Face writing
I've come to think of my face blindness as both boon and bane.
On the downside, I don't enjoy the routine embarrassment of being greeted by friends and neighbours in the street and having no idea who this new stalker who clearly knows me actually is.
On the upside, I've learned to be pleasant to everybody, to take an interest in them, ask them questions which hopefully lead to clues about our relationship.
I'm a very good listener, whoever you are!
I've also come to realise, over time, that prosopagnosia has the potential to give me superpowers when it comes to writing.
My disability (and yes, it can be a serious social disability) means that I process the world differently to other people. I notice things most people ignore. This can - when deployed well - make my writing more surprising to the reader, perhaps more innovate or thought provoking.
The most important thing when it comes to writing is to make it stand out from the crowd. Anything that helps me achieve that has to be a benefit.
The drawback, of course, is when it comes to introducing a new character. It's not enough for the reader to know the character exists. My job as a writer is to bring that character to life for the reader, and a necessary step in the process is to supply them with a pen portrait. Just enough physical and psychological detail to generate a working image in the reader's mind, which they can then animate as the storyline progresses.
Most readers will find it easier if they can help them see the character's face. It's how their brain works in real life. This is hard for me. For most of the characters I generate, their faces might as well be, well, blank holes. Unpainted eggs.
The hardest part of redrafting a piece of writing, for me, is inking the eyes and pasting a sneer onto the lips.
I'll finish with an example. I had been through several drafts of my army memoir thing and was beginning to feel good about its shape and feel when - in a completely different context (thanks, Reddit!) - I came across a discussion about how to do a good character description. It triggered a horrid thought: had I included a description of me in the memoir?
I did a full read of the manuscript. At no point did I describe myself. Worse, everybody else mentioned in the draft were missing significant descriptions - except for the Regimental Sergeant Major, but he was a Work of Art in his own right thus needed no further effort.
Over the next few days I fixed my protagonists - many moustaches of various dimensions for the most part, given the bastards were all wearing the same uniform. What I could not fix, was me.
Even on a good day I struggle to recognise myself in the mirror!
In the end I solved the problem by combining it with another conundrum I was facing: how could I effectively describe the word "terror" to my readers?
Because the defining emotion I felt during my (mercifully brief) Army career was terror. Every day I woke up shocked by the stupid decisions that led me to that place, then petrified by visions of the idiotic things I'd (probably) do to Get Noticed by people with permission to hurt and humiliate me in harsh yet innovative ways.
Here's the final result. Meet 24 year old Rik, heading towards the most intense adventure holiday he'll ever experience in his life!
Initiation
It all starts with the word 'terror'. One of those words that's supposed to be intense but has somehow - maybe through appearing in too many tabloid headlines? - lost its ability to jolt the reader away from idle thoughts and back to the page.
It's not enough for me to state: I was terrified.
I need to show it.
Imagine you've caught a train - let's say it's a train out of Waterloo Station trundling its slow way along the Alton line. You've settled in for the journey and, having finished the morning newspaper, you decide to do some people watching.
There's a man on the other side of your section of the carriage, sat forwards so you can see his face and body. You can tell he's young by the lack of lines around his mouth, but not too young: no acne or blemishes to mar his sallow skin. He has mid-brown hair on top of an oval, elongated skull, cut to a very short flat-top which he's tried to spike with an overdose of gel. You can't see much of the detail in his face because most of the time he stares directly out of the window to his right.
Every couple of minutes he'll look away, look into the carriage, his head jerking from position to position like a bird's - an owl, maybe, given the size of the oblong, clear, fairly thick glasses that magnify amber-brown eyes from beneath the recess of his large brow ridge.
His clothes seem a couple of years out of fashion: jeans tight around crotch and thighs, a horizontal stripe rugby shirt stretched across his chest. He wears white leather basketball boots bearing a cheap manufacturer's logo. His coat is sporty in its way but has no hood and doesn't look well padded. He has a black holdall-type bag which he grips between his legs, like a soft cloth oil drum.
There's other people to look at in the carriage, but something keeps your attention returning to this one. His hands. Or rather, the way he keeps his hands in constant motion. They flick and beat, taking turns to grasp the top of his bag while the other one touches: a quick finger-stab to push his glasses back up his broad nose; a rub of his wing-nut ear, or his flat cheek, or his dimple-free chin; a speedy dip into his pocket - slap, slap. Sometimes it will come to rest on top of his knee, which itself is in slick perpetual motion - up-down-up down-up down-up-down-up - then away again to knuckle his nostrils.
He performs another quick glance around the carriage; looks at you but doesn't notice you staring at him - as if you don't register on his radar. His mouth is small yet ruler-straight, the upper lip thinner than the bottom. And then he jerks his eyes back to the scene beyond the window, the houses and factories of west London now giving way to trees and fields and hills.
He yawns; you can barely see his teeth. His hands are too busy to cover the pale pinks and mustards of his tongue, one bouncing again on his knee while the other settles over his crotch, the overt bulges of his bollocks, like a shield.
When the ticket inspector approaches him from behind he visibly jumps, looks up wide-eyed into the older man's face, takes quite a few seconds to interpret the demand to show his right to travel. Maybe he's foreign? But he does understand, searching pockets for cardboard, before unzipping the top of his bag to pull out a large brown envelope; his knee moves ever faster as he fails to find the ticket within it.
He returns to his garb search and - finally - locates it in the smooth back pocket of his tight, faded blue jeans. As he hands it over, his eyes seem to shine brighter than before; after the inspector returns the card he takes a moment to lift his glasses and wipe his jacket sleeve over his face.
You lose interest in him, look again at the crossword in the newspaper. He's still there in his seat, spine straight, when you reach your destination, his neck rigid with thick bundles of muscles as he forces himself to keep staring out of the window. He's not a tall lad, you realise as you stand and move away from the scene, maybe five foot six? Five seven?
As you step off the train, you find yourself wondering why he looked so quietly agitated, so scared - like a man surrounded by ghosts and monsters and no idea how to escape them.
By the time you reach the station exit, you've moved onto considering more important things such as meetings and lunch options. All that remains of him in your mind is the unusual colour of his eyes, and a stray shiver - a hope that terror isn't contagious: you're starting to worry about that meeting more than you should …