I am not quite sure that I understand what this question means. Of course highly imaginative writers—especially if they have the great technical gift of connotative writing—can start your imagination with a broken phrase, can keep it working long after their words have stopped. It is as though they left echoes in one's mind. I think H. G. Wells makes this magic in my mind more often than any other writer that I know. Although I am half inclined to say that Henry James—who can also involve me in a maze of obscurity—is his equal if not his superior in this respect.
I am sure that each case produces its individual vision.
I don't remember ever formulating this while reading; but of course I realize that an author may have a too explicit style.
As to reading vs. writing. I think not, because it has never occurred to me that there could be any such difference.
In writing description, I always do try to appeal to the five senses of my reader. Perhaps this is so because in the writing courses which I took at Radcliffe College the instructors impressed it on us to do that.
Will Irwin: Answering generally the complex questions under the head: In reading writers who are "my men," as Stevenson, Wells, Anatole France, I find myself seeing the scenes in my imagination. The fight in David Balfour, the meeting of "Pontius Pilate" and "Laelius Lamia" in Le Procurateur de Judée, are to me as though I had witnessed them. I hear the sounds, but I can not say with truth that I taste the flavors or experience the smells. That doubtless is a matter of individual peculiarity. I have almost no sense of smell. On the other hand, I often see the colors most vividly. That again comes from individual peculiarity—I take the greatest delight in color. In a treatise on dreams which I have read recently the author says that dreams are like photographs; that they have no color, only one low tone and white. If that is so, I must be a freak. I am always dreaming in colors—as a few nights ago of seeing a procession in russet brown carrying rose-colored banners. Sometimes my imagination, in reading, reproduces the sense of touch, and occasionally the sense of pain. When I "see things with my eyes shut," I think the image is usually blurred and lacking in detail except for one central figure. But I do usually see such pictures in colors. I perceive what you are driving at in your question about solid geometry. I run true to form. Other mathematics did not interest me. I loathed arithmetic and algebra and I quit trigonometry from absolute boredom. But I was a sharp at geometry, both plane and solid.
I think that the mere concept of an author whom I recognize as one of my men will often set me to imagining things beyond those which he has described. By the same token I am sometimes bored by over-detailed description. I can not say, however, that I have stock pictures for persons and things which come within the limits of my experience. I do, however, for categories of persons and things which I have not seen—as a cavalier, a Zulu chief or a king on his throne. The visual faculty of my mind works in the same manner when I am reading a story as when I am writing one. In both cases I have a succession of color-pictures.
Certainly I use these things as tools of my trade—especially the picture faculty. One analytical passage in Barrett Wendell's treatise on Shakespeare has been very useful to me. He shows that Shakespeare's magic consists largely in creating a succession of haunting pictures in the mind. Since I absorbed that principle I have analyzed other magic styles and found this their secret. I have tried to follow in my poor way. I also try to use the tactile style. As it is a thing generally beyond me, I avoid dragging in the sense of smell. I do use sounds a great deal, however.
Charles Tenney Jackson: As to reading a story my imagination goes more to an author's pictures than his plot. I am rather coldly critical about plots and most of them show their ragged spots to me, lapses, improbabilities and negligences. But I like to have the chap show me a setting that seems real. If it's the sea islands, I want their colorful warmth; the Yukon, I want its snows and grim menace to the human actors. People are so much alike that a story does not move me because a writer attempts to show me their differences in different settings. My idea is that human nature reacts exactly the same everywhere. In other words, answering query III if an author gives me a hurricane I want that vivid, smashing, either by description or suggestion, and I don't give a durn who lives through it to rescue the girl. I know to start with that she'll be pulled out. There are certain banal things in either reading or writing fiction that you can't get away from; so I slide past 'em to see how the minor keys can be played.
Frederick J. Jackson: When I read a story I live it, that is, if the author has a sureness of touch with his characters and action that is convincing to me. Some authors I can not read at all. I won't read them. It's a waste of time. They don't get over with me. What I consider a perfect story is one in which the author can make me suffer with his characters, laugh with them, play with them, make my eye look through the sights of an aimed rifle, let my finger be on the trigger.