This post was inspired by my response to The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a review of which will hopefully be up on Thursday.
Are you a visual reader?
Most people I’ve met are. It sounds pretty great.
I’m not.
For that main reason, describing my reading experience is difficult. For the longest time, I had issues with “imagery,” especially analyzing it, because words don’t really paint pictures for me.
They sound nice, sure, and I adore lyrical writing (hello Neil Gaiman), but long descriptions of character appearance or setting are more likely to bore me than not. That isn’t to say I don’t find them important—I can see the value, and why many readers like knowing what a character/setting looks like. It’s characterization. It’s orientation in place. I can even get annoyed when there isn’t enough (especially of the latter).
But I would much rather have internal monologue or dialogue than a detailed description of a fight scene. I just get lost because I don’t–and definitely feel like I can’t–picture it. Where Samantha from Thoughts on Tomes does a great job discussing how she pictures characters, I find it hard to sympathize entirely, because I just… don’t.
So I don’t conjure images from words. Along the same lines, though, I generally don’t have an emotional reaction to still images. I’ve noticed lately that I’m much more likely to react emotionally (especially positively) to a television show or a movie than I am to a comic like The Complete Persepolis or even a photograph.
And I don’t know why.
Are you a visual reader?
To what extent do you imagine what you read?
What are your more likely to notice?
I’ve had this conversation with my CP at least a dozen times. She’s a very visual reader (possibly because she’s an artist) and I’m … not. I see things when I read, but not clearly. I mean, I like to be given an idea of what something or someone looks like, but I prefer a general idea, where my mind can fill in the blanks with something I’ve seen. I can’t create an image wholesale. I do better with, for instance, a few salient details about a room that I can place in a room I know IRL, rather than trying to assemble a detailed description of a room from scratch.
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That’s a really interesting variation of this phenomenon. It reminds me very strongly of an article I saw on KM Weiland’s website (http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/guest-post-good-writers-are-so-lazy/)–I think filling in the blanks for me, personally, is easier with nonvisual things. I can’t even remember details unless they’re somehow important (like Annabeth’s blonde hair and gray eyes from the Percy Jackson series). In what ways do you fill in the blanks for characters?
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Sometimes they look like an actor with similar features (Rose from Vampire Academy looks like Nina Dobrev. This may be influenced by the vampire thing 😉 ). Other characters just don’t look that vivid. They’re kind of blurry, but I only notice that if I start thinking about it.
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I really liked this discussion post. I’m not a visual reader but occasionally I stop to picture what a character or scene might look like. Though sometimes I find myself visualising most of book so I’m not really sure?? I think it just really depends on the book… 🙂
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I think some books are better at eliciting this reaction than others–it’s finding the perfect balance of detail for the reader to evoke the images. For me, for example, certain books are more likely to envelope me in language than others. I lose myself in Neil Gaiman and Kate Griffin, but I’m jarred by the occasional stunning beauty of sentences in Rowling.
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Yes. I definitely see what you mean. 🙂
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This is an interesting post! I am a visual reader myself, but not only do I envision characters, see the scenes and I especially can visually see the conversations between characters. Its just an automatic thing to me, I don’t know why but that’s how it is for me personally.
However, I don’t picture these things all the time, so I wouldn’t consider myself a completely visual reader. Very engaging and well written books tend to bring out the visual reader inside of me. Loved this post!
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From what I’ve heard, the level of engagement is directly proportional to the ability/tendency to visualize (for visual readers). I find it a really fascinating phenomenon, in part because I can’t imagine it. How do you imagine the conversations? Do the characters have individual voices?
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Yep! I conjure up individual voices. I might not actually hear them, but I can visualise the tone and way that the characters say things, and I can also imagine the body language they are making at the same time. It truly is a strange thing!!
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That sounds like such a great experience!
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I wish you could experience it! 😄
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I am a very visual reader. It’s not like watching a movie in my head, but rather that I’m there with the characters watching it unfold. I can almost hear and smell, too if the description is done correctly. As for the characters, I usually end up picturing actors or people I know that look similar to the description. Or I’ll ignore the description if the character’s attitude suggests he looks like my best friend, for instance.
I can’t imagine not being able to enter the world of the book!
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And vice versa, it’s hard for me to imagine what it /is/ like xD I’m much more likely to get lost in the language and appreciate the writing style and voice. The funny thing is that when I read Jane Austen, I start speaking in a terrible variation of a British accent. That’s about as close as I get, though.
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I think I’m part visual reader. But I’m definitely a visual writer – when I write, I see the movie before I write the book! Haha 😛
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I imagine that helps a lot with writing descriptions–something I also have trouble with. How do you translate a visual into words?
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[…] means it’s time for a review 😀 But let me back track a little bit first: on Monday, I did a post on visual reading, and how it isn’t something I do. This was because I recently read The Complete Persepolis, […]
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I’m half of a visual reader and half not. I picture worlds and areas the best, but when it comes to action, I generally read for a while before I realize that I’m not picturing what happens at all. If I want to play it out in my head, I need to read really slowly.
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Why is that, do you think? Does movement make it harder to visualize?
I find that my lack of visual reading makes fight scenes particularly difficult for me. I find they tend to build little character and only injury and outcome affect the plot, generally, so I get a bit bored.
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I think it might be because I kind of take things and run with them. Like there’s supposed to be a window on the left that some guy smashes into, but it’s really HARD to me to picture a window on the left because I already see a house with a window on the right. So I have to invert the guy smashing because that’s easier than imagining a window after I’ve already NOT imagined a window. Also because of how I picture people- where they are, height, position.. It’s just hard for me to fit them together.
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That makes a lot of sense. Is it easier for you if the author describes the set-up in painstaking detail or does that make it less pleasant?
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Just makes it less pleasant for me. By the time I’ve read the first few details, I’ve already filled in the rest of the blanks, so there’s no need to add more.
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