Walter Prichard Eaton: I certainly see in imagination, as clearly as in reality, when my mind is concentrated. I couldn't write anything if I didn't see as I wrote. A person without strong visual imagination may be a great philosopher, but he can never enter fiction.
I never studied solid geometry. Plane was the only mathematics I ever could do, though!
I have, as a reader, stock pictures only for stock stories. If a writer can not compel an individual image in me, I throw away his manuscript.
I resent description that is a mass of detail, when my picture is formed at a sentence. Most American magazine writers sin this way. I skip the second half of nearly all their description. The French never sin this way. They select few, but the salient details.
Of course one's imagination differs in the acts of reading and creating—i. e. the process of employment differs. In reading it is passive and follows a lead, in creating, it is active. That is why it is more fun to create—and why it tires you quicker. The imagination itself is the same in the two processes, but in the second it has a sense of freedom. Artists have initiative of imagination.
I don't know what you mean by considering these matters as tools of your trade. I have had always an interest in psychology, especially the psychology of esthetics. But it never occurred to me that anybody could possibly write creative literature without the ability to reassemble sensory impressions and hold them steadily by the power of the imagination. If I hadn't possessed to some extent this power, I should never have tried to write. The stronger one has it, the more inevitably he becomes an artist.
E. O. Foster: Having been a copy reader I am afraid that when I read a story I do not allow my imagination the play it should have and I fear that this probably reacts in my own composition. For me to get the full benefit of a story it must be off the ordinary track, for instance—F. St. Mars' stories of animal life appeal to me. I could see and sense the different animals in their habitat. Talbot Mundy's stuff appeals to me but in a different way. I think it is by association, for I have lived a great deal of my life in foreign countries.
I can not see things with my eyes shut, but if I concentrate my memory will bring back details I can write down. For instance in one of my stories I spoke about an "obscene lizard." This particular lizard, a "Gecko," was perched on top of a broken bamboo a short distance in front of one of our trenches in Manila. He was making the night hideous. I threw a club at him just as he started his "yammer." The club hit the bamboo and he went sailing into the air to land ultimately on the ground. I can feel as plainly to-day as I could then my astonishment when, with the sound of his impact, came the "you-you-y-o-u," with which he always ended his call. You could not page him.
Scenery to me comes back in its color, as do paintings, but a house—even the house in which I was born and reared—does not seem to me to have color.
I have not studied solid geometry, therefore I can not answer this question.