With "my eyes shut" I have no limitations in color or in detail.
I took honors in solid geometry.
Generally I am offended by a wealth of description and detail which prevents me from independent thinking; I much prefer to receive a vivid suggestion and to be allowed to ferment it myself.
As a reader I have no "stock pictures." I put it up to the author to show me what he has; if he fails to convince me, I walk out. I decline to substitute my own conceptions for those which he impliedly guaranteed to provide me.
Next question answered already—above.
Obviously, after what I have already said, there is all the difference in the world between the state of my imagination when I read and when I write.
Never. If I had, I should be too self-conscious to write.
Richard Matthews Hallet: The trend of the questions on imagination seems to be to discover what type of imagination mine is, auditory, visual or motor. These I believe are the psychological divisions. I think mine is auditory. I get things I hear better than things I see. A word or two may mean more to me than a whole landscape. Words collect values round themselves in some queer way and they provide you with an imaginary world not so sharp as the real one—that is my case at least—but to which my emotional reaction is vastly keener. I wonder if the imaginations of most writing men are not chiefly auditory, with a good infusion of the motor type where there is a knack of swift flowing narrative. Certainly the chief preoccupation of the writer is with words and not things. Does he have the same grasp of detail as the practical-minded man? I doubt it, even where his writing is all made up of detail. He husbands the details he does grasp, that is all. They are precious and astonishing to him for the very reason that he is weak on that side. Lafcadio Hearn's writing is a gorgeous mass of color and of sensuous appreciation; yet the man was half blind, I believe. His sight was certainly defective. This may have helped him. Beethoven's symphonies were none the worse for their composer being deaf. Obstacles may be the very things that compel genius to extend itself.
Mathematics hits me on my blind side entirely.
I do not resent having images formed for me, I demand it. I dislike sketchy writing. I'm not speaking of the enormous suggestiveness which words of course have in themselves, but of a habit of leaving the reader to fill in the picture. If most stories were of the Lady or the Tiger type, they would fall flat, in my opinion. A story, to ring the bull's eye, should be self-contained.