When the author of a story has set his stage, I generally see the setting in my own way. Most folks, I think, are guilty of this crime against the author's good intentions; particularly artists.
I have no stock pictures of anything I am reading or writing. Some scenes and things are more or less built to a pattern, but I like to "see" them differently whether they are or not.
When I am reading my imagination is naturally to a large extent subservient to the dictates of the printed page. I can make my own pictures out of the author's words, but I have to keep my imagination within bounds or I'd lose track of "what came next." When I'm writing, I'm the boss. I can go where I please and do what I please. It's a different thing and a different sensation. The first is a receptive mood that may kind o' tug on the reins, but always goes docilely or cheerfully on; the other is a creative one that gropes hopefully through a maze of plot and counterplot, scenes, people who are never where they ought to be when one wants them, and, finally and tediously and most importantly, technique.
I have always considered vizualization as the most valuable tool of my trade. Without it I couldn't write a line. This will indicate how much I use it.
Arthur D. Howden Smith: When I am working at my best I live the story literally. Color and distinctness depend on my physical condition, I think—mental states of the moment have something to do with it. As to solid geometry, don't know what you mean—it never meant anything to me.
Response is up to the author. The question of stock pictures is up to the author. Reading vs. writing—you bet. As to tools, it would take a book to tell you, principally because my reactions are different at different times.
Theodore Seixas Solomons: I am a visualizer in writing and reading. Psychologically there is little difference with me in the two processes, except that in reading I visualize little besides what the author describes, while in writing I visualize all the attacks I make in the creation besides the one that stands—is adopted. That is, at every point where I hesitate between proposed actions, before I adopt one of them, I visualize each as I think of it. Conceiving it in fancy being itself a visualizing process.
I do not hear, smell or taste anything. I can see their action, as they talk, see their lips move, if there is any point in the manner of enunciation—but no sounds. The bear meat may be frying, but I do not hear it hiss or get mentally the aroma. Nor do I get the sense of touch. In fine, beyond visualization of the main picture and its immediate surroundings from point to point in the narrative—my own or that which I read—my mental activities are conceptual only and never sensory. But I do feel. My mind flames to sympathetic feeling. I have a weak replica of all the emotions appropriate to the course of the story. This is far stronger, usually, in writing my own stuff than in reading the fiction of others. I do not attribute this to any superiority of fancy in myself, but only to the fact that the act of imagination may be so much more complete when exercised in the creation of my own fiction than when stimulated by the fiction of another that it moves me correspondingly more. When my story is down the stimuli are, of course, no more numerous for the other person than another writer's have been to me in his story, but in the process of writing that which forms the text of my story I have lived through so very much more concerning the people in it than I have selected to be written that I am beset emotionally and mentally with many times as many effects—and am affected proportionally.
To sum up my answer to this question—when I have pictured physically the scene and people, either in writing or reading, it is my intellect alone that works as to what takes place in the sense world among them. Just as in a cinema we imagine by the action of the mind alone sounds, touches, smells, so my stories (and those I read) are cinemas in which I imagine, mentally only, the rest of the action. The mental physical picture—if you get me—is data enough, stimulation enough to suggest to my mind all other sense perceptions in their effects. That is, if I see the bear-meat frying, I can readily supply smells and touches and sounds without experiencing any imagined sense impressions of smells, touches or sounds.
I see things as well with my eyes open, if moving objects do not sidetrack my attention, as with them shut. In fact, I can not plot or write without seeing things, any more than I can describe the route to my place in the mountains without visualizing it as I describe. I see things in their natural colors. Necessary details are distinct. The picture, however, is hazy "off the main trail." That is, my visualizing apparatus is economical—or penurious—enough to refuse to draw and color in areas beyond the main trend of the story I'm conceiving or writing.