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.