All depends on the skill of the author in choice of words.
As a reader I have no stock pictures.
I read Lorna Doone and If Winter Comes with equal pleasure. One paints, the other suggests, pictures. But both are presented by masters.
Much less concentrated effort of imagination in reading than in writing.
No.
H. C. Witwer: In reading a story my imagination does reproduce the story-world of the author, or else I can not finish his yarn. I see his characters, the action and setting, as well as if I were there. Usually when I get real interested in a story—and I generally do—I find my mind wandering between the lines and wondering what the author is going to do with his characters. What will his climax be? If he fools me without stretching the long arm of Mr. Coincidence too far, or without a grotesque improbability, I am that author's greatest fan and will read him assiduously, thinking, "Ah, if I could write like that!" Mere trick endings or endings that I have grasped on page two of the story arouse my honest indignation. In a well-written yarn all my senses will react to those described. I have been drenched with spray by Conrad; starved, fought and shed blood with Couzens, Young and, most of all the latter, Arthur O. Friel. I would offer one of his South American jungle tales as a typical story to which all my senses reacted. I would say the "pictures I see with my eyes shut" are colored approximately to the scene and rather clear-cut than blurred.
I never studied solid geometry—at the time I might or should have been, I was studying left hooks and straight rights!
On some things my response is limited to the degree in which the author describes them. On others the mere concept will set me to reproduce just as vividly. In this class I would put mention of the sea, jungle, a prize-fight, Indian warfare, gambling, Chinese settings, and other things that have a strong appeal to my imagination. In the first class I would put things that have no appeal to me and with which I have had no acquaintance. I'm afraid, as a reader, I do have "stock pictures" for village churches, cowboys and other things with which I'm not familiar. (No reflection on the village church—or the cowboy either, for that matter.)
As a reader I do resent too many images, too much description, particularly the latter. A paragraph by a good author is more stimulating to the imagination, more interesting and less of a "drag" on the action of the story, than pages by others. I loathe this sort of thing: "He sat down at his frugal meal of fried eggs, hash browned potatoes, wheat bread, coffee, condensed milk, creamery butter and salt and pepper. The potatoes were a bit crisp. The eggs, turned over once, etc." And I don't care who writes it. It has always irritated me and always will!
There is a great deal of difference in the behavior of my imagination when reading stories and when writing them. When reading, my imagination is joy-riding, when writing it has entered an endurance contest.