my characters rarely have a face I visualize it’s more a tone/ feeling

I’m pretty face blind, and I think a big perk of reading is that you don’t have to distinguish external images that other people can easily tell apart! I suppose I envision more of a blur or composite for a lot of the characters that are not distinctive looking, and tell them apart more by their role in the story, name, etc.

I love the Stephen King book The Stand and ALWAYS picture the actors from the 90’s movie when I read it, but it’s one of the few times I really picture the characters at all while reading.

I have this problem too. I create a cast for any book I’m reading. The cast is any celebrity that matches the description of the character of the book. The cast is based just on appearance. Sometimes I’ll even write it in a piece of paper. I hope this helps!

Charles Dance played soooo many characters when I read Red Rising.

I don’t organically picture the characters or any scenery I read because I don’t have a visual imagination. Descriptions give me a vague impression, but that’s it.

That said, I will usually look up fan art to create a better picture of characters and settings.

I was gonna suggest you to memorize their voices and then I realized we are in books subreddit and was like oh, he means visualizing their face when reading characters. I honestly thought you meant in real life.

When I create a face it sticks for the entirety of the story. If details are added later in the book like a crooked nose or long hair then I skip over it. Sorry it too late, this guy has been here for 3 chapters and he’s staying this way 😂

I don’t really have facial blindness, I’m pretty good at picturing faces of people I know and identifying people but it’s SO MUCH WORK to come up with a specific face for a character. I just don’t bother usually. They kind of have a face, nose and eyes and whatnot very little specifics I just don’t focus on/think about it. If I NEED a face for something (like they point out a facial detail or expression) then I imagine a face but otherwise it’s like a soft focus with the face not really visible/focused on/almost out of frame?

I picture the books I’m reading very vividly, but oddly I don’t really picture faces.

Instead, I usually make micro expressions with my own face, so I “act out” what the characters are doing with their faces. This helps me “picture“ what they’re expressions look like but without picturing their faces.

Imagine they have a tattoo of their name on their forehead.

I only picture faces if I’ve seen a movie adaptation of the book first and remember the actors.

It’s not really a big deal, just don’t picture faces if doing so annoys you…

Heaps of people, including me, find it difficult to visualise anything at all, best I get is a very vague and fuzzy idea of something - and yet I manage to absolutely love reading books, as I have done for the last 45 years of my life. The name identifies a person, you don’t need to picture exactly what they look like as well to understand what’s happening in the book.

I never put a face to the characters I’ve ever read unless there was familiarity. It’s a mix of people I know that may be placed on the character.

Why are you picturing anything at all? Words are for reading, this isn’t a marvel movie