Each case produces its own picture.
No difference.
Yes. I have made an effort—am making, I hope, a constantly more persistent effort—to use them in this way: by striving through proper word selection, even if it be only one adjective, to make every noun, so to speak, in my stories, mean something. I am trying to make the most minor of my characters have a scraggly moustache, a hump on his back, or some tiny detail which will set him apart in the reader's mind and make him distinctive. In the same manner, food, a room, a scene, a tool—I am trying to incorporate some brief, flash-like description which will make that thing vivid and give it individuality. The more I write the more I am growing able to look at my writing as a trade or craft and comprehend the mechanics of it, and that attitude, I believe, will constantly tend to make a writer consider the tiny details and put them in with deliberation rather than inspiration as the stimulus.
George M. A. Cain: In reading a story, I think my imagination aims to reproduce the picture naturally attaching to it. To what degree this is clear in detail or color depends entirely on the interest evoked by the story. Often the images are so real as to produce physical reactions. I have grown actually ill over a description of some repulsive disease. But I can not say that any mere suggestion of pain in any form has induced an actual like pain in, e. g., some given part of my body. The distress of imagining pain with me is entirely mental, capable of reacting in physical lassitude, inducing nausea only as it becomes repulsive in its manifestations to other senses than feeling. Suppurations are really the only things which I can not imagine without the physical reactions becoming local in my stomach. As for tastes and smells, these have few keenly attractive reactions with me in actual life, and I am affected by imaginations of them only adversely. I can read the Cardinal's Snuff-box without sneezing. But I am pretty apt to reach for my pipe, if I read much about smoking.
Solid and plane geometry were the only mathematics I ever found so absolutely easy that a glance was sufficient for almost any proposition.
I think response is more or less determined by the degree to which the author dwells on description. As a matter of fact, in answering this and the following question, I would say that it is my opinion that we all form our pictures from things we have actually seen. Stage settings, drawings, faces—I believe we conjure entirely from memory. If the author goes into details, we correct our memory pictures to make them correspond with his stage directions. This I have sometimes found capable of actual interference with really writing. In one or two instances I have had so vivid a picture in my mind of the relative positions of certain actors or furnishings, when, say, a character had to use his right hand in the action, and could not have done so in the picture—that I have had to stop and draw diagrams to straighten things out and be sure of avoiding what some reader might instantly see as impossible.
I rather think the images I create in my own writing are clearer to my mind. I have to stay with them longer. Some months ago my wife asked me in startled tones what was the matter with my face. I had to admit that I was just up from writing of the appearance of an insane man in a cabin door and was unconsciously trying to look like him in my efforts to chalk off his most noticeable features for the readers' benefit.
I have considered these things as trade tools only to the extent of being careful to have very clear images before me in writing. Sometimes I have found them almost a disadvantage. My own picture was so clear, I took for granted the reader's seeing what I saw, without my telling him what he could not guess.
Robert V. Carr: Paragraph III is another set of questions involving, to my limited comprehension, heredity, environment, physical condition, psychological wounds, racial memories and the power of intelligence far beyond that possessed by my little finite mind. Who can tell where matter merges into spirit? Who can tell where the imagination of the writer leaves off and the imagination of the reader begins? When I think of the Infinite, I think only of a word. Wise cuckoos, ready to be interned in some asylum, assert that they can imagine the Infinite. What man can imagine a million objects? It is an unusual man who can imagine ten thousand. It makes me hunt for comparisons to imagine a thousand. I have to remember how my regiment looked in line, or its length in a column of fours. What man, then, can imagine thought? He can babble words, he can mumble words, but, after all, he can not imagine thought. He can shovel a lecture on Divine Intelligence into a set of open-billed morons, but, when he is through and has drained the pitcher of water, hasn't he merely put in an evening shoveling words?
Stock pictures? How do I know that my ideas are not all stock ideas? How does any writer know but what his dearest thoughts—thoughts he fondly fancied were his own little, bright-eyed children—may have been fathered by some tribal psychological wound? His most cherished idea may be the offspring of some hereditary weakness. He may write sex poetry because his grandfather was a roué. His little ideas he considers so wonderfully original, may be little stock ideas born of racial stock ideas, family stock ideas, environment stock ideas. The heavy-domed scientists claim the Anglo-Saxon habit of meat-eating has produced a certain set of stock ideas. I consider myself merely a human animal who, when he bumps into something he can not comprehend, gives it an impressive name and lets a gaudy word stand for the gap in his intelligence. There are men who have a ready answer for every question; Congress and the asylums are full of them.