THE READER AND HIS IMAGINATION
When you read a story you live more or less in its story world.
There are printed words on the page and they cause your imagination
(I do not use the word in the sense of "fancy" but to indicate the
mental power that chooses and discards among certain things to
construct certain other things) to build from your own experience a
set of mental images or impressions. The story's world becomes real
to you in proportion as the story's words succeed in making you
reproduce it in your mind.
_Variation in Visualization_.--But the success of the story's words
in doing this is dependent not only on the skill and power of their
stimulus but also on _the ability of your imagination to respond_.
Success is dependent not only on the writer but on the reader.
Readers vary tremendously in the fundamental {198} ability of their
imaginations to respond, both as to quality and degree. It is
surprising that this fact is so little known, for its careful
consideration is of the utmost importance to success in writing
fiction. While my questionings have been only casual, I have not yet
found either a writer or an editor who took this variation as a
serious factor in his work or who had even discovered the existence
of the variation. Wherefore my gratitude is the deeper to Professor
Joseph Villiers Denney for having brought it to my attention in a
college class a quarter of a century ago.
If you have not already investigated, make the experiment upon your
friends. Ask your friends what they _see_ when they read a story and
you will find amazing variations. Some visualize clearly everything
mentioned or suggested--see the characters, actions and scene in full
detail just as on a stage or in real life. Others see things and
movement, but without colors in their pictures. Some see people but
without faces. Some see things only if, and only as fully as,
described by the author. Some see fully even if the author fails to
describe. Some make their own {199} images partly different from
even definite ones painted by the author, often because he fails to
impress his images first. (In the setting of a story, for example,
haven't you, if you visualize readily, had to change your picture of
the scene's geography or pick up the whole setting and twist it
around to make north come where you had had east?) Remember this when
you are the author, and save your readers this violence to the
illusion. Some have a stock imagination-picture that does service
for a concept in almost any circumstances. Some see _practically
nothing_--can not shut their eyes and see the very room in which they
are sitting or even the faces of their nearest and dearest.
I knew a high-school valedictorian who easily mastered every subject
until she came to solid geometry. In that study she could not even
make a start, was totally helpless--simply because she was
constitutionally incapable of looking at the two-dimension page and
seeing, in her imagination, the third dimension. She got raw
potatoes, cut them up to represent the three-dimension figures and
had no further trouble. Another woman overcame the same difficulty
{200} by the same vegetable route. I know an artist, very
successfully designing stage-settings, who can not "tell how things
will look" unless he looks at them, or pictures or models of them,
with his physical eye.
Yet most writers attempt to reach all these types of imagination
without giving the matter a thought! Generally they calmly take it
for granted that every one of their readers has exactly the same
qualities and limitations of imaginative visualization as themselves!
What rich opportunities are lost! Here is a matter in which you
should _not_, without very careful consideration, write things merely
as you see them, at least when it comes to revision, unless your way
of seeing them happens to be the way that is most effective with most
people.
Each author has his individual qualities in this respect. When he
paints his word pictures he tends to use only as many strokes of his
brush as make a complete and satisfying picture for _him_. But how
complete or satisfying will that picture be to the majority of
readers who may not even approximate his qualities of imaginative
visualization? The words he has set down give _him_ {201} the
picture, but will they give it to others? He can not test out the
visualization of the entire population, but he can at least assign
himself a fairly definite place in the relative scale, scrutinize his
word pictures from the point of view of those of different powers and
probably revise his painting methods so that his stories will gain
surprisingly in popular appeal, either by additional touches or by
changing the relative proportion of the various kinds of stimulus.
A certain writer of western stories found that his work made a strong
appeal to those it interested at all, but that the size of his
audience was far less than seemed justly merited. Apparently all the
elements of good fiction were present. But, if he had considered his
readers' psychology in other respects, he certainly had not done so
as to visualization. He himself could reread his words and from them
see his story world in full. So could I, for we both happened to
have the type of imagination that visualizes readily and fills gaps
when needed. But many readers haven't this type and, as finally
became apparent, these were largely the ones who had failed to become
part of {202} his normal audience. For he had not drawn any visual
pictures for those who need them. To them his story people were
merely names and dispositions, without clothes or bodily appearance,
that did dim things in unseen places. The author had deemed it waste
of words to describe things that were--to him--seen of themselves.
It was difficult to get him to "pad" his stories with visualizing
descriptions, but when he began adding them his audience began to
grow.
_Variation in Other Imaginative Powers_.--You will find that probably
a minority have imaginations that reproduce not only visual
impressions but those of the other senses. Some can hear the sounds
of a story--not merely have an intelligent concept of sounds
mentioned, but actually hear them almost as clearly as if they were
actual physical sounds. Some can taste _via_ their imaginations,
with such vividness that their mouths water. Some can smell the
odors in a story they read. Some can reproduce the impressions that
register through the sense of touch--smoothness, friction, impact,
pressure.
I hope to have for a later volume some statistics that will give some
idea of the {203} relative frequency of the reproduction of the
senses. In any case, the great opportunity for loss or gain of hold
on readers offered through visual imagination is considerably
multiplied by the cases of the four other senses. The field as a
whole is so important it is almost incredible that it does not play a
main part in all teaching of fiction writing. Appeal to the senses
may possibly be included, though I've not chanced on it in my cursory
glances at text-books, but, as previously stated, up to this writing
I've happened to find no writer who has even considered the variation
in sense-imagination among readers.
I recall a statement in Professor Denney's thesis class to the effect
that analysis would show the most popular poets, like Burns and
Longfellow, to be as a rule strongly marked by their imagination
appeal to all or most of the five senses. Is there any reason why a
similarly broad appeal in the case of prose would not reap like
results? The case would seem to be stated thus: The more fully you
reach a reader, the more fully you reach him.
Suppose your imagination sees and hears, {204} but does not smell,
taste or touch. Look at one of your own stories. Have you given
comparatively few pictures or stimuli to your readers' visual and
auditory imagination, perhaps taking it for granted that all readers
would supply them fully and satisfactorily, as you do? Or have you,
simply absorbed in your own personal equation, failed to put into
your story any considerable number of stimuli to smell, taste and
touch imaginations? In either case, consider how greatly you have
weakened your story.
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