I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, the Slate Culture Gabfest, and they were interviewing the creators/writers behind the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, which recently became the number one podcast on iTunes (don’t know if it still is; I tried it a few months ago but quickly got bored).
Anyway, one of them says he doesn’t describe characters on the show because he finds that his eyes glaze over and he reflexively skims when he gets to physical descriptions in fiction. I have always done the same thing, and I was never sure if that was at all common or even normal. (Heck, given the oddness of his show, maybe it’s not.)
What’s strange about that is that I love cinema perhaps most of all out of all forms of art; yet I do not picture individuals or locations when reading fiction. The story, in a sense, takes place in my mind in a weird sort of morass or vacuum without physicality, if that makes any sense. Really, it just seems to take place “on the page”, though obviously not literally. It is very difficult to describe. (As a result, I think I tend to prefer fiction that is mostly dialogue and intellectual/emotional interaction rather than having much “action” per se.)
Therefore, when novels I’ve read are made into movies, I cannot participate in the discussion of whether a character looks “the way I pictured”, since I never pictured them at all before seeing the movie. (Interestingly, an exception to the way I read novels comes when I read them *after *seeing the movie version, in which case I do picture the characters and locations as I read.)
One thing I wonder about people who do picture the characters and the action: doesn’t it seem weird that everything is happening so fast? I mean: I assume that most all of us here read pretty fast, and so a scene especially with lots of dialogue would occur at unreasonable speed if we were actually imagining the scene the way it would occur in a film.
Anyone else relate to this, or am I and the Night Vale guy really unusual?
It depends. With settings and action, sometimes I do and sometimes not - depends on the writer. Stephen King and JK Rowling do a good job of making me see what’s going on without me being aware of having to build the visual in my mind. It’s a real skill.
I guess I do from time to time with most authors - but only certain scenes - a couple of times per book. I hardly ever see characters’ faces.
Sometimes I may picture an actor or a location from some movie or show I watch around the time I start the book, but that’s the exception. Usually I picture tenuous generic characters in my mind.
I have mental pictures, but they just hit the high points. I don’t mind a little scene setting, but I get impatient when the descriptions get long-winded, and with some authors, I kind of fast forward when they get started.
The best example is David Weber. He’s a scifi writer, and he goes into loving detail on the weapons systems in his spaceships. If I’m reading a WWII history, I’ll try to understand the weaponry, but if I’m reading about scifi stuff that he just made up, I’ll skip over it, sometimes several pages worth.
You described it perfectly. I’m the same way. I’ve told people that I can’t picture things in my head when I read, but they never believe me. I get immersed in the story, yes, but it’s not like a movie in my head or anything.
When I was younger, I saw everything. Even if the book said “They walk into a tavern” I saw an image so real I could have told you how many people were sitting at the bar and what the food smelled like. Obviously, most of this image came from my own imagination because even the most long-winded authors don’t include that much detail. I often had to revise my image as the author included details that didn’t fit with the initial image, which didn’t bother me in the slightest. The scene in my head was very fluid, much in the way you can make totally nonsensical transitions in dreams without thinking it out of place.
Somewhere around college, I lost this. I’m not sure whether this change was related in any way to a change in my eyesight (which went to hell), a change in my reading habits (which became much heavier in technical non-fiction), just a factor of aging or purely coincidence. Around the same time, I also lost my photographic memory - I still remember images better than most people, but I’m nowhere near what people expect from a photographic memory.
There are some authors who can still evoke a good image in my head, but it’s no longer the rule and even when it happens, it’s rarely at the same level I had as a kid. There are some authors I read without any images at all, the way the OP describes.
I’ve always pictured people and places (in both cases, some more vividly than others) when I read, and I didn’t know that there were readers who didn’t do the same until a conversation with a friend a few years ago.
I usually picture people and places, but the details may be vague.
If the lead character is noble and heroic, then he always looks like me.
When I read Lord of the Rings, I visualized the forests and mountains. However, I grew up in the desert, so my mental picture of forests and mountains was rather lame. When Peter Jackson made the movies, He used New Zealand’s landscapes, which are much more impressive.
I will make mental movies with my books - voices and whatnot.
Oh sweet jumping jesus military sf weapon/ship porn! The Honor Harrington series is known for that! [First book in the series available as free ebook here] It is bad enough that I start flipping pages to get back to people scenes! It wasn’t as bad in the early books, but around the 8th or 9th book :eek:.
I also have issues with sex scenes that got stuck into SF/fantasy novels back in the 70s [Sharon Green especially - she wrote BDSM-ish SF/fantasy novels that were especially painful to read. An author I knew who dated her a few times said she was pretty much like that in real life too, she preferred a date to end with someone bleeding. :eek:] I tend to flip past most sex as it generally is gratuitous and rarely ever lends anything to the actual story line.
The best books tend to also make good audio books - I really liked the audio books for the Oz series, the Hobbit was a good audio book, and I love listening to some of Shakespear’s plays. Oh, and The Odyssey is great as an audiobook.
Typically I have a little movie running in my head; so much so that often the mechanics of actually reading words is mostly unconscious.
This only works with good writers; writers who don’t give enough stage-setting for me to fill in the backgrounds, or (worse) writers who describe every little stupid detail are enough to mess up the projector so to speak. In the first case, I find myself actively thinking “What about this? What about that? Where was that other thing/person?”. In the latter case, it’s the fact that the descriptions go on long enough that it’s distracting from the narrative; kind of like if a filmmaker had an extended minutes-long opening shot that didn’t advance the narrative, but lingered on unimportant items or details.
One thing that does kind of mess with me is when there’s a movie or television adaptation of a particular work; sometimes the casting is accurate enough or the actor owns the part such that no matter how hard I try, the actor is stuck in my head as the character. For example, I really can’t imagine Tywin Lannister not looking like Charles Dance, descriptions of baldness and blonde sideburns notwithstanding.
Generally speaking, if I can’t get the mental projector going, I find the books to be a tough grind- they’re literally words on a page at that point, and it’s more of a mechanical exercise to read them and piece the sentences, paragraphs and chapters together.
If the setting is distinctive – like a cemetery as opposed to a kitchen – I’ll try to picture it. I’ll picture characters when they’re first described, but unless their appearance changes or affects the story, I won’t picture them again.
I picture characters and locations, but what’s weird about me is that when reading many books I’ll often “set” them in completely inappropriate places. Like for example I’ll read a murder mystery and it’ll take place at my old elementary school, even though the story doesn’t have anything to do with a school. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’m doing this, and it takes going by the place in question and being inexplicably reminded of the story to make the connection. Does anybody else do this?
This is a really good point: it’s why I’ve read exactly one and only one book from Robin Cook, Dan Brown, and David Baldacci.
All are best-selling popular authors and I wanted to see what all the hub-bub was about; none of them can write descriptions of people and places. Other popular authors, like Stephen King or Michael Crichton, may not have written literary masterworks but at least I can form a picture of what I’m reading.
I’ve mentioned him many times before on this board, but the best I’ve ever encountered at writing evocative fiction is Mervyn Peake – reading the *Gormenghast *books is like immersing one’s self in a surround-sound wrap-around theater. As **bump **notes, amateur writers can go overboard in trying to write descriptively; Peake easily writes even more words than the hacks do while describing a person or place, but manages to succeed.
I have the Big Book of Gormenghast [well it is, it is the compendium volume of all 3 and is like 3 inchesthick] and people will pick it up off my shelf and flip to somewhere in the middle and see a 5 paragraph description of a closet or something and wonder why people bother to read it, then I loan it to them and they start reading and I have to badger them to give it back …
I still see everything in my head when I read. Always have. Even if an action scene is described in intricate detail, in my head it’s both in super-slo-mo and at real-time speed; I experience both simultaneously as I read, somehow.
I also see every character from head to toe and see locations in vivid detail, often, as you say, dracoi, revising my internal vision on the fly as I read a written detail that differs from my mental image.
I see everything vividly when I read, to the point that if I’ve read a book awhile ago that had been made into a movie, I might not be sure whether I had seen the movie too, or I was just remembering my picturing of the book.
When I picture characters, my mind kind of unconsciously decides what the character would look like–sometimes I see them as looking like a certain movie or tv star, or just a random face I’ve just kind of conjured up
One reason I like traveling is that it gives me more and more-accurate mental landscapes; for me, reading a book set in Philly that mentions Society Hill is very different having been there than it was not having seen it.
I love it when a character has some specific physical trait that’s quite distinctive, it gets mentioned early in the book (maybe not as a description but indirectly) and then by the time it crops up again I’ve completely forgotten about it, the characters having reverted to “mental generic [insert physical sex here] blob”. On the other hand, descriptions that go into every little detail or constant reminders of what a character or location look like bore me, specially when done by the book: hair then eyes then nose… Jesus on a pogo stick, you’re not in fifth grade any more!
When I read, my mind usually does conjure up images of the locations in a book. However, it’s much less common for me to have distinct pictures of the characters in my mind, unless the author makes a point out of emphasizing part of the character’s physical description – two examples that come to mind are as Gandalf’s beard, eyebrows, and hat, and the “retrousse nose” of Jane in Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey.
I’ve read The Lord of the Rings eight or nine times, starting when I was 12, over 30 years ago. When I saw the movies, one of the things that struck me was how often I’d react to the sets / scenes with, “that’s exactly how I always pictured that!”
