posted
One of my bosses told the creative team that we should use lots of imagery in our marketing, because most people read in pictures. That is to say, that when most people read "It was a large, red house with white brickwork trimming the sides" they form a picture of such a house in their minds.
I'm curious if you find this to be true. When you read a sentence, or a description, do you find yourself imagining the thing, forming a picture of it? Sometimes this guy was right on the money, and sometimes he was blowing smoke. The idea to use strong imagery is useful, but I wonder about the veracity of the claim he used to support it.
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I never notice when I writer doesn't include a lot of visual or active clues. For instance when two characters have a long dialogue, I forget about the physical act of talking, I don't imagine how the characters are standing, and I don't see their facial expressions. Actually this is why I like audiobooks sometimes, they do a bit of this work for you.
My images are always incredibly vague, and I NEVER imagine myself as part of the story. I have heard that many people imagine themselves as the main character, but I have never once experienced this. I always attach some amorphous and indistinct face to the person, loosely based on someone I know or ave seen before. This can get interesting when you meet someone and then use their face for a character in a book, then you spend a little more time with that person and they stop working for you as that character... then the imagery gets a bit confused in my mind.
I never imagine things like "a red house with big windows" or something; it always goes right out of my mind unless they are described or referenced later. Strangely though, I imagined alot of things in the book "a river runs through it" in exactly the way they were depicted in the movie. Except that Paul (the younger brother) is a much bigger man in the book.
Mostly film adaptions disapoint me because they are limiting. They don't allow the reader to look at a scene from a thousand angles in the imagination, and they are often dissapointingly too concrete for me.
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The easiest example, I guess, would be Star Wars novels, because they're set on so many different worlds. There are some you only see in the books, and I still have clear images of all of them -- Corellia, etc. I had a clear image of Mon Calamari, and then Lucas messed with it in his movie (that's the weirdest -- when someone makes a movie from a book and it doesn't look like it should.)
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I definatly do, too. I am a very visual person. Even when there is no description I have an image in my head of the situation, not usually of the details but of the space the characters are within (whether they are on a plain, in a city, in a house, etc.)
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I usually only have vague images in mind and even those only come when something is happening in a story that needs to be visualized. When descriptions get complex I tend to tune them out. For example, when I read "It was a large, red house with white brickwork trimming the sides", I saw a quick image of a red house but didn't add in any white brickwork. I suspect this is because I'm not a very visually observant person. When somebody changes their hair or wears colored contact lenses I'll probably notice that something is different but I might not notice what.
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I'm the opposite-- I think in words and sounds. I will read a description and retain every detail of that description, and it's almost like I'm living in that world-- but that's because the important thing to me is those words, that description itself. Most of my memories of things I've actually seen or experienced are of sounds, events, but stored more as words, only vague flashes of pictures-- the audio is extremely clear, there may be a scent tied to it, but the visual, I store as a description more than as an actual visual.
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I don't picture something while I'm reading it, but when I come across something in real life that matches that description, I tend to think of whatever it was that was being described. That was wordy..
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I am like ketchupqueen, I am audial. I can come up with imagery, but that's not as natural as letting the words guide me. Unsurprisingly, I will usually retain all of the character names, place names etc. I also need to study by reading out loud so I can hear the words.
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I'm extremely, extremely visual. Even without extensive description (or any at all), I will automatically assign features to people and surroundings when I'm reading. Details provided by the author serve to make these images more accurate.
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Yes, I do, and it's always weird when you go to see the movie after reading the book and a certain camera angle on a character is EXACTLY the way you pictured it...that happened a lot in Narnia for me.
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I often have visuals for what I read, but they are rarely distinct or cohesive. Characters are always vague faces, yet places are usually clear. I find that imagining the setting is easier than picturing people. Maybe it's because people are constantly changing whereas the setting tends to remain the same. It was so odd to see the LOTR trilogy on film and see so many of the places look exactly as I imagined them. The characters definitely didn't look like anything in my head (i.e. Elijah Wood as Frodo) but I didn't find that to be a huge problem.
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I don't think I do. I don't totally disregard descriptions, but I don't automatically visualize a place or a person. If I think about it I can and do, but the sentence "It was a large, red house with white brickwork trimming the sides" does not automatically bring an image to mind.
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Everytime I read Moby Dick I tell myself I ought to write a screenplay. If the descriptions are vivid, I don't see how you can't see the pictures.
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I don't tend to see vivid pictures when I read, more like vague impressions. But it does make a difference to me if the prose is beautiful or not.
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I agree with Tante. I'm more of a auditory person. I can hear dialogue in my head. But I don't see pictures.
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I see very vivid images as I read, but they don't always have anything to do with the written descriptions. If descriptive prose goes on for too long, I invariably skim. I've read The Lord of the Rings several times, but have yet to make it through the chapter with the description of Lothlorien without skimming. It's unbelievably beautiful and magical. I GET that. I swear, I do. Now, please... somebody DO something.
It has to be the second most frustrating passage (for me, as a reader) in my favorite story.
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Wow, I'm surprised by the wide range of responses.
I rarely see pictures when I read, which is why the boss' remark seemed strange to me. I sometimes have a very vague impression of the people and places, but I'm much more interested in the words.
When I write a story, I tend to have a pretty vague idea of what the characters and settings are as well. If someone asked me to draw one of my characters, I'd have no clue. I usually make my girlfriend act as sketch artist, I give her some details, let her make the pictures, and ask her to change them as we go. It's the only way I've found that I have a really good grasp of how my characters look.
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I don't. For me reading is almost like remembering something I had almost forgotten. If a writer is very visual in his descriptions I sometimes see them, or if I am trying to I can, but overall, it seems to me like someone is telling me it. Sometimes, for specific things like very descriptive poetry or prose, I get a very keen sense of what the events/people/surroundings look like, but I have to approach that type of reading differently than I usually do.
Or even better that I am thinking about something....I almost always "hear" the voice telling the story as the little voice inside my head, the one that I "hear" when thinking about something intensely.
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I don't read in pictures, ESPECIALLY for people. Sometimes I imagine scenery, but that's not everytime I read something.
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I have to really concentrate to really "get" descriptive passages. So, if you want to convey "large, red house with white brickwork trimming the sides," by all means show me the picture instead of writing or saying the words. So I guess I agree with the boss for exactly the opposite reason than his stated one -- it's precisely because I don't make that image in my mind out of those words that you need to show me the picture. (y'know, a picture is worth a thousand words)
That said, we are all learn and perceive differently, so I wonder if there is any merit in a blanket rule like that?
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quote:Originally posted by Uprooted: I have to really concentrate to really "get" descriptive passages. So, if you want to convey "large, red house with white brickwork trimming the sides," by all means show me the picture instead of writing or saying the words. So I guess I agree with the boss for exactly the opposite reason than his stated one -- it's precisely because I don't make that image in my mind out of those words that you need to show me the picture. (y'know, a picture is worth a thousand words)
I'm pretty much the exact same way. I almost never form much of a visual image when I read. I also agree with you that it makes me more interested in actually seeing someone else's interpretation of a setting due to my own lack of a visual image.
This has always been helpfull to me when seeing movie adaptations, since I generally don't start out with some preconcieved vision of what things look like. As long as the plot hasn't been screwed around with too much, I'm usually fine with it.
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quote:Originally posted by Amanecer: I usually only have vague images in mind and even those only come when something is happening in a story that needs to be visualized. When descriptions get complex I tend to tune them out. For example, when I read "It was a large, red house with white brickwork trimming the sides", I saw a quick image of a red house but didn't add in any white brickwork. I suspect this is because I'm not a very visually observant person. When somebody changes their hair or wears colored contact lenses I'll probably notice that something is different but I might not notice what.
I tend to do that too. If I start visualizing, and get what I like, and enough of what's important, I stop and don't add anymore. For example, I never imagined Taleswapper with a long beard; even though I'm pretty sure it says that explicitly.
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: Wow, I'm surprised by the wide range of responses.
I rarely see pictures when I read, which is why the boss' remark seemed strange to me. I sometimes have a very vague impression of the people and places, but I'm much more interested in the words.
When I write a story, I tend to have a pretty vague idea of what the characters and settings are as well. If someone asked me to draw one of my characters, I'd have no clue. I usually make my girlfriend act as sketch artist, I give her some details, let her make the pictures, and ask her to change them as we go. It's the only way I've found that I have a really good grasp of how my characters look.
I never know what the faces of people look like besides vague descriptions. Sometimes if I'm reading and I stop and try to think of what exactly Enders' or Alvins' faces should look like, I end up frustrating myself. It's very easy to keep everyone seperate in my mind, but I'm pretty sure that If I were to think of a lot of characters, they would look the same. I don't like when an author is too vague or too detailed. There is an area where descriptions are just right. I think many authors nail this area dead on, but in my opinion, others such as J.R.R.Tolkein go too far overboard, and I tend to get drawn away from the immersion of the story.
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posted
Ha! I guess I am a very visual person... I was in a creative writing seminar where our assignment one week was a character sketch. We had to write something about a character of our own imagining, in some way that defined him/her.
In class, we passed them out and picked someone else in the class to read them. A guy in the class wrote a detailed description of my boyfriend, then had me read it to the class. e described him as having "a full beard", meaning not that he actually had a beard, but that hair grew thickly on his face. It threw me a little.
I read it aloud, then asked the guy, "Is this someone I know?" He just started laughing.
I think Hamson is right, though. Too much or too little = bad.
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posted
I'm not a detail person, especially when it comes to people. In fact, I have trouble noticing details about people in real life, and thus I sometimes have trouble recognizing people I don't see every day until I'm right next to them or they start talking. Because of this if I have a mental image of a character it is vague at best, maybe height, and feeling of how they move, and a splash of hair color. Thinking about this seems strange because I've always considered myself a visual learner. I can't remember things as well if I've only heard them, I have to see them. But maybe there's a difference between those who remember the words themselves (written) and those who remember everything as pictures. I need enough detail to know what's going on but if there's too much I just skim through it.
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quote:If descriptive prose goes on for too long, I invariably skim. I've read The Lord of the Rings several times, but have yet to make it through the chapter with the description of Lothlorien without skimming. It's unbelievably beautiful and magical. I GET that. I swear, I do. Now, please... somebody DO something.
Heard and seconded. Is this why re-reading those books is so commonplace?
I also get images in my head as I read. With some stories, I try to force my brain to construct new images. With others, I let my mind take its own path. Many times, my mental images are recycled: faces from people I've known, for example. (Personalities vary a lot; I never mix up stories and the real world.)
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I tend to see what is happening in books, with more attention to the action and the talking and where the characters are standing/sitting/moving. I put up a vague setting for them, but I get annoyed if the author tries to describe the setting too much. I can't keep the picture in my head if I have to remember there's a blue box with yellow trim in the corner, a chair against the wall, a ladder climbing up into the loft, and a long table littered with papers in some strange foreign text. I generally skim room and scenery descriptions, get a basic feel for the setting, and as those objects get dealt with in the story, I'll add them in the description.
Writing descriptions for setting bothers me, too. I tend to do way too little and get blasted for it by critiquers or I go around the room in a circle describing it, which bores the heck out of me. I prefer the former, but would like a balance.
I'm in the middle of Shadow of the Giant, and I don't remember words on a page when I remember the story so far. I remember pictures, like a movie, but I can also hear thoughts, which doesn't seem strange to me or odd like a voiceover in a movie would.
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posted
Tstorm, I think re-reading the books is commonplace because people have a connection with them. There are lots of books with excessive descriptions that don't get re-read by lots of people.
I was never very big on re-reading until I got older and realized that my memory of what I'd read 10-20 years ago was not as vivid as it once was. I used to be able to quote books I'd read once, because I could still see the words in my mind (even though my memories NEVER included page numbers, for some bizarre reason). Now, though? Nope. *sigh*
*pushes her reading glasses up on her nose and mutters "Get off my lawn!"*
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quote: It's very easy to keep everyone seperate in my mind, but I'm pretty sure that If I were to think of a lot of characters, they would look the same. I don't like when an author is too vague or too detailed. There is an area where descriptions are just right. I think many authors nail this area dead on, but in my opinion, others such as J.R.R.Tolkein go too far overboard, and I tend to get drawn away from the immersion of the story.
I agree, but with someone who is very good at writing those descriptive passages it is different. I think the reason I reread those books so many times is because every time I did I found something in those books that I had not reconized the other times I had read it. If descriptive passes are poorly done (or even just average) then it can be amolst unbearable, but if it is well done I will at times just reread it to get some of the "color" I missed the first time through.
There is so much detail in Tolkien that you can read it over and over again and almost always find something new. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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My mental pictures are more vague and atmospheric than detailed. Take Rivendell, for example--it didn't really look like that ("that" being the movie) in my head, but I couldn't tell you what it did look like. But when I saw the film, I did think, "yes, that's just right!" Same with Minas Tirith & Rohan.
Lorien and Galadriel, on the other hand--nope. Didn't match my (very vague) mental pictures at all. Probably has more to do with what I perceive as beautiful than with how closely Jackson matched Tolkien's description, though.
I can understand why some would find the Lothlorien section boring, but I guess it's what resonated with me more than anything--the beauty that would be lost with the passing of the (whatever Age they were in). When the Fellowship was sad to leave, so was I. And I think I carried Lothlorien in my heart just like Frodo and Sam did.
When I finally got around to reading the Appendices a few years ago--and no, I didn't read all about runes and every bit of history, but I read a lot of it--I was heartbroken by the story of the death of Aragorn and then Arwen, all alone in a Lothlorien that retained none of its former magic.
posted
I sort of figured that might be it. I never quite got what Goldberry saw in the guy.
But there's another example of my poor visualization skills. I mean, Tolkien spends some time describing the color of Tom's clothing--all I can remember right now is that his boots were yellow (probably because it sort of rhymes with Bombadillo). But that whole description never registered with me until I saw an artist's rendition. In my mind, I guess I just skimmed all that and had a vague "eccentric dresser" impression. I think the last time I read the books I made myself think about the physical descriptions and take a minute to recreate them in my mind's eye. But it's definitely an extra step for me.
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posted
I do! When I read I swear it's like watching a movie - a few minutes in I become almost unaware of the actual words on the page and just watch the movie, if that makes sense. I'm an extremely fast reader (so much so that I used to lie during timed reading in school about how much I read ) and sometimes I wonder if my "way" of reading/watching is why I read so fast.
quote:Originally posted by Space Opera: I do! When I read I swear it's like watching a movie - a few minutes in I become almost unaware of the actual words on the page and just watch the movie, if that makes sense. I'm an extremely fast reader (so much so that I used to lie during timed reading in school about how much I read ) and sometimes I wonder if my "way" of reading/watching is why I read so fast.
space opera
I was about to post this same thing. If I'm reading a book I truly enjoy, the front track of my mind will simply stop seeing words on the page and move instead to images. Some back part of my brain will continue reading along passively, just so the movie keeps playing. I wouldn't want to read books for leisure any other way, though this does make reading books I don't enjoy particularly tedious (Odd quirk, I hate reading things if all I can imagine is words on a page.)
Incidentally, the same is true of most activities I actively enjoy. Hiking, listening to music, and even occasionally parts of work I'll have the same thing happen (imagination / visualization in front, other tasks in the background). The best indicator of this is when I notice the time, and wonder where the last hour or two actually went.
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posted
For me, it works as a kind of really fuzzy TV. Details in the book really dont do much for me, i remember images from similar images ive seen, or i just make up my own setting in my head , which im sure different from what was intended. Its kinda like trying to make a Movie from a book, and get every single description right on the money...it just dosent happen, ppl immaginations are what makes reading so great...
Did any of that makie any sense?
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) and sometimes I wonder if my "way" of reading/watching is why I read so fast.
