When you read fiction, what do you picture in your head?

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When a narrator describes a place ("The low house stood on a grassy hillside, surrounded by gnarled cedars..." or whatev), how do you go about creating the picture in your head? I know it's an unconcious construct, but it seems like I always go back to a few childhood homes or relatives' houses, adapted to the author's details... or if it's set in nature, I always revert to some campground we visited as a kid. It's never some place I've visited recently.

There's little fictional worlds in your head that you visit again and again and again.

― andy --, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 15:14 (twenty years ago)

There's little fictional worlds in your head that you visit again and again and again.

get out of my head.

― Amon (eman), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 15:18 (twenty years ago)

I'm very spacial and direction oriented. I picture North South East and West. For example, I just read Winnie the Pooh the other day, when then went to dig a hole to get the heffalump I thought they were going in an eastward direction from Pooh's house. I think of Rabbit's hole as south of Pooh's house and Chistopher Robin's as north. Also obviously when they went on the north pole expedition they were heading north of Christopher Robin's house. I do this type of thing with other books too.

― A Nairn (moretap), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 15:31 (twenty years ago)

i picture the creator having a masterplan

― t\'\'t (t\'\'t), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 15:41 (twenty years ago)

i think when reading literature i forget almost immediately any detailed descriptions--i will only remember a few particular details and these are enough to distinquish the person or place from others in the book. (a woman has "big hair" or a man is "twitchy"--and that's basically all they are in my mind.)

― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 15:49 (twenty years ago)

i notice that unless the spatial dimensions are explicitly written out, i'll take something like "The low house stood on a grassy hillside, surrounded by gnarled cedars..." and put the house on the LEFT side of my mental landscape.

its always on the left for some reason.

― AaronK (AaronK), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 15:54 (twenty years ago)

I always picture the Gateway supermarket in Swadlincote, and there has been what is now called a 'wet spill' and someone has put sawdust on the floor.

― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 15:59 (twenty years ago)

http://www.u-blog.net/avatars/img/alizee.gif http://nf.wh3rd.net/files/alizee2.gif http://nf.wh3rd.net/files/alizee5.gif

― The Ghost of Predictable Jokes (Dan Perry), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 16:03 (twenty years ago)

I'm actually shocked at the richness or at least the craftiness of my imagination. Let's say that "The low house stood on a grassy hillside, surrounded by gnarled cedars..." actually reminds you, say, of a passage in another book where the adjective 'gnarled' was used to describe a tree and which you pictured then partly by thinking of cedars at Carmel, partly by thinking of cedars in a cloisters in the south of England and partly from some TV show (what was it?). The passage you have cited now has an incredible wealth of associations which will be weeded and trimmed or embellished and refined as the narrative continues until its 'reality' may be said to be particular to that book and only incidentally related to the other experiences.

― M. White (Miguelito), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 16:08 (twenty years ago)

For the sentence you just made up, I pictured the house from that Wyeth painting, you know, with the girl in the foreground, and put some trees around it. In general I'm not sure, but I always picture the inside rooms of a house to be arranged like rooms in my house unless I tell myself otherwise.

― Maria (Maria), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 16:19 (twenty years ago)

I try not to think about it consciously, it kind of ruins it.

― Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 16:34 (twenty years ago)

One of the weaknesses in my imagination is that when an author describes a character, I'll often picture a celebrity like Albert Finney or Martika, and then I'll always see the character as that. If there's an Edward Gorey illustration on the cover (like Lucky Jim), then I'll picture the main character as sort of a cross between the illustration and, say, Drew McCarthy.

― andy --, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 16:37 (twenty years ago)

pink fluffy clouds

(nothing, i'm visually impaired inside my head. zero imagination.)

― nathalie doing a soft foot shuffle (stevie nixed), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 16:40 (twenty years ago)

That's why seeing films of books before reading them is disastrous. (For me, The Wings of the Dove: none of the actors seemed right for the characters and they kept intruding.) (xpost)

― youn, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 16:41 (twenty years ago)

Sometimes the film is surprisingly nearly exactly like I imagined it when reading. Like 1984 for example.

― A Nairn (moretap), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 17:02 (twenty years ago)

myself acting out all the parts. and the costumes are all made out of latex and/or patent leather.

― sugarpants: kind of blurry, kind of double (sugarpants), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 19:18 (twenty years ago)

I don't feel like I do any active, noticeable imagining in my reading, but of course I do; thinking back on recent reads I suppose I have fairly clear mental images of rooms and settings. (The living room in Abraham Mullhouse's home is to the left of the front door, and J. Cartwright's house is on the opposite side!)

― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 20:35 (twenty years ago)

But so the thing that interests me about the process is the way I kind of inevitably wind up stylizing the scene to fit the tone of the writing; for plenty of books, I'm less imagining concrete places and more imagining, say, stages and sets with flat cardboard props, or other sort of stages between the concrete and the abstract. (When Edwin Mullhouse writes Cartoons, you have to imagine it as a cartoon!)

― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 20:37 (twenty years ago)

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