Inevitably, when someone is trying to advocate reading over watching things on screens, some variation of this old joke gets made: “Books are like movies inside your head!” This assumes everyone can—and does—create a full mental picture when they read, complete with sets, landscapes, costumed characters, and easy-to-follow action.
But that’s not how it works for me.
I’m fascinated by the variety of ways people “see” (or don’t see) books as they’re reading them. Most of the people I know are those “movie” types, where everything plays out clearly, created by the firmament of their minds. It leaves me paralyzed with envy, as I try in vain to picture (ha) what that must be like. My visual imagination is apparently content to leave quite a lot to the imagination. There are whole fields of study dedicated to how visual imagination works, and even more about how to “train” the imagination to be more precise in order to facilitate comprehension, but that doesn’t mean that we’re all doing this every time we pick up a book.
Sometimes when I read fiction, I consciously pull something directly from my memory—a face, an item, a place I’ve been to or seen in a photograph—as a visual stand-in. Otherwise, I get what I like to call “the smudges.”
Imagine that you had to visualize something, and everything that came to mind looked like an impressionist painting. Specifically, imagine that it looked like Monet’s Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond. Imagine that people were just vague streaks of color with an occasional defining feature—their hair, a pair of glasses, the color of their gown. Imagine that you were only permitted to view the actions through frosted glass. Imagine that you read Lord of the Rings, and most of Tolkien’s descriptions of nature to you just read as green. Green. More green, tree green, grass green, hill green, I get it, it’s green, John Ronald! Let’s go to Isengard, at least I know it looks different there…
Sometimes I’ll “cast” actors as characters in books because it helps me see them better. Otherwise, my general sense of how they look will change constantly. At other times, everything will be a blur, but I’ll know what that one special sword looks like. Occasionally the picture of an environment comes through clearer than usual, and while it is always down to the author’s prose execution, I’m never exactly certain what causes the clarity. I do know that precision has nothing to do with it, and emotion does—when I get a “feel” for a place through prose, it always looks cleaner in my mind’s eye.
There are no movies in my head. There are smudges and jump cuts and brief glimmers of high-res. There is a strange composite of things I know and things I don’t know, like a shoebox diorama half painted and half made out of photographs cut from magazines. And I love when movies get made from stories I adore—whether they overwrite the vague image I had in my head or they fill in the gaps I couldn’t manage, they help me complete the pictures that my brain is choosing to leave half-finished. It’s extra exciting to have to image finally filled in all the way to the edges of the page.
But what’s more fascinating to me is that I don’t mind this setup as a reader. “Seeing” fiction the way I do can be aggravating when other people are busy regaling me with the complex pictures their mind has crafted and I feel left out, but this never diminishes my enjoyment of a story in the moment. It’s normal to me, and completely immersive regardless. I love the odd impressionist paintings of my mind, and the strange, half-formed entities that occupy them. They have their own little dimension to explore. They are real to me, even if they don’t look the part.
So now I’m very curious—how do you see what you read?
Emmet Asher-Perrin remembers reading Harry Potter and just thinking of Ron as “tall red hair with a long nose and freckles”. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
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I’m a very visual person. Sometimes I have intense visuals of books I’ve read, but other times it’s only a vague sense of place like you might get with a dream. With characters I often either have no real visualization of them, or my brain just shorthands a (sometimes ridiculous) fill-in for them. Like, for instance, SHARDIK’s Bel-ka-Trazet is the King of Swamp Castle from Monty Python; Vain from Donaldson’s Covenant Chronicles is a black tailless MewToo (of all things!)
Very rarely I’ll have read a book enough, or the descriptive language is powerful enough, that I can actually close my eyes and picture being there; again, SHARDIK has a lot of these scenes. And once, I was rereading Donaldson’s MORDANT’S NEED, and in the middle of a massive battle scene I got kicked out of the story when I suddenly realized that my visualization this time around was in fact a mirrored image of the previous time I had read it!
Roughly as you describe it, to be honest. I don’t tend to form visual pictures.
Hell, I remember people I’ve met more as text descriptions than as images. Like, I have a mental picture, but it’s not the first thing that comes to mind. I remember “woman I sometimes meet at the bus stop with long dark hair, cracked voice and upbeat demeanor” and “guy who serves coffee with tattoos, slight lisp and cute pink hair” and “niece with poofy ginger hair and lots of questions who likes gravy”. And I mean, sure, I can sort of call their faces up if I try, but it’s not what comes naturally.
I just hear the words in my head as I read lol. It seems strange to me that people can visualize as they read. It’s like trying to talk out loud while thinking something at the same time (try it; it’s almost impossible). Now, I will daydream now and then about a particularly cool scene and how it would look, complete with dramatic music. But I don’t visualize characters, even if given complete descriptions.
I’m reading this and thinking “wow, you mean not everyone visualises books like they’re in the book.” I thought everyone did!!
I don’t see anything at all when I read. If I’m reading something written in the first person or in the third person limited I get the weird sense that I’m hovering over that person’s right shoulder, but I can’t see what they see.
Possibly as a result of this, possibly as a cause of this, I don’t really tend to take in visual descriptions of things or people. I haven’t a clue what any of my favourite characters look like. The only reason I knew that the Weasleys had red hair before the films came out was that we’re told it almost constantly. It only really registered that Adolin Kholin had light hair with streaks of dark in it when I came across an in-depth discussion of how that would work. When a book is set in a place I know well, I might get a flash image of that place, with the intangible presence of the person over whose shoulder I’m hovering, but the characters don’t appear in the place visually.
It has the advantage that when I see a film adaptation of a book it doesn’t matter to me what any of the cast look like (as long as their voice is right). It has the disadvantage that I find it difficult to use descriptions when I’m writing myself, because I have no clue what a useful description would be and because I have no idea what most of my characters look like. I know how their inner monologues are structured, even if they’re not PoV characters, but I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup.
Fascinating stuff, Emily!
I used to have a very strong visual imagination. It is still there, but I don’t use it as often and I can’t conjure up pictures in my head like I used to (just like I don’t often have vivid nightmares like I used to as a child).
I don’t visualize characters or locations when I read. I may have a vague sense and I do associate specific tones or atmospheres with different books, but I don’t have specifics in mind. I can look at fan art or movie/TV casting and say, “No, that’s not what I imagined,” but I cannot come up with a specific image just on my own.
A while ago I found out some people dream in first person. I have always dreamed in third person, and I assumed that everyone else did as well!
I’m a very visual person and I visualize everything I read in great detail. If some detail is not given in the text, I’ll just fill it in, like the colour of furniture or where certain things are situated in a room. Which becomes a bit of a nuisance when I’ve mentally decorated a scene and a few pages later the author gives some additional information that clashes with my mental image and I have to redecorate everything. Hate it when that happens.
@5 – I could have written your comment myself; in fact, I had intended to. I don’t see anything when I read, either, and I feel like it hurts my writing because I write flat descriptions. And not just the descriptions of people, but of places and objects, too. Dialogue, I’m good with. I have a pretty good ear for it and it’s often the first thing I write for a scene. Beginning to end, just dialogue. Then I go back and try to describe everything, and it’s far, far more difficult.
For me, reading is very much an “in the moment” act. Once a character has been established and they’re in the cast, I don’t think of what they look like anymore. Hell, sometimes I don’t even remember what they were up to a few chapters ago. That hurts my writing too, as one can well imagine.
I distinctly remember the visual image I had of Boromir confronting Frodo near the end of Fellowship. They basically stood on a stone stage, darkness at the periphery. Frodo resembled his appearance in the Rankin/Bass animation (though, at the time I hadn’t yet seen it; the visual actually came from an old figurine I had as a child of Bilbo) augmented by rodentlike features (I actually used to have a Guinea pig named Frodo…). Boromir was more like a younger, less corpulent Sir Ector from Disney’s Sword in the Stone.
Early in my reading, I didn’t really put much into visualizing what was going on, but as I’ve increased my speed and comprehension these past few decades, I’ve found I’m able to render more based on the scene (no more darkened stages). Though, a lot of what I visualize are closeups or long shots; rarely ever medium shots (and all these I blame on my time at college dedicated to cinematography and film study). Either way, I’ve found that with training and practice, I’m able to render bigger and better scenes in the old gray matter while reading.
As for what the people look like, I usually resort to the book cover. If there’s been a movie/tv/radio/comic/etc. adaptation, I’ll seed it with that. Otherwise, I fill them in with composites of people I know who fit the mold, or, if I’m being lazy, make everybody look like a character from the video game Ashen.
When it comes to writing, however, I’m training myself to ensure that each scene contributes something to all five senses (where appropriate). I even use a checklist so I remember.
Wow, I don’t think I would like to read as much if I didn’t get the visuals in my head. I mean it’s not a constant stream of images, I probably don’t get 24 fps, but as I read a book it’s as if this fog of war is lifted with each phrase or paragraph and I get to see a little more. This is what keeps me reading late at night when a book has a good suspense, I want to see the next scene!
I think this is why some people, myself included, are very critical of movie adaptations. I found the orcs in the LotR movies absolutely terrifying! In my head, they were mostly just these green goblins. And don’t get me started on Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn. He did a good acting job, but he’s way too pretty (I think it’s here on Tor.com that I read they had considered Nicolas Cage for the role, and while I agree he wouldn’t have fit either, he’s much closer to the visual I had of the caracter). Other times, the movie is so spot on, you can’t remember the image you had in your head before you saw it (Gollum did that, as well as most of the cast from Game of Thrones).
Anyway, seems like there are advantages to not having such clear visuals of what you read and probably it fits with the type if reader you are.
I’m very much in your boat.
One of the most bizarre book-related feelings I have is occasionally trying to discuss a volume with someone and realizing that I have no idea how to pronounce one of the names or world-unique words that’s incredibly common.
As for movies, it took me a while but these days I can generally appreciate them, not as lesser or derivative works, but rather as a different telling of the same story. As much as I love my books, there’s nothing sacrosanct about the printed word being the canonical source of truth when it comes to a tale.
@10 Yes, sometimes after seeing a movie, I start to associate the characters with the actors in the movie. Sometimes it is good, if I like the portrayal, and sometimes it is frustrating, if the actor does not fit what I think the character should look like.
For the most part, I think the LOTR casting is spot-on.
This is such a fascinating topic – the insights of others’ personal reading processes.
As a former English teacher, I learned that students comprehend text better when they visualize what they read. This led me to think about my own reading, which I never considered, and to actively visualize, which I hadn’t done.
Speculative fiction is the perfect genre for visualizations. I vividly remember Perdido Street Station, Argonath, and Gethen, and the moment when I first read about them. These stick out in my mind because of the effort I put in – read, pause, imagine, pause, reread, imagine, and then move on only when you have the scene set. As far as characters go, I’m still stuck. I read their descriptions, keep them in my mind, but usually forget what they look like. I ultimately differentiate them in my own mind, which usually follows the author’s work but not always.
Sometimes my mind is rich with images when I read, and others it’s not. But I’m happy to know that I’m not alone. Also, one thing I learned over the years – it’s ok. At the outset, I said that reading is personal. There’s no right or wrong way, so long as you don’t stop.
I feel like I’m in sort of a middle ground – I see it in my head movie-style, but characters are often hugely…blank? I’m not even sure how to describe it. Whenever I’m looking at fan-art for a book I love, I’m always so shocked by how the characters look – not because I pictured them differently, but because I don’t really have a picture in my head at all of them, even if I’ve just read the passage that describes them.
It’s been an issue in even my own writing – I often don’t know how my characters look, so I barely spend time describing them.
I get visual smudges also, but when I read I get more tactical/emotional impressions. In a sense I imagine myself as the character and their thoughts and feelings as plot happens to them. Movie adaptations of books with great settings and action scenes are worth the ticket. The more quieter emotion movies seem flat to me. The movie only shows the external actions, not the internal world of the character.
Also this would be an absolutely fascinating panel at a writing / fiction convention. Just hearing people talking about their different takes on how they see books would be so cool to listen to.
I consume enough visual media (and have been trained in filmmaking) that I’m used to thinking in terms of cinematography and staging (to the point where I can get thrown out of an action sequence if my mental choreography doesn’t match what the writer describes –“wait, he was backing away while facing his enemy, how does he get stabbed in the side?”).
I also tend to cast characters* in my head to fit the voices, and mentally steal props, costumes, and makeup designs that seem to fit the descriptions.
(* Characters, not actors, just ’cause it’s easier for me to match voices to personalities that way.)
I’ve always been a very visual person, drawing since I was at least four if not younger, lucid dreaming since age 10 or so, and I always get the “movie in my head” thing from books, to the point that sometimes i’ll remember a scene but forget where it is from, think it was a movie I saw once, and later realize it was from a book.
I think my brain spends more time on what a character’s voice sounds like, than on how that character looks.
16. Or a podcast. I would happily listen to an hour-long podcast about this topic.
I’m in the middle field somewhere. I visualize locations (locations are super detailed), weather, lighting, sounds, voices with great detail. I usually have a very good idea of what the characters sound like, but their looks? That just stays blank. Unless a description of their features and age gets repeated again, and again, and again, it simply won’t stick. I just finished reading the “The Winter of the Witch” trilogy, but of all the characters I did only visualize Vasya, Morozko and Konstantin, because those get repeat descriptions. The rest are … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A friend of mine is a movie-in-my-head person—it’s super difficult to get him to watch a movie or TV version of a book he’s read, because the actors picked and changes made clash with what’s already in his head. Remakes and re-imaginings are even harder. Whereas I’m, like: “Yay, a new and different version of a thing I love, how exciting!” (Unless it’s the “The Last Airbender” movie. >>)
The other way around though, movies and shows do definitely influence my visualization of book characters. Chrisjen Avasarala will forever look and sound like Shoreh Aghdashloo in my head. ♥
I don’t see pictures when I read. I wouldn’t notice if the author changes the color of a character’s eyes or something like that, but when I see pictures or actors I can say they fit or are “wrong”.
Interesting. My mind ends up filling in characters from visual pop culture; movies, TVs, comic books.
For example: I’m currently finishing up Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. And no matter how many times I read that Miramiele has short blonde hair and spends most of the books dressed in a monk’s habit, I constantly picture her as the red-haired Merida from Pixar’s Brave.
Wow, never thought about it. But I scarcely picture characters and locations. I remember details, so I’ll know a person as black hair, but I wont imagine them in detail. I’ll get a sense if a character is large or some other feature, and where they are. I obviously do take note of it on some level. For example, I sometimes have to re-read action scenes that become confusing, but it’s more Strong confident warrior woman moves through room. Like there is a blank platonian ideal of the character and location.
This may be why I don’t watch movies as much as I read for me the emotional reaction and story is much more important. Since film is concerned with the visual it’s often weaker on these aspects than books. So much to think about.
What! people dream in third person?! All the dreams I remember I’m the embodied person, sometimes I’m someone else or in a weird fantasy landscape but definitely first person. Please people describe your dreams this is so interesting.(My Dad said he had dreams where he read the dream from pages in a book)
Because what I “see”, simultaneously, without overlap, is both – the words onthe page and the pictures in my head. I can hear both, too.
Take that scene in The Curse of Chalion where Cazaril is presented with a chessboard full of bribes and civilly refuses them all with one perfectly-balanced paragraph.
I can – and these all exist in the same moment – call back the look of the words on the page, the feel of reading those words, the image created in my mind by those words (I see Cazaril, the chessboard, the game pieces laid out on it, the elderly Fox, the room they are sitting in – ), the sound of Cazaril’s voice refusing and the Fox’s laugh and response, and still I see / hear the words as I read them.
@2 that describes me perfectly also. I recall visual images and people more as text and descriptive phrases rather than the original visual I first encountered. Although perhaps counterintuitively I am terrible with names. What is also interesting is that I live with a visual artist, so I’m surrounded by imagery all the time.
I’m not particularly visual when I read, though it made me laugh to agree with @11
I can look at fan art or movie/TV casting and say, “No, that’s not what I imagined,” but I cannot come up with a specific image just on my own.
I actually get really offended when they don’t look how they “should”, but I couldn’t tell you what that is. For me I think the thrill of getting inside the character’s mind is what makes the character real to me. I don’t feel like I need to know what they look like in detail. I KNOW them. They’re just.. them.
For scenes or background, if the author takes me there I am very happy to go. But it takes a lot of description from the author to really give me a picture of it. It’s not scifi, but Thomas Hardy has the loveliest word pictures of the English countryside. Paragraphs, even pages of description with him, really transport me there and I am sitting in the heath or the barrows. In other works, I will focus on the scenery they focus on, but the background fades to non-importance when the word count spent on it diminishes.
I tend to experience the emotions of the characters stronger then I see them. I think it’s because rather then watching a movie I get very much into the POV of the protagonist so that I see through their eyes and viscerally feel what they are experiencing.
@23 MJ Interesting! I get the feeling that most people probably dream only in first person.
Like I said, I always dream in third person. When I was a child I dreamed once that I was at the zoo with my mother and younger brother. We got separated, and I was wandering around looking for them, when I realized everyone else at the zoo was just copies of the three of us- in my dream I watched myself turning around and looking for my family in the middle of the duplicates. Eventually, one group came up and said even though they already had a daughter (me!), they would adopt me as another. It was seriously surreal. But everything happened as though I was watching a movie, even though I was the character I was watching.
No time to read all the comments right now. Have to come back to that tomorrow. But I want to thank you, Emily, for writing this. I somehow feel better about my own impressionist smudges =D
I read compulsively, but I hear the words I read, so am drawn to writers whose characters converse as opposed to writers who detail the setting. I hear voices and tones and inflections, accents and lisps, and they carry over when I read a series. If the character is describing the setting, then I get a picture of it, but otherwise it is a smudge. If the text gets too descriptive, I start to lose my sense of the story; I am looking for the relationships between the characters not the colour of the cabbage roses on the wallpaper, unless they are working on the wallpaper together.
I watch movies the same way. I put the closed captions on and fast forward until there is a relationship being explored. I love watching the Earth docuseries because the narration is part of the visual experience more than the fight scene is in a superhero movie. Watching a movie when I have read the book is difficult, because it is usually the voices that are lost.
Had I the patience, I would listen to all my books to get all the details of the setting and complete a visual image. Until then, I will continue to hear voices.
Considering a skim most description, I definitely do not experience books the same way I do movies.
I’m not especially visual. The text conjures up images but not hugely detailed ones. Sometimes, even when the author describes a location, like Helm’s Deep, I just can’t get it straight in my mind. Eventually, my brain just gives up and I just go with the story.
As for people, it can be varied. Sometimes my mind ignores the given description. Steven Erikson’s Karsa Orlong has blonde, shoulder length hair as far as my brain is concerned despite being described as black haired with a long braid. Maybe because I thought Orlong sounded vaguely Scandinavian.
Most characters facial features aren’t especially clear either. Just a vague smudge unless the author homes in on a particular feature, like Mhoram’s rudder like nose, from Donaldson’s Covenant books.
Occassionally, it gets absurd. In the Hobbit, Bilbo is described as scurrying around in one of the Mirkwood scenes and I superimposed Edifis the Egyptian from the Asterix books scurrying around in the forest outside the village. Or Laseen, the Empress from the Malazan books initially looked like Cleopatra, again from Asterix.
Because of this, I’m useless at which actor would you cast for which character type discussions.
I fall in between those who highly visualize everything, and those who get vague suggestions of images. It depends on the level of detail in the descriptions I’m reading. Occasionally I’ll have to consciously revise the image in my head because I come across a new bit of description I didn’t have before. Rarely bothers me though.
The interesting thing that does happen to me sometimes is that there will be a moment, and I do not know why it happens…is it the way the author wrote the scene? The words chosen? The emotion of what is going on? Regardless, the moment will be so imagestic that it will impress upon me with the same weight and clarity of a memory. Like I was there and witnessed it personally.
Terry Brooks gave me the first one, in “The Sword of Shannara”. Anne McCaffrey gave me two more in, “Dragonflight” and “Dragon Singer”. Gael Baudino, Jacqueline Carey, Mercedes Lackey and Brandon Sanderson have provided me with others…though they’re not quite as sharp as those first ones.
Thank you for such an interesting topic!
The lack of a visual memory has a rather cool name: aphantasia. I’ve known for years that I could not picture things in my mind with any clarity – especially people. I can’t say that it ever bothered me. I’ve been an artist all my life, mostly painting imaginary landscapes. I might have an impression of what I wanted to paint, but I couldn’t copy it from my head. I had to engineer something like it as I painted. The same goes for my stories. I can’t picture the characters in any detail. I give them a few simple attributes – a recent character had a long nose that she looked down – as tags, but otherwise I leave it to the reader to decide what they look like, if they care. The same goes for scenes. I describe a scene with words without actually seeing it, hopefully including enough concrete details to spark an image in those that can. The curious thing is that I can picture, in my dreams, very specific and detailed scenes. But maybe that is only my impression, and that if I could examine them when awake, they’d fall apart just like my wide awake images.
A very interesting article and comments. There is a good article on aphantasia from the Guardian if you are interested in the subject.
I’ll be honest, I rely heavily on book cover illustrations to help me enjoy books properly. I struggle to picture locations and characters properly unless the descriptions are super detailed. It is why I feel so left out by (and angry at) modern cover trends. It is also why I couldn’t get into Discworld until I came across some editions with the less cartoony covers. But in general, I need a well drawn and colourful cover with enough touches of realistic character design and location painting to help me along. Something dark and moody, with a half naked abs guy or a moody woman half turned away and holding either a dagger or a sword, does not help me. Nor does some gloomy generic landscape theme.
For god’s sake Tor, bring back proper lavish cover art. I’d settle even for a Ladybird book level of art.
I’m a visual, “movie in my head” person all the way. Details tend to be filled in by past visual experiences – Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, for example, took place someplace similar to my colllege dorm rooms and campus in my head. If I’m bored at the symphony, I’ll cast the various musicians as characters in books I like. It’s why I like maps in books – it helps with the place-setting of my mind-movies. If I care about a book, I’ll also get offended by movies that don’t cast like characters are “supposed to look” – Brianna Randall/Fraser is supposed to be six feet tall and blue eyed!
As for dreaming, I often will switch back and forth between first and third person – I’ll find myself no longer being myself – which is probably part of being able to do directed dreaming. Don’t like being chased by the serial killer in a nightmare? – just become another character…
I’m with Random22: the “cheap stock photos” way of doing abs or a woman with long hair and turned back, in the gloom, may be much cheaper than a more distinctive picture, but it is absolutely terrible at suggesting visuals, and also at making the book memorable or easy to find late.
I have this weakness in visualising, but I’m not particularly interested in landscape, and although I’m interested in people I have some degree of prosopagnosia–I’m most like the person who “saves” face details as a set of text descriptions. This actually makes me struggle to store a face-shape if I can’t think of a description. It also unfortunately means my brain is low-key racist: in earliest childhood when there weren’t many people of colour about, I tended to store details as hair-and-eye colour, and knowing that I now have to use skin colour and face shape instead I’m worried about getting it wrong (as above, I find it difficult to memorise the shapes of people’s faces).
As a child when reading I often had a sense of having left the room without quite knowing where I’d gone.
On the upside, audiobooks help me not skip (because I read too fast), and once I’ve got an approximation to a voice for a character I remember it.
When I begin reading it’s as though I’m narrating in my head. Ultimately though I get caught up in the story and am barely aware that I’m turning pages. I see nothing but the words on the page — no smudges, no soundtrack. The lack of a movie in my head has not hindered my love of reading at all. I do recall being amazed though to learn that my experience was not common to others — my daughter and husband both have a movie experience when reading.
Here’s a post I saw a couple of years ago–
WHAT DO YOU SEE WHEN YOU READ?
https://bookriot.com/2016/09/02/what-do-you-see-when-you-read/
I have two levels of reading fiction, the first is an initial getting into it level, where I’m consciously reading the text and building up a level of understanding of people and place. I’m also not entirely focussed on the book yet, and can be distracted.
The second is an unconscious automatic reading level, where I’m reading at high speed, but not aware of doing so. I’m fully focussed on the book and tune out all environmental factors that don’t trip my alarms, like my name or ring tone. That’s the movie playing in my head version, and it needs a certain level of investment to kick in. I don’t necessarily get a memorable picture of the characters, but I certainly do of the events. Although like someone else said – if they do a movie adaptation of a book, I will insert the movie characters into the book roles on future reads. I can also get thrown out of this mode when something unexpected happens, like if a character appears who I don’t think should be there or mentions something that I’ve missed, and I have to go back to figure out why that happened before restarting. It’s a great way to read a book in a few hours, but also a great way to miss your tube stop :
No visuals for me- it’s the words. I do love re-reading, and can fall deeply into those words.
I probably visualize landscapes in greater detail than characters, although in both cases the level of clarity with which I visualize it doesn’t necessarily depend on the level of detail that the author puts into the book. For example, I visualize the Shattered Plains in much more detail than anything in say Erikson’s Malazan books, even though Erikson might go into greater detail with regards to the layout and where everything is in a particular setting.
With characters, I visualize them based more on characterization and personality than on the physical descriptions, I always imagine Dalinar as being shorter but more broad of chest and shoulder than either Adolin or Kaladin even though he’s not described that way (especially the shorter part) in the books. It’s just the sense I get because Dalinar is so solid and centred, and every physical description is overwritten, even things like hair/eye/skin colour are just in my head for as long as I’m reading the paragraph.
I subvocalize as I read. I *think* I don’t on some rereads when I’m going particularly quickly.
I also visualize. Fiction is like watching a movie. I’m not always picturing the characters fully. One thing that can frustrate me is when an author gives enough detail on a building floorplan or a city layout that it’s obvious they have a map or know the layout but I can’t quite get it!
I don’t think I dream in color. When I remember a dream, I may know the color of a dress but it’s like I’m imposing the color on it. I think I di something similar when reading…but it’s unclear.
The average person looks at a screen more than touching the pages of a book. Im guilty. Visuls on the screen redered our ability to viduallize content from bookd
I experience reading stories as the main character of a scene, with flashes of scenery, other characters, action, etc. in varying detail around me. I’m not sure why I sometimes picture landscapes similarly to how they’re written and sometimes my mind lands on a particular picture that has little resemblance to what’s described and no amount of sitting and visualizing will change that picture. I “hear” the story being read sort of overtop it all.
So for example when I read Harry Potter, in my mind’s eye, I have green eyes, short black hair, and a scar on my forehead. I might look across the house table at Ron and Hermione. I’m not looking over Harry’s shoulder, I am Harry when I’m reading the book, even though I’m a muggle girl with light brown hair and zero interest in sports (no matter how magical). Ron and Hermione started looking like Rupert Grint and Emma Watson after I saw the first film, although their voices and the narration still sound like the audiobooks my family listened to. More strongly than sight or even hearing, I feel the back of my neck prickle when Harry’s walking through the forbidden forest toward the dead unicorn or feel the wind on my face during quidditch.
I tend to not be bothered when characters look different on screen than I imagined them because I didn’t have particularly detailed “vision” of them to begin with. It’s much more important how those characters come across as a package, how they feel to me. If I experience a character as sympathetic in a book and then the movie version of them is really whiny and annoying (or vice versa), it can be jarring.
That’s exactly how I see books! Sometimes I imagine people like someone I know from films/TV/other, and sometimes it’s just a blur. And I occasionally get a very clear picture of some person or place, for some reason.
I remember when reading the Two Towers, I had very big trouble imagining the Ents. I kept coming up with a silly Disney like image of a walking tree. So I thought, sod it, I’ll imagine them like that and wait till the film comes out to get a better image!
I mostly get your smudges, but if I’m concentrating, I get more visual detail. I also don’t “hear” the words; for weird fantasy names I often get halfway through the book before even trying to pronounce them. Before that they’re just a collection of letters I may not even put in the right order. It feels to me more like I deal with the concepts more directly, getting the meaning of them prior to any visual sense, and I don’t linger on any word long enough to get the visual sense come up. Because I don’t hear the words I kind of blast through the text. It feels very immersive despite lacking visual or auditory clarity.
I am an intensely visual person and used to visualize everything I read intensely. Part of growing up for me, as a reader was learning to manage this propensity. Not every book necessarily “wants” to be imagined at a movie level of detail or more. It’s ok, sometimes to use visual filler “generic trees here” because life is short and also sometimes it’s less traumatic to mentally elide like so: Battle scene= shouts, grunts, flurry of limbs and blades. Remaining opponents flee. Then protagonist falls panting to his knees beside the body of….. My most common “mistake” of a visualization that has to be corrected later is mirror image reversal/left right confusion.
I have to manage over visualization in real life too. Who wants to SEE every roll in the toilet paper aisle at Wal Mart? My father in law and father are like this but not spouse or kids.
Although this is my own not completely typical way of perception I don’t doubt that other ways of experiencing the world (or Middle Earth, or Meetpoint Station) have their own richness and beauty however. I just read a vignette by Oliver Sacks that concerned a blind man who loved to go walking in the rain because the sound of the raindrops falling all over created a detailed and multidimensional soundscape that he would enjoy and orient himself by.
@28 ladyrian: But everything happened as though I was watching a movie, even though I was the character I was watching.
That’s how I dream a lot of the times too. I have both kinds of dreams: ones where I take the first person perspective and dreams where I take a detached, third person point of view and watch myself from above (or whoever “myself” currently is in that dream, because it’s not always my real-life self.)
Thank for this mind-blowing discussion!
First – I think I finally understand why I had so much less patience for Tolkien than anybody else I knew. I *also* just saw “green green trees green trees mountains trees trees”. And that bored me to tears.
Second – Along with several folks above (#5 and #8 especially), I don’t see much detail when I’m reading, and I worry that this impacts my own writing.
But I do see something. Or I feel it, but in the same way I associate emotion with my every-day visuals.
I couldn’t describe to you what my best friends look like, but I know what it feels like to be around them. It’s not that I don’t recognize them, it’s just that I never commit those details to vocabulary-based-memory. So I could probably tell you hair color, and maybe eye color, but then I’d have to resort to, “She’ll be the one standing in back being sarcastic…”
This is probably why I often dislike covers with artistic renderings of the characters or the world, because they NEVER look like how those things *look-feel* to me, and it causes a strange kind of cognitive dissonance for me, every time I pick up the book.
Yess!!!! This is me!!! Thank you for writing this! Sometimes I can cast a book and that makes visualizing easier. but if I think about it too hard, I get pulled from the narrative.
It’s called aphantasia! Definitely worth a quick Google if you’re interested.
I don’t see anything when I read, and I didn’t even know you were meant to until a few years ago. It does make overly descriptive scenes difficult (looking at you Tolkien), but I don’t think it makes too much of a difference. Like the author, I also find it easier to latch on to a film’s depiction of a character rather than create one myself, so Harry Potter has always been Daniel Radcliffe to me.
I don’t have any visual imagination (or memory) at all. (I recently learned this has a name, aphantasia.) I categorize descriptions with words. This means the more times I read a book the better I recall what things/people “should” look like. But I can’t really explain what it’s like to just “know” without “seeing” any more than those who “see” in their minds could make me understand that (I always thought that “see it in your mind” and “picture it” language was metaphorical. It was a bit of a shock to me to learn that people can literally close their eyes and “see” things on demand.)
That said I have a very good memory for verbal descriptions. If a face, hair color, voice or manner is “wrong” in a film adaptation it bugs me exceedingly.
It’s odd that I’m both visually impaired and very visual. When I’m reading, I do see that “movie in my head”. I also give voices to the characters.
I remember when I first ran into the idea of “aphantasia”. It was a shock to me that not everyone “saw” things in their head the way I do. I’ve been a voracious reader since I was very young (thanks Mom and Grandpa!) and have always been able to “see” all of it as I read it. Even now I can pick a character or setting from a favorite book and recreate it in my head. I’ve always been a very visual person and things like layouts and floorplans are much easier for me to remember than the raw descriptions of places. I might not remember then wording used by an author to describe something but the imagery I created based on it will come back very easily.
I don’t always get super detailed visualizations of characters when I read, but sometimes I will get one that STICKS. Annoyingly, the most prominent right now for me is from the Dresden Files novels. For some unknown reason I started picturing Michael as a large black guy, and now — no matter how many times the text describes him as blond — I can’t get the mental image out of my brain. Which means, as a result, I’ve started picturing Molly as mixed-race, with curly hair, despite (again) all the textual descriptions to the contrary. This is not typical for me — usually my mental images of characters are nowhere near as concrete as this one.
The pictures that come to me in my head as I read are influenced by the description of the author.
However, I don’t often worry about trying to picture it clearly in my head. Just a vague sense will usually do. Like you, some things will be clear but most won’t. I have found that what I really concentrate on is getting to know the characters. I try to understand how they think, their motives, what they say and how they react. I feel like I get to know the characters that the story is told through quite well and that I understand them but they are also more complex and change throughout the story. Often secondary characters (many of which are comic relief) seem to be some of my favorites because I often know what they will say or how they will react before I read it.
I don’t see a movie, I see still pictures. They are relatively detailed, although faces are somewhat vague. But nothing moves. If it moves it doesn’t work. Cloth gets snagged on furniture, feet get stuck when people walk. Arms flail around all crazy if someone tries to make a gesture. It’s all broken. So the picture has to update as the scene progresses. Or it has to change when I realize I’ve got something wrong. It goes along in stops and starts. Maybe like a comic book. Not perfect, but works for me.
What a fun article!
I’ve been an avid reader for 55 years. For me the experience of reading differs differs from book to book. With some authors, I’m in so deep it’s like a waking dream — as some one said above, I’m almost not aware that I’m reading words and turning pages, because it’s as if I’m inside the book. Reading other books is like dreaming when you’re half-awake; I have to choose to focus on the world of the book, because it’s superimposed over my (distracting) reality.
Second, as in a dream significant details are always in sharp focus, but everything else is a smudge. Thus I don’t always picture the physical appearance of the characters unless something about them is stressed in the book.
Third, I don’t actually hear the character’s voices so much as feel the cadence of their speech (if they have strong and consistent voices).
Finally, there are some books that I bounced off of until after I’d seen them adapted to television or film.
Description is my bane. If there’s too much when I’m reading, I tend to glaze over. The LOTR movies were a very different experience for me than the books, suddenly I SAW what everyone else had been raving about, the depth of the world.
When I write my first draft, my movie-in-my-head is very close up: I see character’s faces. They tend to wander around in white space, which I then struggle to fill in with detail in later drafts.
Totally a visual reader, i’m aware of the words and as i’m reading my mind is actively building a scene in my head. I also have a tendency to ‘cast’ a book as I read. Just finished ‘Kings of the Wyld’ by Nicholas Eames and about halfway thru the story the main character Clay became David Harbour from Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’. His friend Gabriel was Daniel Craig looking like he did in Logan Lucky…same with all the rest of the characters.
I’m also a technicolor, surround sound, full CGI lucid dreamer that more often than not is NOT myself! If I am, me/myself and don’t care for where the dream’s going I can change it. Hello zombies trying to break into my barricaded shack, i’m not feeling you at the moment…let’s have a Thriller dance-off! :D
Generally if i’m myself in the dream it’s some version of an unfinished leaky house nightmare with halls that I don’t remember having and being ticked off at my ex-husband. If i’m not myself it’s the full CGI grand swashbuckling adventure. Guess which one I prefer! :D
If other people are seeing a movie in their heads, I’m seeing the storyboards for the movie. Lots of general ideas, not a lot of fine detail, and probably in black and white.
I have aphantasia and “see” absolutely nothing except the words in front of my eyeballs. My imagination can conceptualize but not visualize. I would be the worst police sketch artist, but I would recognize someone fitting the same description if I saw them.
Lengthy, elaborate descriptions are wasted on me. Great, the drapes are luxurious indigo velvet with an iridescent sheen like a beetle’s wing, but unless it’s quickly revealed the protagonist is a beetle aficionado or those drapes are going to come to life and strangle somebody, that information is neither interesting nor relevant to me. I understand other readers demand those grounding details, and I have no problem skimming a line or two to get to the good stuff, but entire pages waxing poetic about scenery and clothing are enough to make me stop reading because that’s too long for me to not care about the story.
When I read a book, I picture everything, but it’s not exactly visual. More like it’s in the back of my mind, with key details fleshed out but still sketchy. More like illustrations, or snapshots, than a movie, although I’ll see moving action in important scenes. I might not always picture a face in detail, but I do see the hair color, costume and colors, buildings, landscape, etc. When the first LotR movie came out, I was amazed because it looked almost exactly as I saw it when reading the books. It was like he read my mind.
I didn’t know until a couple of years ago that I have dyscalculia and associated cognitive disorders. And it’s not ‘dyslexia only with numbers’ although my math abilities are greatly impaired. It involves spatial awareness and more than I can type here, but what it actually means is that when I read books, most of the time I don’t get clear visuals at all. In fact, the more detailed a description gets, the less I am able to imagine it or put things together into a whole. Often descriptions make reading hard for me because my brain simply doesn’t function that way.
“That describes everything!” an artist friend said after I told her my new diagnosis. “I never could understand how you said you don’t know what your characters look like except in the vaguest ways.”
Nope. I’ve always written from a place of emotion, beginning with knowing how a character feels, and usually not knowing why. I spend little time describing them, assuming that my readers can ‘choose their own adventure’ or rather, visualize them the way they want to see them, beyond a few details.
I like your ‘smudge’ description, as I sometimes see things that way, vague smudges of images I’ve seen before that seem to fit. And occasionally? Occasonally there will be words that describe a place so well, I can smell it, wrap myself up in it.
Because somebody described how it made the character feel instead of what it looked like. Gave me some sensory details that were visual.
I don’t get clear pictures when I read (or rather sometimes I do but they go by too fast to take in properly), but I get something else from descriptions that, while it isn’t as directly visual as the “movie viewers” report, is intensely important to me. I think it might be like a kind of synesthesia, where, say, Tolkien’s description of a tree will take me straight to the emotions I might feel at seeing such a tree, even though I don’t get the intermediate stage of “seeing” the tree clearly in my mind’s eye. And I do remember being very annoyed when I saw descriptions such as “a good picture or two hung on the walls” (that’s in Little Women) — well, is it one picture, or two? how can you not know, omniscient narrator?
I do often see words when I hear people talking, like a kind of private subtitling. And I was fascinated by rushthatspeaks’s account of having “a kinesthetic, tactile, and olfactory imagination. With elements of temperature.” https://rushthatspeaks.dreamwidth.org/480878.html
Technicolor, full dolby surround, complete with Hollywood cast. And in contrast to Nicole (comment 59), I was a bit disappointed at the lack of detail in the LOTR movies. Don‘t get me wrong, those movies are fabulous adaptations, but the book was so much MORE in my head.
I’m like you — I don’t “read” well. I have smudges and sometimes cutout faces, but it’s mainly smudges of color (and barely that).
When books have maps, I’m able to “visualize distance,” and the landscape is clearer to me, because landscape is more consistent (even in its differences) whereas no one person is the same. What is black? What is white? What does it mean for someone to have a ‘long blue cape?’
BUT there are times when a show (“Game of Thrones season 1) or movie (it’s not out yet, but the movie trailer for “From a Dark Wayover” by Dan Lord) just gets complete 1000% spot-on what I didn’t even realize was in my head.
I see the characters, the action, the setting, the locations, I see it all. Wife hates it because I get lost in the book and don’t respond to outside stimulus. I will read 12 -15 books straight then have to take a break to come back down.
It depends on the skill of the author. Usually, I see the book as a movie in my head & ‘hear’ the dialogue in the various voices of the characters. This is common with authors like Ray Bradbury, Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Robert Heinlein, Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels (same lady, just different names), etc. I can enjoy a book that just tells a story, but the ‘movie in my head’ ones are treasures and I often re-read them.
We have a member of our writers’ group with aphantasia and we were stunned when she told us. Most of the rest of us are full mind’s eye visualisers and it was hard to get our heads around the fact that she didn’t ‘see’ anything mentally.
The really ironic thing is that she’s a really good writer and paints a great picture of a scene and the characters (doesn’t over do it, just enough for us to get the vibe) – all of which means that we, as her audience in read backs, ‘see’ more of the scene than she does herself!
I honestly could cry reading this because I have been so desperate for the longest time to find a way to describe the way I “see” the books I’m reading. Almost word for word, you’ve summarized my shared experience when it comes to reading. I’ve actually bookmarked this page so I can come back to it whenever I’m getting down on myself that I’m not that great of a reader because I can’t form that fully living and breathing movie in my mind like others can. Many of my reader friends get down on me because I tell them that I like to read some books after the movies have come out because it actually strengthens my enjoyment of the books because I can “see” them so much better. It is so nice to know I’m not alone in this.
I’m glad so many aphantasia folks showed up. Truthfully, some of us find you visualizers odd too. I mean, how can you walk around with all those pictures in your brain
!!
But it’s also interesting to see the spectrum of pictures. Sometimes with aphantasia, people start thinking it’s all or nothing. Good to know there’s a visual spectrum like there is an aphantasia spectrum (and that’s without getting to prosopagnosia/SDAM/ADHD/ASD/etc. questions).
Reading these comments has made me realize the depth of the disagreement between people who love a movie made from a book and people who hate it, with all the stops in-between. After reading this I realized I see things a s a sort of colored in sketch as I read, and really enjoy seeing it fully realized as film.
Someone mentioned Perdido Street Station, and I remember placing some of the scenes with the sculptor in my old attic studio. I’d be fascinated to see how a filmmaker would recreate those scenes (please someone make that series into films!?)
After reading the Expanse novels, I was thrilled to see them brought to life in the series so well, it definitely heightened my enjoyment of the books.
How interesting!! I’m somewhere between the two extremes — I’m pretty good at visualizing settings but have very impressionistic ideas of what people (especially their faces, since I hover on the edge of prosopagnosia) look like. I really like Emily’s and others’ description of that: frequently-repeated details are usually all I “see” in characters, even if there is a movie or TV adaptation and I could theoretically sub in an actor for my mental image.
I DO sometimes sub in movie settings for my imagination, though, and I rarely create what I imagine from scratch in the first place. For example, descriptions of houses and furniture are usually copied from my own house, etc.; I don’t really put a whole lot of original thought into my mental images.
I dream in both first and third person, and sometimes switch between the two in the same dream!
I’ve never really thought about it, but doesn’t surprise me people perceive books differently. Think of how many discussions there have been on Tor.com about how many different interpretations of what would appear to be a homogeneous experience (sitting in a cinema watching a movie), people’s perception must be different. Transfer that to a medium where more is required of the audience to interpret what is going on, and of course there’ll be a greater diversity of experience.
Now, Where I fall on the spectrum is “changes depending on the author and writing style”. Most of the time, it’s akin to an animated L S Lowry painting, matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs level of detail, just enough detail to envisage what’s happening. Interestingly (and seemingly unlike a lot of the commentators) also included are the other senses – sound and smell, mostly, with the occasional touch and taste where needed. Occasionally it gets even more impressionistic, and the characters are little more than phantoms against a befogged, dark, barely perceptible stage. Then certain scenes will morph into tv, or even movie-level detail. Sometimes that will be most of the book. And *then* there’s certain scenes that play in a kind of hyper-detailed IMAX/70mm/Bullet time mashup that’s only capable in my mind’s eye, where I’m able to perceive everything, and it comes complete with incident music. Scenes like (but not limited to) the chessboard scene in Curse of Chalion (as already mentioned), the “thought experiment” with fast penta in Komar, the Last Ride in Echoes of the Great Song, and the sky ship ambush at the end of Aeronaut’s Windlass (to be fair the way the sounds are discribed in that sequence, I’m sure the author had Ride of the Valkaries playing in his head as he wrote that scene). It doesn’t have to be a particularly good book to trigger that, but author has to obviously hit a sweet spot for that particular scene.
With regarding adaptions of a book to other media (comics, computer games, TV or film), my wife and I have differing approaches. She prefers to read the books first, and the adaption second, because it spoils her enjoyment of the book if the adaptation doesn’t match what she’s reading. I, on the other hand, will wait to read to the book if I know an adaption is coming. I find it jerks me out of the movie if casting or plot doesn’t match the one I’ve already “seen” inside my head, but I seem to be able to accommodate that while reading a book, morphing the actor into the description in the book.
Of course there are exceptions. Hagrid didn’t look, sound and behave like Robbie Coltrane’s version in my head before the films came out, but he certainly did afterwards. His portrayal so utterly replaced what was there before I couldn’t honestly describe the differences.
Reposted on my blog with the following comment.
For the most part, I have no issues visualizing the books I read. Though it’s less like a movie and more of pictures/images actualizing the storyline before my eyes without need of additional equipment. My realized stories translate into life not played out over a screen, but real life. The life of those characters and their everyday reality. Whenever an image is murky or I stumble upon text I have problems computing to pictures, I reference other books or look up on the internet.
What about you?
I’m not that visual of a person-which is funny because I’m so into art. But I’m a word person for sure. When I read books, the words strike me really heavily, and the only thing I see is the words. Strangely enough, as you said about your system, it still feels as though I am there in the book. Even though it’s an entirely different experience from real life, it feels as though I am the main character. Part of that is probably just that I’m a really empathic person, but still.
The words are so vivid to me that once, when my dad was reading Alcatraz 5 to my brother, and I was across the room listening, I corrected him on a word. I had only read the book once before, but when he said the wrong word I immediately picked it out and corrected it. This happened twice as he was reading. He still teases me about it all the time. Now, I do have a pretty good memory, but I still feel like that was kind of ridiculous.
It’s a bit of a point of frustration for me, actually. Not because I don’t enjoy reading that way, but because most others read entirely differently. Growing up, nobody I knew liked to read, and when I met people who did I finally felt like I fit in. Then, as I discussed books with them, I came to realize that they didn’t view them in the way I did at all. They don’t care about the words the way I do. The prose, the connotations of the words, the grandness of descriptions-but the only thing they care about is the plot.
I’d always thought the ‘it’s like a movie in your head’ description was less literal than it turned out to be. I had no idea people actually saw images that way. It’s frustrating for me not to have anyone who shares my perspective. It’s not really anyone’s fault, though, so I can’t really complain. But just like you, I’ve become very interested in how people ‘see’ books.
Definitely a visual person.
I rate the readability of fiction on how visual it is to me. If I forget I am looking at words on the page because I am immersed in the world within the book, it is a good read. Maybe not a good book, but a good read. For a truly engaging work, I am standing in their world, following the characters about like an invisible observer, an extra character the author forgot to mention was there, or as them, depending on the writing style. If I read it and can’t get past the words, then it doesn’t hold my attention long enough to get through the book. Even with a work that doesn’t take me away, I can sometimes read it with the intent of how I would envision it and end up in the same place.
If the imagery feels wrong to me, then I also find the book hard to finish. Like trying to appreciate a landscape from a collection of poorly shot polaroids.
This is not like watching movies, which are over there, apart from me, but more like an MMO, where I have agency, can act within the world, but am just watching to see what happens because I don’t want to intrude on the events unfolding.
It also works for non-fiction, though when dipping into things like philosophy and social theory, the imagery can get very abstract and not necessary something I can describe meaningfully in words.
I can still distinctly remember scenes from books I read decades ago even if I don’t remember the plot, or the context of the scene, or the title, or the characters name, or or or. Mention a book, suddenly I have a visual, sometimes as powerful as a full-blown daydream. On the other hand, those images are very malleable, what I may remember not be what I saw then, and I usually enjoy artists’ interpretations who transform those images in positive ways.
I am NOT a very visual person at all. In fact, I struggle with a lot of ‘spatial’ skills (I can’t drive, for one, and left and right are not intuitive concepts to me. Not in the same way up and down are. I don’t know how to explain it). Like some of the others here, I would have no idea how to describe what my kids, my husband, my best friends, etc look like, I do tend to mix up people’s faces too sometimes (such as coworkers I don’t work with often). Once I walk away from somebody, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what color their eyes are, or what they were wearing, etc. I can’t even bring it to mind. It’s like my mind doesn’t store the details. I’ve always been kind of boggled by the idea of describing a suspect to a sketch artist.
It’s not that I can’t see things in my mind (and for people like my kids/husband, I CAN bring them to mind although there is perhaps some fuzziness and it’s overlaid with my emotional impression). In fact, I do HAVE an imagination. But it’s like I have no way of translating what is in my brain into something external. Likewise, sometimes visual descriptions (ESPECIALLY complicated visual things like battles) just go way over my head and I can’t really process them. I might come up with some kind of picture/visual but I doubt it’s what the author intended.
So, yeah, the ‘smudges’ are also how I see most books. In fact, I sometimes tend to skim over complicated visual descriptions of things like battles, landscapes or people in my hurry to get to the rest. Sometimes that means I might end up missing an important detail. To use another Stormlight example, I honestly didn’t realize that most residents of Roshar have epicanthic folds, and that the Shin’s strange eyes are just eyes without the fold (eyes like mine, basically) until I started getting involved in the fandom.
That said I LOVE language and words, so I don’t actually mind evocative language at all, it just…doesn’t necessarily create an actual picture in my head. It still has a ‘feel’ to it, it’s just not visual. Or maybe it’s just a few brief impressions here and there. When I write I tend to spend a ton of time in peoples’ heads, and expanding on moments that are kind of frozen in time, and its also something I enjoy reading. I love the tension in a moment just before something comes to fruition.
I also tend to be very verbal in my own internal monlogue. I tend to basically internally narrate all of my thoughts, memories and actions. I’m not sure how common/normal that is.
Interestingly, music does tend to evoke a lot of images for me – I can be listening to music and come up with all sorts of stories, images, emotions, etc that go along with the music.
I love watching good movies of books for this reason – and sometimes (if done well) the emotional impact can actually be heightened. If instead of processing a bunch of text I get slammed with a gorgeous visual, good emotional/character development AND amazing music all at once – that’s what makes it all hit home in a way that is different from the emotional reaction I have to books.
@79 / Lisamarie – going slightly off-topic, I too have left/right confusion. Like you it’s not intuitive, and I really have to think about which is which. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties (and I met my wife, and she pointed out that when the hands are palm-down, the thumb and index finger form an L on the left) that I’ve been able to reliably and consistently identify left and right. Until then, sometimes I set the cutlery correctly on the table, and sometimes it was mirrored…
Since then I’ve noticed I use stuff that’s ergonomically right-handed (like scissors) with my right hand, and stuff that’s not (like pool cues) I use left-handed. <shrugs>. My wife says it really bugged her how there was something disconcerting about how I played pool until she realised. How that affects how I perceive things compared to a person who instinctively knows their left from right, I couldn’t rightly say…
This is the reason I can’t stand reading anymore. I used to love it when I was a pre-teen but now I’m an adult it kills me to read. I thought it was my attention span, but I ran some test and it isn’t. Just today, I tried reading and actually forcing myself to picture the descriptions and I got the greatest feeling, and the picture was clear as day. Have you tried reading like that? It takes a lot of mental effort I’ll add that part.
I seriously struggled with left/right confusion myself. I’m the postergirl for the old joke “Me mum needed to write left and right on my wellies, but she forgot to write right and left on me feet”. If it wasn’t for me having a scar on the back of my left wrist then I’d be completely lost all the time. I call it Ryouga Hibiki syndrome, fewer and fewer people get that reference though.
I read/perceive mostly in terms of felt meanings rather than visual images. But the fourth time I read LOTR I was looking for a way to make it new for me again, and made a conscious effort at visualization, being successful at this with scenery but not so much with characters. Since then I noticed that I had become more capable of visualizing when reading other things when I wanted to as well, but most of the time I haven’t felt like bothering. In fact I have encountered several examples of writing where it seemed to me that the author had made a deliberate effort (and had perhaps been taught this) to use descriptive language, but since those descriptions were not communicating any felt meanings, I found this to just be distracting and annoying.
What I like best is a compelling story of course, but in terms of what might be called “mechanics”, I like best writing that gives me a clear sense of the author’s voice, writing that I would be able to read aloud. Tolkien and Herbert are good at this, but the best I’ve found in this department are James Herndon (Way It Spozed to Be, How to Survive in Your Native Land) and Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). Surprisingly, Michael Spivak’s Calculus is pretty good too! :)
I don’t visualize. Ever. I dream, which I believe to be pictures, but when I wake I can no longer recall them.
That said, I’m an avid reader. I take in the descriptions, and might recall them, but since I don’t have a visual memory I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. It’s all just part of the larger emotional experience. That might be why I’m impatient reading cinematic or action driven books. I like books because they offer more of an emotional sensory landscape and that’s what I can translate better than pictures.
I do get lost when others talk about the story as a movie in their mind because I don’t have a frame of reference to understand that from. And in anything in life, instructions that start with “see yourself” or “visualize” get an eye roll from me. But when I write, I tend to hear that I have particularly good descriptions, so maybe it works out okay in the end.
I do tend to cast actors as characters in the book or story! Glad I’m not the only one who does this. I’m also more an audio person so I usually can hear the words in my head, less than visualizing them.
This is why I love graphic novel versions of stories, the Wheel of Time graphic novels, for instance. It’s all about the cities and settings. Tar Valon, Caemlyn … took my breath away.
No visuals whatsoever when I read, so I love illustrations and maps and diagrams and/or films and grow bored with description (yay for Austen, boo for Tolkein). Bad with faces, but good at mentally rotating objects on any axis. Dreams are first person, but memories are third. And I have just learned more ways in which brains can vary that I never imagined.
I started speed reading when I was 15. These days I would say that there is very little difference for me between watching a movie and reading a book. I actually prefer to read.