Write what you know.

[dameboudicca]

You know, that advise you get all the time. It has some truth to it (especially if not taken to literally).

But what do you do if you suffer from prosopagnosia (facial blindness), when you couldn't describe the face of someone you knew if your life depended on it even? If you are incapable of reading facial expressions (at least, if they are not really exaggerated). Does that mean you have to write stories about faceless beings who never shows the slightest hint of an expression on their faces? It would be all right if your character had the same condition, but if you don't want that...?

This is not just a question out of idle curiosity, I have these problems, and so far I have avoided it by using generic descriptions (put together from stuff I've read), but it feels a bit like cheating (no, no, not word-by-word, of course not - but still!) - and I'm terrified someone will, eventually, see through it. After all, I know it's fake!

Or, do I have no choice but to continue as I do now?

[somewhat cross-posted]

Comments

[melannen]

You don't have to write what you know - studying how something works from the outside and thinking it through is a perfectly valid way of writing.

There are some really great writers who are totally blind, and you'd never know from their descriptions. There are some really great writers who have severe Asperger's, but you'd never know from their characterizations. One of the best things about writing is that if you get a good enough theoretical knowledge, you can fake it, even if you'd never be able to apply it in real life.

What people have said above about continue to learn from what you read, and getting someone to check your work, is a great idea. I'm a very non-visual person, so if I don't force myself, I can write entire stories with no physical description at all, and I have a lot of trouble linking faces and expressions as I experience them with the words I have to use in the language, and both those things have been very helpful. If you want to go beyond just copying other people, though, I have a few things I use.

My problem isn't the same as yours, so I'm not sure how much my solutions will help, but here's what I do:

Make a chart with all the quantifiable physical characteristics of your characters, and fill it out - even if you're filling out some of it at random. I use a set of questions I got out of a book that are based on the interviews police sketch artists use to get descriptions of suspects out of confused witnesses - if you're interested, I'll dig up and post the list.

Once you've got a pretty good idea what they look like, even if it's only in words, find visual references for each character that at least match on the big things like sex, race, and hair color. Refer back to the references whenever you think it's time for the description. (A lot of people use photographs of celebrities for this, or stock photos - I know there's a website I've used before where you can actually search a photoarchive based on what the people look like, but I've lost the list. Meanwhile, searching flickr tags can be helpful. I actually prefer using old painted portraits, because they give me the gist of what the person looks like, but aren't as specific as photos. But it can be really hard finding paintings of people who aren't white, so I fall back on stock photos a lot.)

You can do the same thing for facial expressions - there are whole catalogs of photos and videos of people making faces which are labelled with what the expression and emotion are supposed to be, and they're indexed so that you can go, "This person is sad. What does sad look like?" and get a whole page of sad faces. Visual artists - especially animators and cartoonists - use them a lot, so you can find them pretty easily by looking at art reference books (though the print versions tend to be expensive). There are also free ones available online; look for "facial expression reference" and you should get some ideas.

Then get your visual references out, and just describe what you see, feature by feature, as if you were describing a mechanical drawing or a plant or something. It'll probably be stilted and way too detailed at first, but do some as exercises, and use your writer's sense and what you've learned from reading to figure out what parts of the description to leave out, and which to put in, and when you actually need a physical description and when you don't, and how to make it flow naturally with the rest of the narrative. Treat the faces like any other background research, figure out when you're infodumping and when you're not dumping enough.

If you *really* want to get into learning expressions the hard way, there's a whole science of facial expression, why we make the faces we do, which bits are cross-cultural and which aren't, how the standard-issue human brain does its sensory processing and how that gets translated into conscious concepts. Paul Ekman does a lot of pop-sci stuff about it that's fairly easy going to start with, though sometimes the pop-sci gets a bit sensationalistic, and does a little too much assuming that everyone has a standard-issue brain. Anyway, I've found it fascinating and sometimes helpful; I have no idea if you will (or if you'd've been exposed to too much of that sort of science already.)

[dameboudicca]

Thank you for your reply, it was very informative!

For me 'writing what you know' have always been on a 'write what you can understand' basis - but facial expressions and looks are in the 'can't understand category' and they are so important to so many people I can't leave it out entirely. Learning is out of the question (I've tried), but lists sounds like a good idea (that one you are talking about sounds like it would be good! I don't need to tell a reader anything - but I should know, at least)!

And then practice, practice, practice... ;)