When I write I leave out a great deal more than I do when I read.
I do not consciously use any tools when I write. I depend upon a sense
of form partly instinctive and partly cultivated--that and the emotions.
=Nalbro Bartley=: I seldom read fiction because I always see the
machinery of it (or think I do). But when I read history, I let my
imagination vividly picture every incident and struggle. I often feel
the actual pain or mental suffering described.
I see mental pictures in their actual colors--with very clear-cut
details.
Solid geometry and trigonometry both helped me as a fiction writer--I
was hopeless with algebra or arithmetic. I can't explain the former
unless it was a sort of mathematical phantasy--anyway, it taught me to
construct. I never have "stock pictures" for scenes--each one has some
minute difference as the case may warrant.
Yes, I think every reader likes to have "tribute" paid to his
imagination--he likes to have the author paint a vivid outline but not
crowd it with unnecessary detail.
When I read a story, which is seldom, it is usually a classic or a
well-established piece of fiction and I think I am reading it because of
its excellent technique and very little because of imaginative pleasure.
When I write stories I have the unbounded egotism of the creative
mind--my people and their troubles and triumphs are so real and so very
acute that I am on mental tiptoes until they are out of the depths and
on to the heights!
No.
=Konrad Bercovici=: I am hard put to answer. The more I write the less I
read. I find it interferes with my work. Reading a story carefully takes
out of me quite as much as if I were to write a story. And except in
rare cases I have not found any story worth while enough to allow it to
do that to me. It is all a question of intensity, I suppose, but my ears
actually do ache after a concert. Not because my ears are too weak, but
because I listen with such intensity. I read in the same way as I listen
to music. I never studied solid geometry or other mathematics. I have no
stock pictures for anything. I would become crazy if I did because I
hate to see the same thing twice. My imagination never behaves properly
either when reading or writing a story. I suppose if the imagination
were an independent individual and it actually acted instead of
imagined, it would be kept in prison for the rest of its natural life!
Tools of trade? My God, I have never considered them such. I consider
myself as belonging to the minstrel class, born about five hundred to
six hundred years too late. Otherwise I should enjoy nothing better than
traveling from market-place to market-place and telling stories to the
assembled peasantry or at some inn. All story-tellers,--as a matter of
fact, all artists, are modern minstrels. Just born to amuse the people
who toil and work.
=Ferdinand Berthoud=: I read so little of other men's work that it is
hard to say. I suppose I do see the actual happenings and actors, and
not the printed words as printed words.
Of course in my own writing I live the story and am actually a part of
it. Live in another world as I write it. In each of my small few stories
so far I am in either a large or small part one of the actors. I see
myself and see and hear the other men--always personal friends or men I
have lived with and quarreled with. I see the grass waving, can hear the
horses' footfalls and smell the sweet clear air. The peculiar scentless
smell of the open African veldt is always there. I feel so much a part
of the thing that when I finish my stint and come back to myself and
look at the walls of the room where I write I am in a state of
semi-collapse.
No, I don't feel the actual pain in other men's stories or my own, but
more than once in describing scenes of torture the impressions have been
so vivid that they've turned my stomach and I've had to lie down for
half an hour or so to get right again. I've seen the "remains" after
torture, so perhaps that accounts for it.
The pictures I see are in their natural colors. Details distinct and
solid--not flat as in a moving picture. What I mean to say is that they
are firm and rounded, like a picture by Millet.
No, I have no stock pictures of cowboys and such things, particularly
village churches. In the course of years of wandering I've seen so many
places that no one is ever uppermost in my mind.
No, there is no difference in behavior of my imagination when reading
and writing stories, because I don't read them. Don't read a story a
month, and never read a novel. Only read trade, finance, astronomy,
travel, research and such stuff.
Incidentally I am continually having a very curious experience. Time and
again I read books in my sleep--books I have never before seen. They are
always old books, printed a hundred years or more ago, I should say. I
go through page after page of them and they're wonderful stuff--stuff
that I'd almost give my very soul to be able to write--but try as I will
when I wake I can't remember a single word of them. Yet the dream comes
again and again, and always a different book.
=H. H. Birney, Jr.=: I have read so much and so omnivorously all my life
that I can not say I "lose myself" in any work of fiction to the extent
that a description of the agonies of a man dying of thirst would send me
hunting for a pitcher of ice-water. I am much more likely to be
emotionally stirred in reading an account that I know is true than by
some work of fiction. For instance, I feel no shame in admitting that I
broke down and cried like a baby in reading the account of Scott's
tragical expedition to the Antarctic--their final defeat by the cold
when only eleven miles from a cache of food, and the heroic
self-sacrifice of the doctor. In reading fiction I am constantly making
comparisons. Should I read of thirst I compare the written sensations
with my recollection of my own when I went fifty-two hours without water
in northern Arizona. Does Friel write of the Amazon jungle I make mental
comparisons between his account and Algot Lange's or others I have read.
Am constantly seeking for conviction that the author "knows what he's
talking about." That's why I await so eagerly a yarn by Thompson Burtis
or Talbot Mundy. _They know!_ React to a greater extent to descriptions
of scenery--desert, mountain or river--than to descriptions which cater
to the senses, taste, smell, etc. Have smelt some ungodly stinks and
eaten most unholy messes in my time--the kind that can't be written
about! Find a keener emotional reaction in sorrow or pathos than in
"love scenes." Have been in love myself and never missed a meal, but--I
stuck to the end with my best friend when he went over the Pass with
meningitis, and then had to tell his folks about it when they got there
an hour too late.
Solid gave me more trouble than plane geometry, but I always was a
dumbbell at all mathematics. Can understand your question, however.
Intelligent reading, or writing, is in many ways a third- if not a
fourth-dimensional business.
No. I strive to make each case a distinct, separate, individual entity.
I have known mighty few "types" of particular occupations or pursuits.
I read largely for recreation and, lately, to get ideas as to style.
Main factor of my imagination when writing is impatience. Do not write
with particular swiftness and usually know just what I want to say long
before my pen gets there. Once I start I want to get it over with.
Creation is to me a task, not a joy. I take my pleasure in the finished
product.
As tools? Not as much as I should, but I'm getting to use them more and
more. Remember, I am one of the "youngest of the entered apprentices."
=Farnham Bishop=: Depends entirely on how well the author makes his mind
meet mine. Most of 'em never make me see anything but the printed page.
Too much description blinds my mental eyes every time. Suggested or
connoted scenes and actors, sketched in with a line or two, are much
more plain.
See better than I hear--taste too darned well if I'm hungry and broke
when somebody describes a good camp dinner, for instance. Smells? Most
odors are nothing but empty names to me, for in real life it takes a
healthy onion or a whole garden of roses to rouse my olfactory nerves.
(Probably that's why I've never felt any desire to smoke). Feel what
I've felt in reality, when a happy bit of description brings it back;
too vivid descriptions of suffering make me wince.
Mostly black and white, sometimes crudely colored. Vary from mere
suggestive blobs to--say, once when I was a kid, I "saw" an extra
illustration for a story in _St. Nicholas_, that Reginald Birch might
have drawn, and it puzzled me no end when I failed to find that one
among the others that he did draw, when I reread the yarn. But I've
never reached that particular height since then.
Plane geometry was as far as I ever traveled along that trail.
A good concept or connotation starts my imagination hitting on all
eight.
Usually, the stock picture, formed in early life, pops up and has to be
modified. When somebody says "soldier," I see a clean-shaven young man
in Civil War blue, with the little forage-cap that our army wore until
1898. Then I have to shift his costume and make-up to suit the story,
but I can't get away from the impression made on my infant mind back in
the eighteen-nineties.
The difference between work and play. Have to force the darned thing
when I'm writing, but she rambles gay and care-free when I'm reading.
Consider these things "tools of my trade"? I do and I've tried herein to
explain how I try to use them.
=Algernon Blackwood=: The visualization of a story I read depends
entirely on its degree of actuality according to the evocative power of
the writer. I prefer a suggestion that enables me to form my own
pictures of scenes and characters described, rather than to have these
formed for me in detail by the author. A description of house or room or
garden I invariably skip. With his first vital adjective the scene
flashes into my mind. His subsequent detail bores me.
=Max Bonter=: An author can make me see his story-world with a vividness
strictly in proportion to the degree of his skill. My senses register
sound, smell, flavor, touch, etc.,--although less acutely than in the
world of actuality.
As an example of vividness, let me cite Henry Leverage's _The
Shell-back_. I could almost swear that I got a whiff of "Old Marlin's"
unwashed hide; I saw the slime in his eyes and the kinks in his matted
old beard. I would not consider these allusions disgusting. The author
dispassionately sketches a piece of humanity--that's all. It's
truth--and my heart rather warms to "Old Marlin" on account of it.
I can see plenty of color with my eyes shut, although the details of the
pictures are not perfectly distinct.
When I studied mathematics my brain was not sufficiently mature or
systematic to grasp all the fundamentals of any branch. I had not much
success with geometry.
My response to an author's description is usually limited to his degree
of vividness; although it often happens that a theme or a situation,
_per se_, so interests me that I leave the author's world and reproduce
one of my own.
Shame on the pen-prostituting varlet who uses stock pictures for his
scenes and characters! I would almost as lief see an author plagiarize.
What imagination, what regard for the ethics of his craft must a man
have who sells his wares over and over again? Can art be as lazy, as
unscrupulous as that? To my mind, if a writer be not indefatigable in
his distinctions, discriminations and demarcations, he is not
sincere--if he be not sincere, he is not an artist. He reminds me of the
barroom cripple who fares forth to his station on the street corner with
half a dozen lead pencils to sell; who returns to the saloon with his
pocket full of pennies, but his stock of pencils still intact. These may
be harsh words, but--must the dollar taint _everything_ in this world?
Writing and reading affect my imagination in two distinct ways.
When I begin reading, my faculties are relaxed and receptive; my
muscular system is in repose. My eyes flash the printed symbols to my
brain; my brain translates them and projects them kaleidoscopically upon
the screen of my imagination. The pictures immediately generate
enthusiasm or otherwise. If they generate enthusiasm my faculties prime
themselves and become more acute; my muscular system acquires a certain
tension. My brain is receiving food, stimulant--in other words I'm
"being entertained." If the pictures generate no enthusiasm, however--if
they evoke only a yawn--my faculties remain torpid. My brain is neither
being fed nor entertained nor stimulated. In other words, I'm "being
bored."
Thus the function, or behavior, of my reading imagination would seem to
be largely passive--merely displaying the author's pictures and leaving
their value to be passed upon by my reason.
The function, or behavior, of my writing imagination, is vastly
different. Before I can start, it must initiate a fund of enthusiasm of
its own. This enthusiasm must be sufficiently keen to tune up my
faculties and make them aggressive and openly demonstrative. This
enthusiasm must stiffen my backbone and give tension to my muscles. I
must be thoroughly alert to capture and express every passing thought
and idea. In other words, I must "feel in the humor to write."
My imagination must still take the initiative. It must proceed to throw
picture after picture upon its screen--not merely drawing them according
to well-defined descriptions as in the case of my reading self--but
_initiating_ them for my creative self, being guided in the task only by
a hint, a haunting fancy, a lurking impression of the long ago.
Reason--the critic--stands constantly beside imagination and ruthlessly
picks flaws in its pictures, rejecting many as unnatural, uninteresting,
overdrawn, etc. Such pictures as are passed by the critic are then
translated by brain into words that rush out of my finger tips to the
keyboard of the typewriter. That is about as near as I can get to it.
At any rate my writing imagination must be enthusiastic, stubborn,
tireless, inventive and wholly active in its function.
I am just beginning to consider these matters as tools of my trade; hope
to be able to use them more skilfully by and by.
=Katharine Holland Brown=: The keenest impressions, from reading
stories, are gained from sight and touch and sense of smell. Sense of
touch, perhaps strongest. No appeal to the senses in my case is as
strong as that declared to exist by many people.
Can not really "see with my eyes shut" with the vividness that many
writers describe. Instead, I get a mass-impression instead of one in
detail.
Undoubtedly the requirement of solid geometry, by universities, was
sponsored by Torquemada.
Detailed description is not essential. If the story is vivid, the locale
shapes itself without effort.
No stock pictures. Each new story has its own images.
One of the great charms of certain authors lies in their
lapidary-accuracy of detail. So, in case of the real artist, there is no
question of "too many images." I can not answer the next inquiry--have
never analyzed so far. Nor have I considered any of these matters as
"tools of the trade."
=F. R. Buckley=: This is a very big question: I can't answer it more
exactly than by saying that when I read or write I have a _subliminal
self_ which feels, tastes and smells, so that I get the effect of
stimuli quite vividly without any semblance of reaction on the actual
physical senses. This is extremely difficult to explain. I might say
that when there is a smell or a sight or a sound before me, either in my
writing or some one else's, I rather _know_ it, than feel it. It is
rather as though (I am now thinking of a revolver-shot in a small room)
the essence of the roar, denatured of the qualities which appeal to the
physical ear, had been poured into my consciousness by some other
channel. Until I started to answer this questionnaire I should have said
I heard the crash; of course, I don't; I don't even--I think--imagine
it. Yet the effect of it certainly impinges on me; an exciting passage
of action will even speed up my heart, and fast action will make me work
the keys of the typewriter faster. Normally one doesn't keep tab of
reactions, but it seems to me I've caught myself grinning with pain when
somebody was getting hurt. But the speeding-up and the grin are not, I
think, direct action--such as I should experience from actually going
through the action or watching it with my eyes. I think they are the
manifestations of the imagined action's impact on the subconscious,
duplicate me, whose sole business it is to receive them. And this
duplicate self's control of my own person is only partial; which is why
my mouth doesn't actually water when my hero eats lemons.
I can see pictures with my eyes shut; in full color but they are still
pictures--not movies. I can't shut my eyes and see action; but before
describing it I can close them and see the picture of its effect; see
the man who's just been shot and how he lies and how his garments hang
and where his hands are and how his feet look. I have actually seen a
good many men after violent deaths. This may help. And I can see every
detail of the man who fired the shot--his attitude, what he's doing with
the revolver now he's fired; also, I can see the room and feel it. You
know that there is a distinct feel about a room when something
abnormal's happening. A pretty gilt clock you've always liked will look
entirely different--tawdry, pitiful, cold-hearted, if a dead man's lying
in front of the fireplace. I get all this, and I couldn't write if I
didn't.
As for solid geometry, ALL mathematics were abomination and to pick on
solid geometry would be invidious.
I haven't any stock pictures at all. In reading, if the author doesn't
give me a picture, I use Shakespearean scenery--blank space with "This
is a Church" written on it. Writing, I invent quite definite and
different "sets" and so on, for each story.
Big difference between imagination reading and writing. Very, very
rarely does reading speed heart-beat and so on; writing, comparatively
frequently.
=Prosper Buranelli=: The chief pleasure I get from a story is an
intellectual gratification, the perception of some irony, the
astonishment which comes from some development, unusual with respect to
current ideas, but reasonable when submitted to clear thinking. A good
story to my mind is a piece of thinking, of rational building up. I see
in Anatole France's _Procurator of Judea_ a rigorous deduction of what
could have happened under the circumstances. The seeming truth of the
colors and sounds of the setting has for its purpose the heightening of
the plausibility with which the close is reasoned out. It is much like
the paleontologist who builds the idea of an animal by reasoning on a
couple of bones and a set of tracks in prehistoric mud. I am never
absorbed, save by the author's ideation.
I can see things with my eyes shut, but don't, often. I have an "ear
mind." I hear things. My imaginings take place in words or in music. In
adolescence I saw things, but not now. Solid geometry and spherical
trigonometry trouble me. I have enough trouble constructing, in
phantasy, in two dimensions.
If the concepts are disposed in provocative arrangement, I can supply
the vestments, at least such as I need. But the fuller and more
persuasive the coloring, the more powerful the logic of the concepts. If
an author places a civilized man among cannibals and carries him through
well analyzed mental processes to cannibalism, it will be all the more
plausible if he complete his reasoning with fully colored and convincing
pictures.
Any story which either gives or suggests stock pictures, such as cowboys
or village churches, save in most acrid mockery, is to my mind
immeasurably rotten.
In the best stories, I think, reading one and writing one would be much
alike. Reading a beautifully reasoned story would be much like writing a
beautifully reasoned story. If you watch a very well played game of
chess, it is like playing along with the player. It is something like
playing the game yourself. You know what is in the player's head, why he
makes a move. With bad players playing, it is merely a spectacle. You
can't tell what they are about most of the time and, when you can, you
are entirely out of sympathy with the rational processes, which, you
understand, are contemptible.
Tools of trade, presumably text-books and other forms of instruction, I
have found, are useful, but only if they give you bases upon which to
erect further meditations of your own.
=Thompson Burtis=: My imagination causes me to react to all the stimuli
you mention if the writer has any vividness at all about his writing. I
taste the flavors, sniff the odors, feel pain, etc. I will except none
of the cases mentioned. Perhaps my reaction to the description of good
or bad food is the strongest. I can get hungry at the mention of a
delightful meal, and mentally nauseated, so to speak, at a description
of bad food on shipboard or something like that.
In the pictures I see with my eyes shut most details are blurred. Most
often the pictures are black and white, but in especially vivid cases,
such as a tropic night or something of that sort, my mental pictures are
in color. The limitations are usually in the case of scenes with which I
am totally unfamiliar, and because of the number of unfamiliar details
mentioned I am often totally at sea in an attempt to visualize a scene
or a happening.
Yes, solid geometry did.
My response is not limited to the exact degree of the author's
vividness, but it is affected by his descriptive power. A mere concept
will make me see something, but not as much as a good description would.
Each case produces its own picture.
No difference.
Yes. I have made an effort--am making, I hope, a constantly more
persistent effort--to use them in this way: by striving through proper
word selection, even if it be only one adjective, to make every noun, so
to speak, in my stories, mean something. I am trying to make the most
minor of my characters have a scraggly moustache, a hump on his back, or
some tiny detail which will set him apart in the reader's mind and make
him distinctive. In the same manner, food, a room, a scene, a tool--I am
trying to incorporate some brief, flash-like description which will make
that thing vivid and give it individuality. The more I write the more I
am growing able to look at my writing as a trade or craft and comprehend
the mechanics of it, and that attitude, I believe, will constantly tend
to make a writer consider the tiny details and put them in with
deliberation rather than inspiration as the stimulus.
=George M. A. Cain=: In reading a story, I think my imagination aims to
reproduce the picture naturally attaching to it. To what degree this is
clear in detail or color depends entirely on the interest evoked by the
story. Often the images are so real as to produce physical reactions. I
have grown actually ill over a description of some repulsive disease.
But I can not say that any mere suggestion of pain in any form has
induced an actual like pain in, _e. g._, some given part of my body. The
distress of imagining pain with me is entirely mental, capable of
reacting in physical lassitude, inducing nausea only as it becomes
repulsive in its manifestations to other senses than feeling.
Suppurations are really the only things which I can not imagine without
the physical reactions becoming local in my stomach. As for tastes and
smells, these have few keenly attractive reactions with me in actual
life, and I am affected by imaginations of them only adversely. I can
read the _Cardinal's Snuff-box_ without sneezing. But I am pretty apt to
reach for my pipe, if I read much about smoking.
Solid and plane geometry were the only mathematics I ever found so
absolutely easy that a glance was sufficient for almost any proposition.
I think response is more or less determined by the degree to which the
author dwells on description. As a matter of fact, in answering this and
the following question, I would say that it is my opinion that we all
form our pictures from things we have actually seen. Stage settings,
drawings, faces--I believe we conjure entirely from memory. If the
author goes into details, we correct our memory pictures to make them
correspond with his stage directions. This I have sometimes found
capable of actual interference with really writing. In one or two
instances I have had so vivid a picture in my mind of the relative
positions of certain actors or furnishings, when, say, a character had
to use his right hand in the action, and could not have done so in the
picture--that I have had to stop and draw diagrams to straighten things
out and be sure of avoiding what some reader might instantly see as
impossible.
I rather think the images I create in my own writing are clearer to my
mind. I have to stay with them longer. Some months ago my wife asked me
in startled tones what was the matter with my face. I had to admit that
I was just up from writing of the appearance of an insane man in a cabin
door and was unconsciously trying to look like him in my efforts to
chalk off his most noticeable features for the readers' benefit.
I have considered these things as trade tools only to the extent of
being careful to have very clear images before me in writing. Sometimes
I have found them almost a disadvantage. My own picture was so clear, I
took for granted the reader's seeing what I saw, without my telling him
what he could not guess.
=Robert V. Carr=: Paragraph III is another set of questions involving,
to my limited comprehension, heredity, environment, physical condition,
psychological wounds, racial memories and the power of intelligence far
beyond that possessed by my little finite mind. Who can tell where
matter merges into spirit? Who can tell where the imagination of the
writer leaves off and the imagination of the reader begins? When I think
of the Infinite, I think only of a word. Wise cuckoos, ready to be
interned in some asylum, assert that they can imagine the Infinite. What
man can imagine a million objects? It is an unusual man who can imagine
ten thousand. It makes me hunt for comparisons to imagine a thousand. I
have to remember how my regiment looked in line, or its length in a
column of fours. What man, then, can imagine thought? He can babble
words, he can mumble words, but, after all, he can not imagine thought.
He can shovel a lecture on Divine Intelligence into a set of open-billed
morons, but, when he is through and has drained the pitcher of water,
hasn't he merely put in an evening shoveling words?
Stock pictures? How do I know that my ideas are not all stock ideas? How
does any writer know but what his dearest thoughts--thoughts he fondly
fancied were his own little, bright-eyed children--may have been
fathered by some tribal psychological wound? His most cherished idea may
be the offspring of some hereditary weakness. He may write sex poetry
because his grandfather was a roué. His little ideas he considers so
wonderfully original, may be little stock ideas born of racial stock
ideas, family stock ideas, environment stock ideas. The heavy-domed
scientists claim the Anglo-Saxon habit of meat-eating has produced a
certain set of stock ideas. I consider myself merely a human animal who,
when he bumps into something he can not comprehend, gives it an
impressive name and lets a gaudy word stand for the gap in his
intelligence. There are men who have a ready answer for every question;
Congress and the asylums are full of them.
Difference in imagination when reading and when writing? Involving, so
far as I can see, heredity, racial memories, acquired physical
weaknesses, mental quirks, tricks of egotism, and a multitude of
mysteries I have never been able to solve. I give this up with scarcely
a struggle.
=George L. Catton=: Yes; if the characters are distinctly drawn and the
setting correctly planned and the action natural under the
circumstances, I can see it as fast as I can read it. If it is not, I
skip over what I can't see immediately as not worth wasting time over.
And I might just mention, by the way, to a student of such things as
characters, action and setting, some of the characters and setting and
action in fiction are so impossible as to be ludicrous. No, I can't say
that I can become so immersed in the atmosphere of a story that I can
"hear" and "smell" and "feel" and "taste" with the characters in the
story; that is, the characters in a story that I am reading. But with
the characters in a story that I am writing--well, that is something
else again. If I want to I can weep with my characters and laugh with
them and run the whole gamut of the human emotions with them, but that
is something I seldom allow myself. I go too far then, with the emotions
of my characters.
Yes, I can really see things with my eyes shut, or open, in the dark or
in the daylight. And there are no limitations whatever. Green grass is
green, a pine tree is a darker green, and a forest lake is yet a darker
shade. Colors, and black and white, reproduce themselves in their
natural shade when I am picturing in my mind's eye a scene to be put
down in words on paper. Also the characteristics of a character. I can
see a broken nose just as plainly as a straight one, and a hare-lip as
plainly as a cupid's bow. Details stand out as distinctly, or even more
so, than the whole. Continuity writing for the movies is, to me, one of
the easiest and most fascinating tasks I ever tackled.
Never had an opportunity to study any other geometry or mathematics.
If the author of a story I am reading fails to picture a scene or
character or bit of action so that it can be understood and "seen" as
fast as I can read his picture, I supply what is lacking myself to make
it up and save time. In fact, in lots of cases I find that the pictures
the author drew were never needed at all, as far as I was concerned;
certain things will happen under certain circumstances, inevitably, and
the ground under a knot of pine trees will be bare of grass without any
one telling me that.
Never have stock pictures. Each setting is built up to conform to the
necessities of the action and the characters and the theme. Stock
pictures and characters, etc., savor too much of a manufactured article
and kill the personality of a story.
Only in one thing is there any difference in the behavior of my
imagination when reading or writing a story. If I am reading a story by
another author my imagination pictures for me only what is absolutely
necessary to make the story interesting. If I am writing a story my
imagination brings me a thousand pictures, incidents, etc., to choose
from. Or, to put it another way, in reading a story my imagination is
localized to the restrictions of the story; while if I am writing my
imagination knows no boundaries.
Yes, I have long considered these matters as tools of my trade; so long
in fact that a consideration of them now is unnecessary. In fact, to
think of them now when working on a story is to restrict their working.
=Robert W. Chambers=: It depends on the story. No limitations to
"seeing." Colors. Distinct. All mathematics annoy me. Response depends
upon the author. No stock pictures. Do not resent many images if they
are well done. Difference when reading and writing? Of course. As tools?
Have given it no thought.
=Roy P. Churchill=: I have never thought of this before, but believe
that in my own case my responses through the senses are governed by what
I have actually done myself. For instance, I know how a six-inch gun
sounds, the noise of the shell, the impact of the explosion. I can see
the splash at the target, follow the birdlike flight of the shell, smell
the powder, taste the smoke. For I have done these things, _experienced_
them, and when they are in a story my senses respond. Yet I have not
been a jockey in a horse race. I can't get near as vividly the feel of
the saddle, the smell of sweating horses, hear the shouts of the crowd,
the taste of churned dust on the track. So in a story the writer's
experiences must be real, it seems to me, to give anything like a
second-hand impression on the senses of the reader. Yet I do enjoy
prize-fight stories, and never did them, love horse-race stories and
never rode in a race. It must be that the authors of such stories had a
very, very clear picture to give it to me at all.
In stories of places I have not seen, telling of experiences I have not
gone through, imagination fits in somewhat blurred details, but often
more enjoyably than stories of things I already knew. For instance, I
have confused ideas of just what passes are made in a duel in _The Three
Musketeers_, but it does not detract from the charm of the story.
I have no stock pictures of scenes, rather try to make them fit what the
characters need.
My imagination works more freely in reading stories than in writing
them.
=Carl Clausen=: I feel all of these things if the story is done well
enough. Actual colors, I think. Always distinct. Did not study geometry
to any extent. Limited to the author's description. No stock pictures so
far as I am conscious. Difference when reading and writing? Can't answer
this. Don't know for sure. I write by "ear." If these are tools, I don't
know it.
=Courtney Ryley Cooper=: Unless I can see the story clearly and _know_
the characters, the thing falls short with me. I feel that there is
something either wrong with the author or myself.
Black and white.
Never got as far as solid geometry. Arithmetic was bad enough!
I reproduce myself and often "help" the author. If I don't like his
setting, I make one of my own and go merrily on.
Individual.
I don't like description that is too minute. I feel like a kindergarten
pupil.
A great deal. In writing, I am so terribly concentrated that I actually
see nothing. Everything seems to be working out from my subconscious
brain, whatever that is.
No.
=Arthur Crabb=: This is a bit too highbrow for me. It seems to me that a
great many writers try to make an undue appeal to the senses and too
little to the common sense of the reader. For instance, if a tale is
laid at the seashore I am not particularly interested in having the
writer explain to me that the air is salt and the sea is green and the
sand is white, and so on. What I am interested in is knowing what the
character thinks of it, that is, if the heroine has lived all her life
at the seashore, the salt air and the green sea and the white sand
probably do not interest her any more than the back of the brick
building I see out of my office window interests me. If the heroine
comes from an inland farm then the effect of the sea on her is decidedly
different. The same thing in general applies to all the rest of human
emotions. The idea of making a little shop girl, of no antecedents, go
through the range of emotions that would put a prima donna to shame, is,
it seems to me, unnecessary and undesirable. I recently started a story
in which the author plastered on so many colors my only impression was a
kaleidoscopic paint shop. The characters in the story never saw any of
the colors at all.
I, like every other human being, can see things with my eyes shut, if I
get what you mean. I can make imaginary characters act and picture
imaginary scenes in complete detail. That, it seems to me, is absolutely
necessary if one is to write at all.
I studied mathematics two or three years beyond calculus. Naturally
solid geometry gave me more trouble than plane geometry or trigonometry.
It is a far more complex proposition. I think the two are comparable to
learning to ride a bicycle and learning to walk on a slack wire.
Incidentally I think there is a catch in this question, but I am dodging
it.
It depends on the author. Without checking myself up by compiling
statistics I think the really great authors cut out what you call vivid
description. Do you realize that the probability is that nothing in this
world exists at all except in an individual's inner consciousness? The
reader can not be, certainly ought not to be, particularly interested in
some writer's own picture of something or other except as his characters
are affected.