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?
Originally posted in February 2019.
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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When I was a kid, and had the time to read a couple books a day, the “movie” was so clear it actually obscured the text. I remember vividly being 13 and reading Ender’s Game and having a moment where I realized I couldn’t remember a word of what I had just read, I had just been watching the movie play out. Something similar for the first Amber novel – I can still, to this day, see several sequences of the book very clearly in my head as I first imagined them (with the inevitable drift of memory, I’m sure).
That doesn’t happen anymore. Now I tend to experience stories just as you describe it here – with those smudges containing more than images and sounds, with taste and smell and even touch sometimes. Maybe this is my background as an actor, but characters have very clear voices. I can more readily adapt my image of a character as more information comes through than I can the sound of their voice.
More stylized prose tends to lead to a more impressionistic experience. I read a lot of short fiction, but when I do manage to swallow down not just a novel but a series, I tend to find my images solidifying until I do actually see whole sequences in great detail. By the final Shades of Magic book, I saw Red London quite clearly.
I have a good friend – a writer in fact! – with some form of aphantasia, who describes most acts of imagination as a spreadsheet with a list of qualities for each thing he’s contemplating, and that it takes effort to not glaze over at elaborate visual description in stories. He scans for adjectives, puts them in the spreadsheet, and barrels along till he finds the plot again.
Exactly what Erik said! I find that I can be totally immersed in the read and it’s like an out of body experience for me. My go to genre is Sci Fi, I guess to me it seems the most fun as you can’t really don’t know how it will be in that time frame as most are set in the future. So that let’s my imagination go free! I am currently reading We Have Met the Enemy by Felicia Watson and with her characters and the story itself I can pass hour upon hour reading books like hers. It takes a lot of parts outside of the words on the page to make the read feel real!!
I usually form mental images of people clearly when I’m reading fiction, but the settings and scenery they are in is more impressionistic.
I also definitely do the whole “think of an actor” bit sometimes when I’m imaging characters in books. For example, before I saw Game of Thrones, I always imagined Tywin Lannister as having Patrick Stewart’s voice – he didn’t look like him, but he sounded like him.
Great post. The smudges is a perfect explanation to something I’ve always done but never really realized. I try not to ‘movie’ up a book but it’ll happen from time to time. I tend toward the smudgy/impressionistic side but of course it depends on the material. Leckie’s Ancillary series and Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series are smudgy to the max while Kim Stanley Robinson and Peter F. Hamilton lend themselves to a more clear visual interpretation.
Nothing. Not even smudges. (It never occurred to me until right now that the descriptions in books were intended to generate Imaginary pictures.) They’re all just word sequences to me. After reading a passage I know “what happened” in an abstract sense, but nothing even slightly resembling a picture. (I tend to skim pure description as a result.)
I get something like the smudges you describe, to the point that I will often skim long passages of visual description because they aren’t going to do much for me. I respond better to description that involves other senses – telling me what something feels or smells like creates much more of an impression.
However, I hear books very clearly. I know exactly what all the characters sound like, even if I only have very smudgy ideas of what they looks like. I’ve never been disappointed in an adaptation because an actor didn’t look like the character in my head but I had to stop listening to the aSoIaF audiobooks because the voices were so wrong.
My brain tends to be super specific about locations and landscapes, but completely ignores characters except for their voice. But it’ll throw in background music, if it feels like it. So basically I don’t get a movie, but an audio play enhanced with pretty pictures of landscape and architecture.
I used to get it in full color imaginings when I was younger. SF, mysteries, fantasy, some poetry – if they were trying convey an image or an experience, I could “see” it.
Not so much nowadays. I only semi-seriously say I envy the kids’ imaginations, but not the attention spans.
@5: Dave Bush
I highly encourage you to read Blake Ross’s description of aphantasia, and his discovery that he has it. I have a few friends with aphantasia, and it has helped me to communicate with them, but also for them to communicate with me. I think you’ll find it interesting. https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/
I tend to believe that I follow the cues delivered by the author and visualize what the author points as important, and leave the rest for smudges.
In my mind, I usually cast actors or acquaintances to impersonate the characters that can’t be smudges, but if the book is being adapted before I’m reading it, I tend to use the actual actors chosen for the adaptation.
If I can’t visualize complicated scenes that seem to be important, I usually re-read them until I make them clearer.
This “visualization” isn’t restricted to vision, but it also includes selected sounds, smells and tactile details.
Some of these scenes visualized more than 30 years ago are still crystal clear in my mind.
I’m probably genetically incapable of skimming fiction, but I always wonder about all the subliminal information conveyed by the authors through scenery and description that is discarded by readers that are used to skim.
@9 Erik Harrison
That’s me!!!
I’m closer to the movie than to the smudge, but even as I say that, your smudges made sense to me, and your “Impressionism” more so. While characters tend to be a bit more visible to me, the surrounding scenery and buildings are often in soft focus or in something closer to animation, with the details mostly suggestive with a squiggled line or two to say “This bit would be *really fancy* if I sketched it all in.” And I sometimes know my mind has picked up its idea what things look like from things I have experienced – dirt roads and cobbles for some reason spring to mind, maybe because fantasy characters spend so much time walking (I jest!). IN fact, having walked more gravel roads than dirt ones, I have to remind myself dirt roads in stories are DIRT, and don’t crunch.
For me it really depends on the writing itself. I experience the melody/pacing/sentence structure of the words themselves kind of like a ride, sort of like being on a boat? And then depending on what the boat ride is like I may be more or less able to “see” the action/description. Even if the description is detailed, if the way its written feels like I’m being jolted around, I’m too queasy and disoriented to be able to focus on the scenery. Or if the “ride” moves too fast, I might not see details and it’ll be more of a blur, which may or may not mean I don’t enjoy it. The best books are like a glorious rollercoaster or a trip down a really awesome river, with bits where it moves too fast to see but also bits where there’s an amazing view. As a result I’m very picky about style, and I’ll stop reading after a chapter or so if I can’t handle the author’s voice, even if I can see it’ll be a good story plot-wise. It’s not something I’m that proud of, but life’s too short to read a book you’re not enjoying, right?
Words do not and cannot translate to pictures without the reader/listener contributing their own content. For example, the phrase “the purple shoes” cannot be used to form an image. What style shoes? What size – for dolls, or as big as a house? What color is ‘purple’? All the words provide us with is a set of associated concepts.
I don’t ‘see’ anything when I read. How could I? (Did the shoes have laces, or not? How can I tell, all I know is that they were shoes that were purple.)
I wish I could remember where I read this so I could cite it, but apparently the human mind is unable to construct or remember faces. It can construct facial features one at a time in quick succession so it seems like you’re able to see the whole face in your mind but in reality you may only see a significant feature clearly while the rest is a blur at best if you’re even able to maintain the image at all. That’s part of what makes eye-witness descriptions so unreliable. Since reading that article, I now notice the phenomenon while reminiscing or reading and trying to picture the characters and their actions. It really is true. I like to think I have a pretty vivid imagination but never noticed just how hard it is to keep a detailed image of people in my mind.
This is a perfect description of the way that I “see” what I’m reading. And I was recently trying to describe it to a friend for the very same reason.
For me, it’s always been a more immersive, experiential way of understanding the story than sitting back and watching a movie. I feel totally involved in everything happening in the story, but could I describe what the people look like? Ehh, no more than the author did.
Very cool post, especially the links to the other research.
@14/melendwyr: True, but when people look at actual shoes, they don’t necessarily register the laces either. We only see, and remember, a subset of what’s there. That makes it easier to come up with mental images that feel real.
As for the original question, I only see impressionist images too. But the same is true for many of my memories, so reading and remembering still feel alike. The biggest difference is faces. I can remember faces, at least for a while, but I can’t picture characters.
I get no visuals. Ever. Sometimes I’ll try, but it doesn’t work. I do hear words in my head. This is probably why I never wanted my parents to read to me. I insisted on reading everything myself because I needed to hear the words in my head, and not in somebody else’s voice. The words don’t even have to make objective sense. I’m aware of the rhythm, the rise and fall of the “melody”. It’s a lot like listening to a jazz solo. That’s why prose style is always the main determinant in who I like to read.
Nothing, no pictures in my mind at all …
I’m another who sees absolutely nothing when reading.
This was startling to me, because even though I do get strong visual images of scenes in my head (I recall vividly reading one of the Narnia books and being surprised to realize I must have read it before, since I already had in my head the vision of the forest between worlds) you have described perfectly my experience of Tolkien’s descriptions. “Yes, yes, very beautiful, and THEN what?”
Forest green, grass green, trees leaves…
I want to go reread one of his descriptors now and see if that’s still my experience, since you’ve put it so well.
@5, @9, @20. Don’t despair. I think you might have an advantage that the visualisers don’t. You probably really appreciate the writing style. I always suspected that people who understood “literary fiction” probably read in a way different way.
The cinema watchers in the 2s/6d seats like me get derailed by big words or complex sentences. But you guys are real readers. Hard core bibliophiles
I see all the scenery like a movie, grouse when the movie version looks nothing like what I saw, etc. But the characters are blobs, I generally have little idea what they look like, definitely haven’t a clue what they’re wearing, and often can’t even remember their names when I’m not actively reading. Authors like Dickens create exceptions, when the character descriptions read almost like scenery descriptions.
@22, interestingly, I don’t despair as seeing no images has always been my experience, and I’m a huge reader. I am not a big fan of literary fiction; most of my reading is in genre fiction. I don’t tend to notice writing style either; I’m all about the story.
Slow reading allows me to imagine far better “what it feels like to be” in the room, this person, under this roof, among these people, wearing these clothes, being that young, or that old. I suppose “slow reading” would refer to the first fifty to hundred pages.
As many of you said, and I do too think that this is where the author acts the strongest like a director, the style of the author paints the emotional setting and the seriousness tone that will guide my imagination. For instance, reading a Terry Pratchett novel feels more like a Terry Gilliam’s type of movie for me, whereas Amor Towles’ sort of prose makes me emphasise on the surroundings, like imagining the raindrops, “hearing” how people are walking, just as in an Anthony Minghella’s film. It’s almost impossible for me to read anything from Stephen King and not hearing Morgan Freeman in my head.
There’s no denying, there’s a machine in our heads creating motion pictures anyway and even in the most digitalised technologies, there’re always sequences of still takes, frames or singles. But is it really what happens when we read? The way we handle time, or the way we scent things.
I do wonder how much people differ in what we can visualize vs. differing in how we describe our visualization. Perhaps many people actually have the same mental imagery, but one person focuses on how pale and empty it is compared to real vision, and calls it smudge or impressionistic, while another person responds to how it feels and calls it a movie in their head.
Certainly I cannot call up a mental hallucination that is anywhere as vivid as physical vision, or maybe vivid at all. If I close my eyes, I cannot ‘see’ anything. On the other hand, I can remember outlines, or the position of objects relative to each other. I can close my eyes and ‘look’ from one imagined object to another, or around an object, tracing it out with eye movements the same way my eyes would move in looking at real objects. I can imagine the geometric plane well enough to come up with geometric proofs of trig identities without pencil and paper.
As for visualizing during reading, I think I do so more now than when I was younger. I don’t have strong childhood memories of visualization, while now I’ll often stop and try to pay attention to the words and what they imply. Not all authors actually make it clear! It may also help that I’ve experienced more than I had as a child: mountains, deserts, forests, ships, have experiential referents now that they didn’t have when I was a poor child who never left Chicago.
I will say I’m far more confident in being able to somehow visualize and manipulate lines than colors.
Don’t see a thing when I read, and I don’t think I ever have; reading is an auditory experience for me, not a visual one.
The rhythm of the text, length and structure of sentences are very important to me.
There is also a bit of a kinetic element, I can ‘feel’ the movements and speed of the text in my body.
I tend to skim / skip lengthy descriptions, no matter how beautifully they are written
I never tried to analyze it before but yes I do visualize. Vague images float through my mind as I read descriptions, I love description, which become more focused and detailed if I stop reading to concentrate on them.
How can people read and see something else at the same time? Don’t you have to see the words?
Can’t speak for others, birgit, but I don’t ‘see’ visualizations with my eyes. The image is in my mind and I can see fine with my eyes at the same time e time.
Yeah, I can imagine a triangle as I stare at my screen, but it’s not like it’s real or obscuring anything.
I feel this may touch back on my speculation that there’s less diversity of experience and more diversity of description.
If you look at an object, then close your eyes, do you not retain some ghostly awareness of the object? My visual imagination is like that.
You guys are making me understand why I can’t figure out sewing patterns, and maybe why I get disoriented when the lights are off. I have voices and sounds in my mind, but not pictures. I read a trilogy where I can’t tell you what the main characters look like, but a secondary character sounds exactly like Captain Janeway.
Thank heavens, I was afraid I was the only one! I follow stories just fine, but I’m not really SEEING them.
I’m an artist, so this is a bit of a chicken-egg situation, but I see everything when I’m reading, very, very clearly. I picture the exact position of the furniture and the way the light hits; I know how a character’s hair looks, their body language and facial expressions, clothes are a bit blurrier but that’s because I’m pants at designing clothes IRL. But it has a downside: I find it almost impossible to modify an image once it’s there, so if I imagined something wrong it’s a hassle to try and fix it.
For example: when I first read harry Potter, I pictured the main staircase being opposite the doors. Then a later book happened and it transpired it’s in front of the Great hall’s doors, and to the right of the maind doors! With a lot of effort I could modify the mental image to the right one (otherwise I kept getting confused as the character’s movements in the text didn’t match the ones in my head), but my mental Hogwarts still has some steps leading nowhere on the wall in front of the door.
I can also hear them, like people above said. This is the main reason I can’t listen to audiobooks, AND the main thing that puts me off actors playing the characters in adaptations – everybody sounds wrong.
To be honest, when imagining I FEEL more often than consciously visualise – feel that such and such an actor would suit this character, that the setting WOULD look like this, that this music goes quite beautifully with that setting etc.
I also get occasional snatches of descriptive prose – even where a characters appearance is not described – that one tries to jot down.
(I admit to this being a shameless repost of my original comment, because I like the conversation but don’t have time to reformulate my response).
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.
To me, reading novels when I was young was like inducing dream sleep: I could see characters, landscapes, setting details, quite vividly sometimes. Not so much anymore, though, which might be why reading novels has become such a chore.
I agree with @14. I am very verbal but not visual, so I struggle to fill in details that the author doesn’t specify. I’ve also read way too many stories that deliberately obscure certain details for plot reasons, or that make unusual choices for important details that aren’t revealed right away. What I mean by that are, for example, SF/F stories with alien or otherwise non-human viewpoint characters. Sometimes they’re written in such a way that the reader can’t tell what they are or what they look like until later in the story. Sometimes important details are buried in the descriptions, or aren’t even mentioned because they’re not important to the viewpoint character. Just look at all the people surprised by the dark casting of many of the Wheel of Time characters.
What a great post. The comment section is equally fascinating. I had no idea that so many people don’t even try to visualize anything while reading fiction, and many even skim descriptive passages, no matter how beautifully written. I’m guessing the assumption is that descriptive language is purely ornamental and has little to do with the story itself. That’s a shame, and really discouraging to an aspiring writer who loves setting the scene and hates writing plot expositionand dialogue. I think we as readers are too concerned with flipping pages and hurrying the story along when the author wants us to slow down and enjoy the scenery. Sometimes imagery is the point in and of itself; if it’s a part of the novel, it’s never meaningless fluff. Finishing a book is satisfying, yes, but it’s a lot more satisfying when you take the time to enjoy it as intended.
I don’t see shit.
I see the words on the page. That’s it. I’m immersed in language, not hallucinations.
Comments 40 and 41. Two diametrically opposed views! I love the all comments here. But hats off to Dale O. I will bet most readers of F&SF tend towards his take on the subject.
“I see the words on the page. That’s it. I’m immersed in language, not hallucinations.”
See, I don’t get how that’s possible. The ‘words on the page’ are meaningless, just arbitrary symbols that refer to categories of experience that we share. ‘purple’ works because it evokes memories of purple things we’ve seen and what they have in common.
I mean, in a sense I can get what he means. It isn’t just the words themselves, but the way the words are used, constructed, flow together, picking the perfectly nuanced word for an emotion, etc. Of course that also all depends on their meanings which has a more abstract concept but somtimes even words themselves have an inherent beauty.
Can’t see a thing, unless I’ve already been shown a visual image of it – illustration, cover art, map, a movie having been made of the book, or even cosplay. I just read words and follow the story.
@43: No, ‘purple’ works because it refers to a concept: in this case, a category of color. We don’t need to call up mental examples or visualize anything, because we can manipulate the word instead. Words are like pointer variables in programming in that way.
I have no visual experience of what’s being described when I read, I merely experience the sequence of concepts. And those concepts are (virtually) never precise enough to refer to any particular image I might create if I attempt to do so. If I try to create an image, I have to supply additional information and thereby narrow down the possible acceptable choices to a single reality. Which involves running the risk of getting things wrong, like imagining a purple high-heeled shoe when the author meant a sneaker. My personal visualization isn’t what the author created.
It’s worth noting that my visuospatial abilities are below normal, while my verbal abilities are… let’s just say they’re not.