Reader Question: When you write, do your characters physically “talk” in your head?
To begin with, I posed a question to my private Facebook group earlier in the month:
I was expecting responses about characters, upcoming plot lines for the trilogy I’m releasing, and the like. I was not expecting the first question I received. It definitely made me stop and think before I typed up my response.
The question: When you write – do your characters physically “talk” in your head?
To be honest, I’d never considered how my writing process worked in that regard before. As I’m plotting scenes, I “see” the events and locations in my mind. I envision the characters’ reactions to the situation in terms of facial expressions, gestures, how they move about the space. I know how they’re going to react emotionally. But I don’t “hear” them speak, nor do I know the exact words they’ll say when it comes to dialogue. (Weird, right?)
When I write dialogue, I’m in the character’s headspace emotionally, and the conversations seem to flow as I type. Even after having time to really think about my process, I continue to struggle to adequately explain exactly what goes on in my brain. I settled on the statement that they talk through me rather than to me. It seems to make the most sense to my mind…
But this question made me wonder: Is my process the same as other writers’, or are we all different?
I hopped over to Twitter, which has a fantastic writing community, and copied the question my reader posed to me, with a brief explanation of my own experience.
I was not prepared for the volume of responses I received, nor was I expecting the array of different experiences other writers have. The human brain is capable of amazing and wonderful feats, but to see so many other creatives with differing experiences for what on the outside seems to be an identical process was truly incredible.
This question is proof that although many writers seek to achieve the same goal of storytelling, many of us go about the process in surprisingly different ways. And we experience our storytelling differently as well. It was fascinating to read the responses.
Here are some of the responses I received to the reposting of this question. If you’d like to view the full thread and all of it’s responses, you can find it here.
Hyperphantasia, by definition is: the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery. It’s the opposite of aphantasia, where mental visual imagery is not present. I’d heard of aphantasia previously, as one of my friends has it, but never hyperphantasia. Again, it’s fascinating how our brains work differently but manage to achieve the same end results!
And my question sparked even more questions, some of which would be very interesting to explore further!
This was one of the most interesting threads I’ve been a part of in quite some time. Thanks for taking the time to read this week’s post!
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