I hate to read a book that does not produce an individual vision and so add to one's stock, as it were. The chief delight of reading seems to me exploratory.
On the contrary, a writer who can form images is a great writer. But having images distorted or ill-formed is merely tiresome, and annoys one with a sense of wasting time.
Yes, all the difference between eating a meal and cooking it. (Incidentally I would always prefer the cooking.)
My brother-in-law, Frank Norris, once said that when he really wished carefully to depict a scene, he appealed to each of the five senses in turn; and to a greater or lesser degree I don't think any picture can be painted without one or more of these "tools."
Anne O'Hagan: It seems to me that the only possible answer to this question is: "It depends upon the genius of the author." There are villages in England I could find my way about in, there are drawing-rooms in which I perfectly see the furnishings, because of Jane Austen and Thackeray. I have grown hungry reading Dickens' meals. I suffered utter fatigue, misery and coldness crawling back to the farm with "Hetty" in Adam Bede; and I think I had something the same actual feeling of physical exhaustion in reading the Italian home scenes in The Lost Girl. But for the most part the impressions are impressions only, not experiences.
Pictures are colored when I actually have them, and details distinct.
All mathematics gave me trouble, but I think that the climax of despair was reached in calculus instead of solid geometry.
Response follows vivid suggestion as well as detailed description—when there is response.
I suppose that if the author of the village church or the cowboy did not cause me to see a definite creation, I have a property-room church or cowboy which my imagination would fit into the story. But I think with a little help I am able to construct a new one for the story in question.
Probably yes. That is, I should be bored by not being allowed to use my own imagination a little.