Yes, I do resent, as said above.
Works better and more freely when I am writing them.
No, haven't used them as tools, but, believe me, I will hereafter.
My wife, just reading McTeague, calls my attention to Frank Norris's overdeveloped tendency to use the olfactory image. For example, he pictures the beginning of marital disillusionment by "McTeague's" consciousness of the smell of his wife's hair-brush. Maybe I have the details wrong, but anyway "McT." on entering the bedroom is conscious of the smell of the hair-brush where one of our modern heroes would smell the fragrant powder on her palpitant flesh, etc. Also in a mob scene in The Octopus, where some thousands of the Californian peasantry get together to hunt jackrabbits on a hot summer day, Norris speaks of the "strong ammoniacal odor." Now I think the average reader doesn't feel with his nose unless the author, as in these cases, deliberately calls his attention. That is, if you write "a sweating crowd" most of us would think of the glistening brow rather than the animal odor.
Probably that was in the ordinary practise, the naturalist school, but there seems to be evidence that Norris ran more naturally to the smell-image than most of them.
William Harper Dean: When I read a story I must live through it with the characters. If this is impossible I will not stay with it. If I can not suffer and rejoice with the characters, laugh with them, hate with them, the story lacks the power to produce that reaction in me which my own stories must produce in me. If the style grates or lumbers along I become disgusted—the fine charm is lacking.
Yes, I see things with my eyes shut—place my characters in a situation, then stand off, as it were, and watch them react, then record what they do and say. I can't ram words down their throats, neither can I drag them about like dummies and think they are acting.
Solid geometry to me was always more immediately assimilated in its logic than analytical geometry or calculus. The former made pictures, the latter nebulous nothings.
An author who can, like Knut Hamsun, write one line describing a situation, then pass on to the next stage of plot development, gives me that delightful privilege of placing my own interpretation to the line and, in my mind, reading several chapters while I let my eyes follow into his next paragraph. And that's writing. Not everybody can do it, for not every author is a writer. The reader deserves latitude for exercising his interpretative powers—if an author sets about to argue out every situation down to the orthodox Quod erat demonstrandum, he not only clutters up the story with words but he cheats the reader and the reader resents it. I might go a step beyond and say he is casting reflections upon the reader's intelligence.
I have no stock pictures for any setting or any character. I construct them as I need them from life. I always can produce a prototype for anything I use, for I don't attempt to write about any setting or any character with which I have never made contact. It's no trouble to scent out inventions in a story; they grate and make the story squeak and clank. I am running a series of stories in The Ladies' Home Journal built around a boy character of the twelve-year age. He is my own son. Where he plays, I know every nook and cranny of that great woodland park, I know the code of ethics held by his clan, I know how his mind reacts under certain stimuli. When I need a character like the ogre which every boy his age has, I find him in the neighborhood, or, failing, go back and resurrect one which I knew in my boyhood.