I think I must see details, for descriptions, bits of books, here and there, stand out from the main story often. I fancy the color of them is ephemeral.
I have no remembrance of any thing in mathematics from the multiplication table to trigonometry that didn't spellTrouble for me with a monster T.
My response to an author who interests me is evidently helpful. I have found, often, that in rereading something I have liked I have built on many additions, colored it with my imagining.
Sorry, but I'm afraid my "stock room" is bare. Maybe I would find Owen Wister's or a stage cowboy in it, never having seen a live one.
My pictures come from original locations—geography I have covered myself.
No great difference in the working of the imagination between writing and reading. If so, one of degree. By the looks of my hair, when "genius" (?) has burned, I should judge I may get greater emotional depths when creating.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes: Visual imagination, yes. Hearing, no. Taste, smell, touch, pain, thirty to fifty per cent. Colors: distinct. No solid geometry. Concept is as good as three volumes—better; want to roll my own. No stock pictures. Reading vs. writing, no difference. As to tools, yes.
Frank C. Robertson: My imagination reproduces the story-world of an author, though with limitations. That is, I see a story-world when reading but I frequently realize later that it is not just the same as the author's. This, of course, is not the fault of the author, but comes from my own peculiar reactions. For instance: the author says "the lion roared." I don't hear the roar, I see a lion open his mouth in the motions of roaring. He says: "the gurgling brook." I don't hear it gurgle—I see it cascading over stones and know that it is gurgling. But if he forces me to it like "out in the darkness there sounded a strange, droning noise," I actually hear a strange, droning noise. In lesser measure this holds true with all the senses. The author speaks of his starving hero eating luscious fried bananas. I can see those bananas and my mouth waters, but to save my life I can not taste them. My sense of sight predominates. But where acute physical pain or mental agony is described I think I actually feel. At every blow of the lash my flesh shrinks and my nerves recoil. And I am as easily moved to tears as the veriest schoolgirl—which is why I write he-man stuff. Cold, callous and indifferent.
The mental pictures that I see are usually clear-cut and the coloring very much as I see the same objects in real life.
My response is not limited to the exact degree to which the author describes. I frequently seize upon a mere impression left by the author and from it build up a whole chain of pictures. I find this a decided handicap in my own writing for I am prone to leave a mere impression of the setting, and the scenes which are so clear to me are blurred in the mind of the reader. In rewriting I find that I always have to make the setting and atmosphere more vivid. In these mental pictures each case, or object, has a distinct individuality.