thing are (I have the map) but my brain doesn’t put it all together into the final product. Generally it turns out ok because I just focus on the character/culture/plot rather than the nonexistent views.
