My answer as to difference when reading and writing is "of course." My
idea of a story is people; the description, plot, etc., are the frame of
the picture. I am for instance not so much interested in who committed a
murder as why the murderer did it.
My general answer is, no.
=Mary Stewart Cutting=: It entirely depends on the power with which the
story is written. As a rule, my imagination does not produce the same
results on my senses as do the actual stimuli themselves. But, on the
other hand, if I may give an instance from Booth Tarkington's _Alice
Adams_, the dinner party given by Alice to her apparent suitors is so
vivid to me in every detail that I can never get over the feeling of
being actually there in the heat and the murkiness and the smell of the
brussels-sprouts.
There are no limitations to the pictures seen with your eyes shut. I
think we have stock pictures in our minds, unless they are described.
There is a great difference in the behavior of my imagination when
reading them and when writing them. One has to use continued effort to
keep the proper proportions in one's imagination. When you are reading
stories it is simply a relaxation.
Everything is a tool of one's trade.
=Elmer Davis=: Depends on how good an author he is. As a matter of fact,
my senses respond in detail much less than I had imagined till I tried
it with your questions in mind. Usually I have a mere intellectual
response to sensory images in a story, though on occasions, with
especially good writers or in stories of unusual interest, I feel them.
_E. g._ I get no feeling of smooth contact or gentle pressure from
_Cytherea_ or _The Sheik_, though those stories are full of this item.
But I do from certain poets--Catullus, Donne, author of the Song of
Songs which is Solomon's. A. Dumas and your Mr. Gordon Young can
generally give me an impression of rough contact or hard impact. I taste
food described in a story when I am hungry. But in the main my senses
don't respond--sight and hearing come across more often than the others.
I assimilate the scene described to the nearest like it that I have
known--very generally, of course, and following the author's
descriptions in principal details.
I believe I incline to see them in black and white except when other
colors are mentioned. Details blurry unless set down. (Note for
argument. Yet I much prefer stories which leave details to my own
imagination in the main. The curse of Hergesheimer is his overloading
with minutiæ of interior decorating. The great value of most Oriental
stuff, notably the _Arabian Nights_ and Herodotus, is their use of stock
phrases "fair as a moon on the fourteenth night," etc., which let you
make your own picture.)
No more trouble.
Largely answered above. The creation of atmosphere and suggestion is of
course a delicate business, as you know. When it is done right I much
prefer the suggestive concept.
Stock pictures drawn from recollections of childhood (mainly) for most
things. Country church, barnyard, I have from the age of three. With
variations, of course, to fit the particular case. Most images fall into
certain types based roughly on things I have seen.
Yes, I do resent, as said above.
Works better and more freely when I am writing them.
No, haven't used them as tools, but, believe me, I will hereafter.
My wife, just reading _McTeague_, calls my attention to Frank Norris's
overdeveloped tendency to use the olfactory image. For example, he
pictures the beginning of marital disillusionment by "McTeague's"
consciousness of the smell of his wife's hair-brush. Maybe I have the
details wrong, but anyway "McT." on entering the bedroom is conscious of
the smell of the hair-brush where one of our modern heroes would smell
the fragrant powder on her palpitant flesh, etc. Also in a mob scene in
_The Octopus_, where some thousands of the Californian peasantry get
together to hunt jackrabbits on a hot summer day, Norris speaks of the
"strong ammoniacal odor." Now I think the average reader doesn't feel
with his nose unless the author, as in these cases, deliberately calls
his attention. That is, if you write "a sweating crowd" most of us would
think of the glistening brow rather than the animal odor.
Probably that was in the ordinary practise, the naturalist school, but
there seems to be evidence that Norris ran more naturally to the
smell-image than most of them.
=William Harper Dean=: When I read a story I must live through it with
the characters. If this is impossible I will not stay with it. If I can
not suffer and rejoice with the characters, laugh with them, hate with
them, the story lacks the power to produce that reaction in me which my
own stories must produce in me. If the style grates or lumbers along I
become disgusted--the fine charm is lacking.
Yes, I see things with my eyes shut--place my characters in a situation,
then stand off, as it were, and watch them react, then record what they
do and say. I _can't_ ram words down their throats, neither can I drag
them about like dummies and think they are acting.
Solid geometry to me was always more immediately assimilated in its
logic than analytical geometry or calculus. The former made pictures,
the latter nebulous nothings.
An author who can, like Knut Hamsun, write one line describing a
situation, then pass on to the next stage of plot development, gives me
that delightful privilege of placing my own interpretation to the line
and, in my mind, reading several chapters while I let my eyes follow
into his next paragraph. And that's writing. Not everybody can do it,
for not every author is a writer. The reader deserves latitude for
exercising his interpretative powers--if an author sets about to argue
out every situation down to the orthodox _Quod erat demonstrandum_, he
not only clutters up the story with words but he cheats the reader and
the reader resents it. I might go a step beyond and say he is casting
reflections upon the reader's intelligence.
I have no stock pictures for any setting or any character. I construct
them as I need them from life. I always can produce a prototype for
anything I use, for I don't attempt to write about any setting or any
character with which I have never made contact. It's no trouble to scent
out inventions in a story; they grate and make the story squeak and
clank. I am running a series of stories in _The Ladies' Home Journal_
built around a boy character of the twelve-year age. He is my own son.
Where he plays, I know every nook and cranny of that great woodland
park, I know the code of ethics held by his clan, I know how his mind
reacts under certain stimuli. When I need a character like the ogre
which every boy his age has, I find him in the neighborhood, or,
failing, go back and resurrect one which I knew in my boyhood.
No, when I read a story, my imagination works in the same channels
followed as when I write one.
I do not consider these things "tools of the trade"; subconsciously I
use them as such, but I try to divorce from creative writing any and all
"rules," "tools" and "formula." Good writing is nothing more than good
thinking--if we thought by rule and formula, what a world this would be!
=Harris Dickson=: These things depend, I believe, upon the skill of the
writer and perhaps as much upon the reader's present mood. Sometimes and
in some stories, all the incidents, settings, characters, smells, sounds
and sights are just as clear as if I were actually present. Sometimes I
do not get them at all. For instance, many years after I still feel the
gruesome atmosphere that Conan Doyle created in his _Hound of the
Baskervilles_, remember passages from _The Lord of the Isles_, and smell
the deep dark medieval woods in _The Forest Lovers_. Books with me are
like people--some I see once and remember always; some I see every day
and fail to register them at all.
I shouldn't know solid geometry if I saw it coming down the big road
with a bell on it.
I am not conscious of having stock pictures in mind; the end of Loch
Katrine (_Lady of the Lake_) is very different from Lake Geneva
(_Prisoner of Chillon_). And the battle of Waterloo (_Vanity Fair_) does
not resemble the battle of Omdurman (_With Kitchener to Khartoum_).
I don't know whether too many pictures should be given a reader. The
writer should, in this day and time, remember that "The tale's the
thing." And pictures of setting, etc., perform precisely the same
function as sets in a drama. Sometimes a too-elaborate setting detracts
from and holds up a story--as in a very gorgeous recent film of
Nazimova, called _The Red Lantern_, the perfection of the actress
herself was largely obscured by distracting scenery. To my mind the art
is just as bad if you have too much of this--perhaps worse--as it is if
you have too little.
To me there is much difference between reading and writing; in reading I
must follow what is told me; in writing, what imagination I have roams
on a loose halter.
Sure, some of these matters are tools of the trade, a trade that in many
respects is just as mechanical as carpentering--secure foundations, body
of edifice, and climax roof.
=Captain Dingle=: Depends of course on the artistry of the author in
that particular story. Some stories read to me like the monotonous dirge
of a praying revivalist's convert. But when the story is well written
and is a story after mine own heart, I can generally see, taste, smell,
feel with the author, though I never recall feeling physical pain. Of
the senses, I think sense of smell gets to me most vividly. (No, that
isn't any wallop at anybody's stuff. My own stinks sometimes.)
I have to "see" my own work, though not necessarily with eyes shut. When
I visualize a story it is like seeing a fleet of ships coming out of a
fog. When the fog clears, the bell rings for "Full Ahead."
I never had a chance to study anything deeply. To pass any of my
nautical exams I was simply crammed with rules and never learned the
roots. So far as I remember, of any studies I suffered at school, what
we called plain ordinary "sums" gave me as hard a hammering as anything.
I never could learn to do more than add and subtract and blunder through
division. Salt hoss and hardtack and rope-ends constituted my curriculum
after the age of fourteen and a half.
Sometimes an author's mere phrase will give me a clear picture, but not
often. I can't recall a writer of recent date who can do that for me.
I have a fresh vision, usually, for each picture I form myself, except
where I am using a character or a scene over and over again, as in a
series. I mean, I don't see any building as a mere pattern, nor any man
as a type altogether.
Oh, yes! My own imagination works like a pre-war non-union artisan when
I am writing: smoothly, without strikes, and never kicking at a bit of
overtime. When reading, unless the stuff grips extra hard, the
imagination is like one of the post-war scum who never work except to
fight up to the pay window, then strike till next pay-day.
No, I don't think so. Perhaps I ought.
=Louis Dodge=: When I read a story I consider it an excellent or a poor
story just in proportion as I see it and realize it--and all the
characters--clearly, as if I were participating in it. I like swift
strokes which make things vivid and real. For example, in _The Master of
Ballantrae_, Stevenson, wishing to indicate the deterioration of a man's
character, pictures him as he walks with his little son. "Mackellar" is
speaking: "It was pretty to see the pair returning, full of briers, and
the father as flushed and sometimes as bemuddied as the child; for they
were equal sharers in all sorts of boyish entertainment, digging in the
beach, damming of streams, and what not; _and I have seen them gaze
through a fence at cattle with the same childish contemplation_." That
last phrase (the italics are mine)--does it leave anything invisible?
The real masters _do_ make me see colors and smell odors and feel beaten
down by forces. When I was a boy I took the writer's word for it; but
now he has to show me. That, perhaps, is the test of a "rattling"
story--that it shows us instead of telling us.
I can see things clearly with my eyes shut, but only the major colors
appear; the blue of the sea and sky, the red and black of fire and
smoke, the green of grass. When I see human faces I see only
expressions. I can now see the face of "Barnaby Rudge's" mother, with
the expression of mysterious and hidden terror in it.
Solid geometry was easier to me than plane geometry--perhaps because it
came afterward, perhaps because the additional dimension made the thing
more tangible.
I don't like stock figures; yet I confess that when I think of
school-masters I think of dear old Professor Lane of Quitman College, a
bent old man with calm dark eyes and a meek manner and an iron-gray
mustache; and when I think of western sheriffs I always think of Bob
Dowe of Maverick County, Texas, who spoke softly and "went and got 'em."
I _try_ not to use stock figures.
I would rather write stories than read them. Making a story is my own
adventure; reading one is following another man.
I don't like to think of "the tools of my trade." I think Dickens' best
book is _The Pickwick Papers_--a book in which the author plainly didn't
know where he was going or what he was going to do. The greatest books
are formless: _Les Miserables_, _Jean Christophe_. Perhaps little folk
ought to have tools and think about them. The result may be a good job,
but never, I think, a great story: and I like to hitch my poor wagon to
a star.
=Phyllis Duganne=: Depends on the author whether I visualize his
story-world or not. Some writers can make me see and believe people and
places and action that I'd be inclined not to believe--and some writers
can make a perfectly ordinary living-room scene look more like a
cardboard set than a house. Same with sounds and tastes and smells and
touches and feelings. I think that in the average short story I find the
people more real than the settings and action. And it depends a great
deal, too, on my mood. If I'm interested in the story as a piece of
work--the sort of job I'm doing myself--it's more an interesting laying
of words end-to-end to make a piece of fiction that's convincing and
readable than anything else. But if I'm not thinking of the story as
work--but just as a tale--I can be righteously indignant with the
villain and thrilled with the hero.
There aren't any limitations to "seeing things with my eyes shut"--if
the writer can make me see them. A writer I like and enjoy--and I like a
good many--can make me see things and people and places quite as though
I were there; every detail and color and sound and smell and noise as
distinct as though it were before me.
I didn't study solid geometry, but I'm sure it wouldn't have given me as
much trouble as plain every-day arithmetic. Nothing could have.
Again it depends on the author. I think that usually my response is more
than the exact description of the author.