There is a lot of wisdom out there, so much so that it can be difficult to parse. I spent a long time trying on different things I heard from other writers, but truthfully after trying and failing to get to some special place— the proverbial Author Place. I began to feel really discouraged because everyone would talk about stuff that either I didn’t agree with or I didn’t fit, like proclaiming my word count or struggling with a blank page. It wasn’t until I heard JD Kirk talk about how he learned he had aphantasia that my whole perspective changed.

He spoke of his experience and I left my body.

I had no idea that it’s possible to actually picture things in the mind. It still seems like magic to me, like how people can read a book and see everything that happens. WILD. At best I see silhouettes of characters, and as a result I always left out those details in my writing because it doesn’t matter to me. Hair color doesn’t change anything for me. I don’t even look at people’s eyes, so knowing the color of their eyes doesn’t matter in the slightest to me. Suddenly, and completely, I was engulfed by this idea and how it explained so much about me, as a person and as a writer.

I’ve taken to describing my mind as blank. Mostly there’s nothing there. I don’t have an internal monologue, and I don’t stare at the ceiling at night thinking about stuff. My head hits the pillow and I’m out, like a light switch. I can even write to music with lyrics, I’m doing it right now. Vocals are just an instrument, after all. Many writers talk about the fear or paralysis they experience when they are faced with a blank page. For me, every day is blank so a blank page is nothing new to me.

I imagine it must seem sad to some, but I don’t think of it that way. When I learned about this, I remembered a short story that another writer had told me felt as though it was a piece of something larger. I took hold of that story and ran with it. Aphantasia became a permission slip, and somehow the ideas were even richer as I just allowed them to come. No judging. No planning. Just writing whatever came. Every page was littered with bonkers space opera ideas and before I knew it, a two thousand word short had become a 3 POV space opera that combined multiple different story ideas I had been trying to make work for years. It all coalesced into this beautiful and harrowing story that remains unfinished on my hard drive because I went to a convention and talked about it as I was hitting 50k words.

Okay, yeah, you can feel sad about that part.

Even that is valuable to know: try to finish a thing before attending a con. But like “write what you know”, that comes off as a monolith that must be worshiped at. It’s not. None of that stuff is, because we are all different and there’s strength in knowing the things that make our minds different. In my research on aphantasia I’ve found a lot of people trying to cure themselves of it and that feels so unfortunate and upsetting to me. It’s not a disease. It’s not a handicap. It’s what makes me, me.

There’s power in knowing one’s self.

About Edward Kane

Known for passionate coverage at pop-culture publication GateCrashers, Edward Kane is also an author of prose and comic books. With over two decades of retail employment, he is far from faint of heart and aims to show that through his fiction. Edward lives in Connecticut with his wife, where they are most likely watching The Office, again.

Edward is available and open for work.