If I read "He found himself in a dense woodland," my imagination makes
the rest; I see pines, oaks, etc., as well as the woods. I think most
other readers are like this; that's why they don't like detail.
Unless I'm careful, I have stock pictures for such things as
logging-camps, etc. Often I catch myself and make myself see it
differently, make the creek run the other way, and so on--and it's
harder than you'd think. The last camp I worked in (there was a sawmill
in connection) is always coming back to me, and I've had a devil of a
time putting a thicket of laurel where the mill stood. This sounds
crazy, but I'm trying to answer your questions.
There is little, if any, difference in my behavior when reading stories
and writing them. I get "all het up" in either case, if there's any
reason for it.
"Tools of the trade?" I forget everything like that when at work, I
regret to say, though sometimes I take pains to see how some real author
has got his effects.
=Romaine H. Lowdermilk=: I actually imagine--envisage--everything that
goes on. If the writer has told it at all clearly I see and hear
everything. I smell or taste nothing--my imagination does not go so far.
I feel no pain nor sense of touch except in very familiar things like
bitter cold, tropical heat, ropes, gun-shot in the leg and the like. The
scenes I see are all in "black and white" much like the illustrations in
magazines, or rather more like a memory of an actual happening. I see
bright sunlights and deep shades, but seldom see colors even though the
heroine wears a yellow waist. The main details are distinct, the rest
merely passing impressions. Sometimes an especially vivid story brings
out a lasting remembrance and I have it as almost an actual happening.
Solid geometry gave me no more trouble than any of my mathematics, but,
at that, it is a terrible arraignment to numbers.
My response is generally limited to just about what the author
describes. Naturally I do not know what is coming and so do not give
much room to imaginings. The only thing that peeves me is to go through
a lot of fine description only to find that it had nothing whatever to
do with the progress of the story; was just slung there by the author
for the sake of more words, words, words! But description in line with
the action, or used to bring out the story more clearly, is a delight.
I have stock pictures only for that with which I am not familiar, like
the interior of a submarine. All sub-sea stories to me might well be
written around the same old boat, as that is the boat I see. But
cowboys, cattle, people, village churches or vaudeville theaters all are
individual. Sometimes even I find a writer who seems to know his subject
well enough to give me a description exactly fitting some place I know.
Then I read him with great interest. In my own writing I have an
individual in mind whether I write a description or not. I never write
of things I must needs use a "stock" illustration for--only of course as
for brief mention. If my hero had once been caught undersea in a
submarine I might mention that incident, but to write a story about
it--never.
Which brings me to my own imagination when writing. Indeed there is a
great difference! When I write I see everything. I see all my characters
in their widely separated haunts, and right in the "center" so to speak
is a bright spot like a spot-light and seemingly my characters come out
of the semi-darkness and enter that light for the moment of their
action. It is somewhat like rehearsing a play, only far more vivid to
me, for the scene is constantly changing; instead of the scene changing
under the spotlight, the light moves over the story-stage and spots
first one location and then another. I have difficulty sometimes
deciding which characters to put on or to deal with next and sometimes
withdraw one who has done much and fire him completely. Then, too, when
I hit certain scenes I have so many thoughts and things crowd so swiftly
I whack away, hitting any old letter and spacing weirdly for the sake of
speed. In some scenes I weep. If I try to stifle my emotion my thoughts
falter. Often in the reading I wonder what there was to sniffle over
when I wrote, but sometimes the best part of the story is right there.
Often I soberly type off something that makes me laugh, real sudden
humor, when I come to read it. Often it is something I didn't realize
was funny when I put it down. Usually, like the sob-stuff, it requires
considerable revision to make it presentable. I am glad I can feel the
emotions so strongly and hope it will stay with me. I consider it a
valuable "tool" and try not to abuse it.
=Eugene P. Lyle, Jr.=: Writing stories keeps my imagination alert.
Reading stories, the keeping of my imagination alert depends on the
stimuli--the art of the author. In one case the imagination is in
harness; in the other it is loose in a pasture, and may be asleep.
A story has to be pretty vivid to react on my physical senses. Zola's
novels, for example.
I rarely visualize, see with my eyes shut, except by conscious effort or
intention. Then I can, easily.
Solid and spherical geometry gave me less trouble than algebra. I had to
think _hard_ to work out some of the original problems, though, but it
was a satisfying experience.
The mere concept is sufficient for a vivid impression, but provided it
impinges on something in my emotional make-up that is already
susceptible or sensitive. For instance, the thought of a keen knife
drawn across the palm of the hand--you don't have to go any farther; you
don't have to describe it. But something else you might, and even then
it might leave me cold. I think the personal equation figures in here
tremendously.
No, I don't think I have stock pictures, not as a rule, unless some
particular thing in my experience has made a deep impression. If you say
cathedral, I'm likely to see the one at Cologne, while I wouldn't think
of Notre Dame at all. The latter is _sui generis_--not a cathedral. It's
Notre Dame. Say Notre Dame and I get it.
=Rose Macaulay=: Depends entirely on how well and forcibly the story is
written. Most stories convey no impression of any kind to me. My
imagination pictures are just like what I see with my eyes open, I
think. No solid geometry. My response limited by the author. Having
stock pictures depends on the description. Resentment as to images
depends on whether described well or tediously. A great deal of
difference when reading and writing. As to tools, don't quite follow
this question.
=Crittenden Marriott=: I taste through imagination to some extent. As to
pain presented in fiction, I "choke up" on some stories--Mrs. Abbott's
for instance. Can see images with eyes either open or shut. Details
blurred. Solid geometry easier. Response limited by the author. I don't
describe much, except when I am trying to please the women with
meteorologic disquisitions; then I sling words. As to tools, no.
=Homer I. McEldowney=: It depends more or less upon the ability of the
author, I should say. I have a pretty fair imagination and if the writer
gives me half a chance, I believe that I see just about what he saw--or
sets down in print. That, I think, applies quite as truly to taste,
sound and smell, as to sight. I've read yarns that gave me an odd
tightening through the chest and which, if they didn't actually "raise
my hair on end," did produce a fine stand of "goose flesh" at the back
of my neck. I've caught myself with the palms of my hands moist and
cold. If these are sound indications of inner turmoil, then I'm getting
all the kick there is in a yarn--with no transformer reducing the
voltage.
Nope, solid geometry didn't give me any more trouble than other
mathematics--and a damned sight less than a five-hour course in algebra
that I just plugged through with a weak-kneed D!
I don't believe in stock pictures. I haven't them, and hope I'm never
turning out stuff at such a rate that I actually have to employ them. I
get a lot of fun out of my characters and scenes. To me they have
individuality. I have never tried it, but I suspect that my use of a
stock picture or character would result in a lightly veneered but wooden
yarn.
I believe that for the most part I really get into the stories I write
rather more deeply than into those I read,--with some exceptions,
perhaps.
=Ray McGillivray=: To some degree imagination supplies an adumbrance of
all the sensations you mention. With me auditory imagery is strongest.
Anything appealing through any sense to my notion of the dramatic,
curious or interesting I remember in fairly accurate (often exaggerated,
I'll admit) detail. Solid geometry was my shark subject in mathematics.
Calculus was where I resigned.
My greatest handicap to pleasure in reading fiction lies in the fact
that unless characters are (1) left automatons, or (2) portrayed vividly
like Hamsun's "Isak," Hardy's "Tess," or Stribling's "Birdsong,"--my
concepts and the author's get to quarreling from the drop of the hat.
Stating it briefly, my favorite authors are Hamsun, Turgenieff, Dickens
and Nick Carter. In dime novels I write my own story as I read.
Stock types of characters hang on a writer only when he is trying to
vivify a setting or situation with which he is not thoroughly
familiar--or when he never has taken the pains to look closely at people
in the endeavor to form constructive estimates of them. Of course
weariness of body and mind, too--but _then_ the chap behind the pencil
or Chatterbox No. 5 is not a writer but merely a dumb Will-To-Work.
The only difference in the way imagination works when reading and
writing--so far as I know--lies in the fact that in reading every
ascending step in the flight of story development opens a whole new
gamut of conjecture, questioning and hope; in writing the imagination
has to cross and recross, mount and descend the same space too often for
any such tremendous scope. I verily believe a wide-awake writer of
adventure fiction actually reads three novels every time he completes
the perusal of seventy thousand words of an interesting story written by
some one else. Vice versa, he crosses his own steps three times or
more--three hundred might be a better figure--on his own _pièce de
resistance_.
=Helen Topping Miller=: Reading is to me a sort of orgy of the
imagination. I see, feel, hear, smell and experience every sensation
written into the story--more keenly, I think sometimes, than the author
who writes it. Naturally, I supply my own pictures for the setting--if a
writer describes a country road I see--not his road, but the roads I
knew as a child back in rural Michigan. I do not know whether I "see
things with my eyes shut" or not. I know that when any idea is presented
my imagination gives one leap and is gone. I live, walk, see, feel and
hear the scene, experience the emotions of the characters, sense
everything distinctly. There is no blurring, rather the impression is
painfully keen.
Mathematics were an abomination to me. I scrambled through them as
easily as possible and forgot them with cheerful alacrity.
I certainly consider my ability to experience every sensation
imaginatively as my most important tool. It seems to me the most
valuable and essential factor in trying to write fiction--the thing the
canny Irishman called the "ability to get inside other people's skins."
=Thomas Samson Miller=: Imagination and visualization: I _feel_
location--the very hue of the sky, feel of the air, the scents and
sounds of nature. I am less vivid on human actions and sayings. I am not
so closely in sympathy with human beings as with nature. It is my
greatest drawback in fiction writing.
I do not carry mental "stock pictures"; that would be reducing
novelizing to bookkeeping. Certain authors do it, just as the same keep
to one successful form of story and repeat, even in time-worn
phraseology, so that one finds "Of a sudden" five to ten times in a
single short story.
Behavior of imagination in _reading_ and _writing_ stories: The stories
I read are so utterly beyond my art that there is no comparison. In
_writing_ the imagination is intense; one _lives_ in the story, which
one can not do in another story, any more than a violinist can reach the
depths and heights of feeling of the composers whose composition he
plays. No reader gets out of a story a tenth part of the feeling and
visualization the author puts into it, or, perhaps, thought he put into
it.
=Anne Shannon Monroe=: If the story I am reading "gets" me at all, I
swing full into it, become absorbed and follow breathlessly through; if
it doesn't "get" me, I don't go on.... I see the characters, the
place--it is all as if it had been an actual experience. Sounds, tastes,
odors,--it's all real in my mind, _if_ the writer has made it real on
paper.... I think the atmosphere of the story gets into my sense more
keenly than anything else,--the feeling of it--beauty of scene if beauty
is created on the page--as in Hudson's writing.
Pictures I see in imagination are as they are pictured by the creator of
them: the intense glare of a desert under sun--it's blinding just to
think about: the deep rich purple-green of heavy old forests--it's
almost suffocating: some writers make me feel these things just as if I
had seen them.
All mathematics were impossible to me, solid geometry no more so than
that whole idiocy, from the multiplication table up.
If the presentation is true, the mere concept starts my mind off on
jaunts of its own.
I do _not_ have stock pictures; each character, scene, place is new,
fresh--a creation.
I _do_ resent too many images. I could not wade through all of _Main
Street_: while _Lulu Bett_ was a delight.
Difference in behavior of imagination when reading or writing stories?
Well, in one way, no: if my imagination is not fired, I do not read and
neither do I write. Often when I start to read a story it suggests one
of my own, and I am off on my own adventure, instead of following the
one the author has put before me. But if he has put it so as to catch my
interest, I follow him with the same enthusiasm with which I write.
=L. M. Montgomery=: Yes, when I read a story I _see_ everything, exactly
as if I were looking at an actual scene. I _hear_ the sounds and _smell_
the odors. When I read _Pickwick Papers_ I have to make many an extra
sneak to the pantry, so hungry do I become through reading of the bacon
and eggs and milk punch in which the characters so frequently revel. I
never feel _physical_ pain when I read a story, no matter how intense
the suffering described may be. But I feel _mental_ pain so keenly that
sometimes I can hardly bear to continue reading. Yet I do not dislike
this sensation. On the contrary I like it. If I can have a jolly good
howl several times in a book I am its friend for life. Yet, in every-day
existence, I am the reverse of a tearful or sentimental person. No book
do I love as I love _David Copperfield_. Yet during my many re-readings
I must have wept literal quarts over David's boyish tribulations. And
ghost stories that make me grow actually cold with fear are such as my
soul loveth.
I can "see things," with eyes shut or open, colors and all. Sometimes I
see them mentally--that is, I realize that they are produced
subjectively and are under the control of my will. But very often, when
imagination has been specially stimulated, I seem really to see them
objectively. In this case, however, I never see landscapes or anything
but _faces_--and generally grotesque or comical faces. I never see a
beautiful face. They crowd on my sight in a mob, flashing up for a
second, then instantly filled by others. I always enjoy this "seeing
things" immensely, but I can not do it at will.
The very name of geometry was a nightmare to me. I decline to discuss
the horrible subject at all. Yet I loved algebra and had a mild
affection for arithmetic. These things are predestinated.
I have no "stock pictures" as a reader. I generally see things pretty
much as the writer describes them--though certainly not as the "movie"
people seem to see them! This is especially true of places and things.
But very few writers have the power to make me visualize their
characters, even where they describe them minutely. Illustrations
generally make matters worse. I detest illustrations in a story. It is
only when there is some peculiarly striking and restrained bit of
description attached to a character that I can _see_ it. For example:
when R. L. Stevenson in _Dr. Jekyll_ says that there was something
incredibly evil about "Hyde"--I am not quoting his exact words--I can
see "Hyde" as clearly as I ever saw anything in my life. As a rule, I
think the ability to describe characters so that readers may see them as
clearly as they see their settings is a very rare gift among writers.
Yes, as a reader I _do_ resent having too many images formed for me. I
don't want too much description of anything or too many details in any
description.
When I _read_ a story, I _see_ people doing things in a certain setting;
when I _write_ a story I _am_ the people myself and _live_ their
experiences.
=Frederick Moore=: My imagination reproduces the story-world of the
author to the extent that the author has given me pictures or has
suggested them to me. I actually--mentally--see and hear all given to
me in the story. I can not say I smell or taste, except the reference is
to something already in my memory. For instance, if an author refers to
the smell of a whaling-ship, or a bilge-water forecastle, I smell it in
memory--that is, I know it. But I doubt if I could create the smell that
might be referred to in filling a helium-gas balloon, because that is
beyond my ken. If it should smell like, say, rotten oranges, I might get
a reaction that would be fairly accurate. I can not say that I feel pain
presented in a story in any degree. The strength of the suggestion on my
imagination depends largely on the skill of the writer in transmitting
his idea to me. Of course, I suffer more mental pain in seeing a cat
injured than I do in reading of how several men were killed. In the
latter case shock is missing, yet I have seen more men killed than I
have cats hurt. There is a difference in the behavior of imagination
when reading and when writing--while reading, my imagination is being
spoon-fed; in writing, it is on "high," climbing a hill and watching the
road carefully. And there is a difference in concentration, for in
writing I am emptying my subconscious reservoir, while in reading I am
refilling it. After finishing a story, I find that a lapse of time is
necessary to allow the subconscious (or what I presume to be the
subconscious) to refill. I couldn't write stories on an eight-hour
basis--if I wanted to.
I really see things with my eyes shut, in the colors which I may desire
to give them. Details are distinct if I care to turn the "spot-light" on
them, so to speak--in other words, to the point on which I want to
concentrate for description. The detail I am working on is distinct, but
if I want to hold the image long enough for extended use I do not
attempt to hold it steadily. I find that impossible. But I can make the
image repeat itself without limit. I doubt if anybody can hold an image,
even of something that has just been looked at, longer than a very small
fraction of a second. And by this I don't mean a succession of "flashes"
but a fixed image.
Solid geometry gave me less trouble than other mathematics, because I
could visualize it better. However, I have been able to copy from mental
images of a problem I have seen written out, or printed on a page, a
problem required in an examination. That is, I have found it easier to
recall that problem as I saw it in figures, and copy it, than I have to
attack the problem and work it to the required answer. I presume
everybody else can do the same. In examinations in artillery I have been
able to recall images of cross-sections so readily as to be able to
reproduce them in rough sketches or to give the required description.
But if the question related to something that I had _heard_ in a
lecture, I might well miss the question entirely. I show very poor
results in written examinations relating to book matter--unless the
questions relate to pages with such type arrangement or sub-heads that I
can recall the entire page mentally and pick out of the image what I
want. I may know a thing very well practically, and not be able to pass
as high in it, as something I have acquired wholly from a book. I
believe text-books on all subjects should be more visual.
The response of my imagination in some cases is dependent on the skill
at description of the writer, especially in things or scenes with which
I am not familiar. But a mere concept will set me reproducing if the
matter deals with something with which I am familiar. By this I do not
mean to say that my imagination will not work except with things with
which I am familiar--I am referring to degree of response.
No, I do not have stock pictures for anything. I may think first of some
picture in memory, and from that basis create the character, the place
and the events. However, imagination probably requires something in the
nature of a "feeder." What the imagination of a person blind from birth
does would be most interesting. If a person had been blind up to, say,
twenty and then recovered sight, it should be interesting to know what
kind of mental picture he had had of, for instance, a full-rigged ship.
I have considered all these matters as tools of my trade. Without them,
I doubt if it is possible to have the trade.
=Talbot Mundy=: If I pick up a book, say, on India, and provided the
book is sufficiently well written not to "get my goat," I am in India
instantly. I see, smell, hear and taste India. Sometimes I almost touch
it. The same with any other country or place. India merely serves as an
illustration. I have to be brought back to my surroundings with a
wrench.
Sound is perhaps the least real of the sensations. I get the effect of
the sound without the sound itself. The louder the sound, the less real,
I rather think. For instance, if a gun goes off I don't jump out of my
skin, and I don't think I hear the report--or, if so, I rather see than
hear it. Colors are absolutely real, although rather more beautiful than
in actual experience.
This is a very difficult question to answer, however. The world of
imagination and ideas seems to me to be a separate world in which we
experience all the sensations above referred to, but experience them
differently. The sting--the element of personal suffering--to use the
Christian formula, the cross--seems to be missing in this world of
imagination; so that, although the cross and its consequences--a strong
smell and its discomfort, pain and its distress--may all be present in
the story, they are seen objectively and have practically no physical
reaction except that of conscious pleasure.
On the other hand, ideas, emotions, contrasts between right and wrong do
have a pronounced physical effect. I frequently sweat or grow angry or
get prodigiously excited while reading--but always because of an idea
that is concretely presented.
Perhaps I can put it best this way: Suppose that we torture the heroine.
The most blood-curdling description of her agonies would probably excite
my curiosity and might perhaps tickle a sadistic vein, but would
certainly not cause me physical distress nor even mental disturbance.
But the question whether she shall be tortured or not--the right and the
wrong of it--the low-down arguments used on the one side, the high
standards raised on the other, would arouse me almost to frenzy, and the
blood would go coursing through my veins twice as fast as usual.
I don't have to shut my eyes to "see things." I see them more easily
with eyes wide open. Possibly because I am short-sighted, the imaginary
things that I see in that way are often more "real" than the real world.
The pictures are invariably colored. Never black and white.
My response is not limited by any means to the degree in which the
author describes and makes vivid. As often as not, too much description
has the reverse effect.