Mary Stewart Cutting: It entirely depends on the power with which the story is written. As a rule, my imagination does not produce the same results on my senses as do the actual stimuli themselves. But, on the other hand, if I may give an instance from Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams, the dinner party given by Alice to her apparent suitors is so vivid to me in every detail that I can never get over the feeling of being actually there in the heat and the murkiness and the smell of the brussels-sprouts.
There are no limitations to the pictures seen with your eyes shut. I think we have stock pictures in our minds, unless they are described.
There is a great difference in the behavior of my imagination when reading them and when writing them. One has to use continued effort to keep the proper proportions in one's imagination. When you are reading stories it is simply a relaxation.
Everything is a tool of one's trade.
Elmer Davis: Depends on how good an author he is. As a matter of fact, my senses respond in detail much less than I had imagined till I tried it with your questions in mind. Usually I have a mere intellectual response to sensory images in a story, though on occasions, with especially good writers or in stories of unusual interest, I feel them. E. g. I get no feeling of smooth contact or gentle pressure from Cytherea or The Sheik, though those stories are full of this item. But I do from certain poets—Catullus, Donne, author of the Song of Songs which is Solomon's. A. Dumas and your Mr. Gordon Young can generally give me an impression of rough contact or hard impact. I taste food described in a story when I am hungry. But in the main my senses don't respond—sight and hearing come across more often than the others.
I assimilate the scene described to the nearest like it that I have known—very generally, of course, and following the author's descriptions in principal details.
I believe I incline to see them in black and white except when other colors are mentioned. Details blurry unless set down. (Note for argument. Yet I much prefer stories which leave details to my own imagination in the main. The curse of Hergesheimer is his overloading with minutiæ of interior decorating. The great value of most Oriental stuff, notably the Arabian Nights and Herodotus, is their use of stock phrases "fair as a moon on the fourteenth night," etc., which let you make your own picture.)
No more trouble.
Largely answered above. The creation of atmosphere and suggestion is of course a delicate business, as you know. When it is done right I much prefer the suggestive concept.
Stock pictures drawn from recollections of childhood (mainly) for most things. Country church, barnyard, I have from the age of three. With variations, of course, to fit the particular case. Most images fall into certain types based roughly on things I have seen.