William Shaw

I am an author. I am often (!) praised by readers for my writing of place. In fact I write in a fairly minimalist style with very little prose that actually describes a place. I tell readers to go back and add up all the pages that have descriptions on them and say that if they stick them all together they'll find there's really not much there. However maybe it works because I work hard to get readers to imagine a place by choosing very specific details. I've thought about this a lot because I didn't realise I was aphantasic until about half way through my writing career. Now I wonder if it helped me define my writing style in an accidental way. I wonder if my inability to call up images helped me with this. Readers have to make pictures in their minds because I don't.  I've always thought that is the trick to realism as a style. You don't see what's going on inside other people's heads; you just have the phenomenological evidence – what they say, how they look. But from that evidence, the reader intuits the deeper layer of what they're thinking. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to it.  Writing place is a little similar. If you fill the page with description, you actually crowd out the readers' imagination.