I have partial facial blindness which makes it hard to picture faces that aren’t super familiar and I can’t create new faces in my head. I end up picturing faces of people I know and celebrities.
It becomes frustrating when I’m reading as the faces morph constantly into my head. I constantly stop to get the faces right. Sydney Sweeney ended up as 2 characters when I read “Bunny” lol. I also get a biased view of the characters this way. It makes it really hard to enjoy reading nowadays. Any suggestions? Different strategies for picturing or reading without picturing?
Many roleplay writers (collaborative storytelling) do what’s called a face claim. This is when you pick a celebrity/stock photo model to represent your character, to help others picture them, and also to prevent multiple people form picking the same actor lol. You could assign each character an actor based on their descriptions, and print it out and put it in the front of the book like a map to reference. That actually sounds hella fun…