My response is not limited to the exact degree to which the author's description makes vivid, for I frequently find myself trying to add to an author's conception.
I think possibly that when I visualize a church it is possibly the little one in which I first attended divine service, but I have seen so many cowboys and so many soldiers that I imagine each case produces individual vision. I have not been inside many churches lately.
There is a decided difference in the behavior of my imagination when I am reading a story and when I am writing one. Nor have I considered these methods as tools of my trade.
Arthur O. Friel: My imagination does not reproduce any of these sense impressions, or pain. If the writer has made these things vivid they register strongly, but I do not actually see, hear and smell them as in real life. Didn't study geometry. Am limited virtually, though not actually, to the writer's portrayal. No stock pictures. Reading vs. writing? Yes. When writing a story I live it. Have not considered these as tools of my trade.
J. U. Giesy: Personally in reading a story my imagination reproduces the scene of the author only as tinctured by my own characteristic bent, I suspect. I actually see the characters and settings—I mentally appreciate the sounds, flavors, tastes, smells and tactile impressions described, but wholly in a comparative rather than any other sense. The pain sense in a physical way, I can not say I have ever felt—on a mental plane, as applying to pathos, grief, etc., I have always been keenly responsive. In writing I have at times laughed heartily at some humorous situation or wept at the emotion I sought to convey by the situation and cause for grief expressed.
In "seeing things with my eyes shut" I believe that the pictures take on the mentally pre-recorded tints resulting from past experiences of life. Details with me are exceedingly distinct—a setting or locale is as clearly apprehended as though it for the moment was actually existent in a physical state.
Geometry never troubled me. It probably would now as I haven't tried to demonstrate a theorem for years.
I am very apt to carry on the author's concept along my own lines—or to diverge from it at times to an entirely different result.
I have no stock pictures in the sense you mean. Each setting grows as applying to the story in hand. At the same time there is no doubt that each is in a sense the result of past knowledge of such settings, many of them having come down from childhood, and each being modified for the case in hand to suit.
I read in a more or less passive state, trying to get the meat of the author's thought. I write in a state of tense concentration trying to force my thought on the reader. The processes are very different I think.