I don’t seem to have the ability to entirely invent faces. I’ll usually use a known face (often an actor), but sometimes I might change it like… that actor, but with a rounder face.
I’m reading a book at the moment where I just can’t get a visual handle on one character, nor hear their voice, and it’s actually spoiling my reading haha.
What about you? Do you ‘cast’ your books in your head? Where do you get the faces and voices from?
by Ok-Friend-5304
7 Comments
The ether.
I usually just imagine them as described, but only very vaguely, and the appearance tends to change in my head, hahaha! As far as the voices, sometimes I do change the voice up in my head, if an accent of manner of speech are described. 🙂
They just form on their own, lol. But I do rely on descriptions (however scarce, lol) given by the author, so that helps to feed into my imaginings!
Mostly they just sort of evolve for themselves, unless there is an existing model for my brain to base them on.
It can cause vast discrepancies between my version of a character versus how they are actually described, sometimes, but since its all in my head anyway, no worries.
Normally they are very vague shadows of sorts, I’m definitely not good at visualizing people. I kind of enjoy when there’s a movie or show already (even if I don’t watch it), just so I can google some images for reference.
I visualize books, but for some reason I don’t give the characters faces. They’re “names with bodies,” basically. I just imagine generic characters that fit the description (hair style, clothing, size, gender), but for some reason I don’t imagine a face.
My mind seems to be much more gung ho about visualizing details of a landscape like slopes, hills, views, plant species, lighting, smell, specific set up of buildings and which directions doors and windows face.
Unless it’s a very specific description I usually see actors