I See Faces by Connie Berry

Pareidolia noun: the tendency to perceive a specific, often

meaningful, image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

 

Last week, after living in our house for twenty-four years, I suddenly spotted a face in the marble tiles on our bathroom floor. Here’s a photo. Do you see what I see? It’s not a human face. It’s the face of a bulldog. How did I miss it before? Now I can never unsee it.

Have you ever spotted a dog or a tree or the outline of a person in the clouds? Most of us have, although I admit to spending far less time than I did as a child lying on my back and gazing at the clouds. I should probably do it more often.

If you have perceived an image in the clouds or perhaps a human face in the grill of an automobile, you’ve exhibited a tendency for pareidolia. It’s a human thing. We’re created to recognize familiar shapes, and from infancy, we are especially drawn to the human face.

During the Renaissance, painters used pareidolia in their work, painting collections of fruits, vegetables, and other objects to create a human portrait. Here’s an example by Guiseppe Arcimboldo (1566). The title of the portrait is “The Jurist.” What appears to be a man’s face is a mash-up of fish and poultry, while his body is a collection of books dressed in a coat.

Thinking about pareidolia, I realize that in a sense, readers do the same thing. As they read words on a page, they instinctively “see” the familiar outlines of a human being in their minds. That’s what writers aim for—creating characters through words that form images our readers can never forget.  Words can create images, and the power of words to do that should never be forgotten or taken for granted.

How do we do that?

We all know about the interesting and unique physical characteristics that help us cement our characters in the minds of readers—the prodigious mustaches, the sapphire blue eyes, the angry scars. But there’s more.

If readers are looking to recognize a “face,” it’s not only on a physical level. It’s also the emotional and spiritual aspects of human life that transform black marks on a white page into a living, breathing person.

What makes us human? Think in terms of gifts and flaws, courage and fear, success and failure, thoughts and feelings, loves and hates, hope and despair, the sublime and the prosaic. Real people are made up of all these things, the ordinary elements of earth joining hands in the miraculous combinations that make up human life—like the portrait in “The Jurist.” We can’t forget them.

Writers, how do you bring your characters to life? Readers, which fictional characters will you never forget?