How real is your imagination?

Random surrealness aside, how vividly do you tend to imagine a scene when you read? Can you see a person's face emote and express when they say anything? Do you hear the cafe chatter in the background? And when they hold hands, do you feel your heart blush? I wish to know how much do you involve yourself when reading, as a survey.

I'm thinking of dabbling in some poetry, and I wonder how words can deeply affect.

edited 25th May '11 10:16:59 PM by QQQQQ

I tend to hear the characters speak when they're engaging in dialogue, and picture what they look like...sometimes, if the prose is visceral enough, I'll get a little movie playing in my head.

I visualize very, very little. This shows in my writing—I tend to give my stories a fable-like quality with almost no description.

I visualize it a lot - I think of a scene in a movie and then write it down in literature form.

I tend to picture things a little minimalistically. Unfortunately, this affects my writing, so my descriptions come across very beige (as has been noted in the Character Development Threads).

I hear the characters' voices, and I picture the situation in a simple way. Nothing so elaborate as facial expressions, though.

I write in vibrant shades of purple when it comes to character description. Granted I wrote mostly poetry and song lyrics up until a year and a half ago.

I picture settings and characters, but not in great detail, and I tend to have one image that I associate with a particular book.

Being a manga freak, I do not have have any problem in imagining characters. Buildings and objects description on the other hand, is something that I have problem both in reading and writing.

My characters 'talk' to me most of the time through thoughts and I sometimes visualise the scenes when trying to sleep (stop looking at me strange!) When reading, I get pictures of the character's face/expressions (like when I read pre-famous Twlight I pictured Edward having black hair, gold eyes and a pissed-off expression and sparkling like a diamond)

edited 26th May '11 2:30:15 AM by sabrina_diamond

I have a vivid imagination for characters and objects, but a terrible one for rooms and such places.

People tend to not give descriptions of a place's floor plan, so I always visualize refurnished versions of the same few places by default.

My imagination is probably some of the least real imagination there is. I am a big picture person, so most details get lost on me.

When I'm writing out scenes, I try to visualize them, like I'm watching a show. I can see the characters, I say their dialogue to myself, I see the room they're in, the floor plan of the area... basically, I see everything. And then I try to write it down like how my viewpoint character would perceive it.

It's making sure I don't miss some details in my description, prioritizing details, and conveying it in a somewhat logical manner (details tend to hit me out of order) that I need to work on.

Movie-like, most of the time.

I have an incredible imagination when I'm visualizing a scene and writing, but there is always a question of how much detail I need to put and what the (potential) readers can fill in for themselves. To sort of avoid being beige and purple, I only detail certain aesthetics based on how relevant I want them to be to the story as a whole.

I'm not sure how well this actually works.

Its probably because I'm an artist, but when something is described like in the excerpt, I see things with full-color, perspective, texture, and lighting. When someone gives me an object — like 'gingerbread house' — I fill it in with what I view as a run-of-the-mill version of said object, and change the details as I go.

However, if someone isn't really careful about describing something I don't have a baseline for — like a made-up animal or a very foreign landscape — then I'm going to be confused as hell. This is probably the biggest reason why I'm not a huge fan of anything but really soft sci-fi novels, because the second they try describing something more out-there I'm completely lost.

On people… eh, its hard to describe. Even when there's a description about what people look like, I rarely pay too much attention to it outside of maybe filling in a few colors. There's their expression, their tone of voice, their posture, and their movements. Everything else is rather inconsequential in my head-movie, unless it affects one of those things — like a taller character being described as hugging a smaller one, or a character with long hair brushing hair out of their face and over their shoulder. Even then, there might be a small hiccup in the movie, as processing that sort of stuff seems to take slightly more conscious work.

Also, I've noticed that visual descriptions have gotten a bit more vivid since I've started writing, once I've been prompted by the text. Probably because when I like a scene I'm writing, there tends to be a shitload more visual details floating about.

Probably because I'm hyper-lexic, I been able to visualize like a movie at a young age when reading a book causually. As in, I can naturally see the characters and there positions, along with the scene. I can vagually hear their voices as they talk (which made me develop an aversion to anime adaptation, due to dissonance between the voices). If a character gets an injury I can sometimes feel it, so I don't like Gorn because of its excess gore. I usually don't imagine the other two senses unless it is brought up in the text.

The only thing now is to figure out how to ramp it up so I can start actually seeing it.

EDIT: Also, I usually can imagine the layout of a room, so that influences my writing. And if I forget a character's appearance, I usually fill in the gaps, which could lead to some awkwardness during re-reading.

For very minor details, I could perceive them if they are brought up in the text, but I usually don't fill them in.

For the most part, I see realistic at default, but it could vary depending on what I'm reading. For example, for Kira Is Justice, I was imagining the canon characters with their manga apperances, while the original characters looked realistic.

All the above applies both to my own writing, and my actual imagination. There's a reason why I say creativity is my biggest strength.

edited 26th May '11 7:10:11 AM by chihuahua0

If I concentrate, I can bring up a detailed mental image, but otherwise it's more cartoony outlines. I hear dialogue almost as if it where spoken (and improperly punctuated dialogue sounds awful). Touch, if I concentrate on imagining a touch sensation I get a tingle on the body part being touched, but nothing more. I am completely incapable of imagining smell or taste.

So the only thing that really feels 'real' to me is the dialogue.

My imagination gets carried away so much I actually have to tone it down in my writing lest I throw out amateur Purple Prose. I can read scenes from my own writing or someone else and my imagination will actually create details suited for the scene that are not mentioned in the prose itself.

edited 26th May '11 7:13:13 AM by MajorTom

When reading, I have a very minimalistic mental image of what's happening in terms of sight. The other senses (touch, smell, taste and hearing) tend to be more vivid for me.

When writing, I visualize a scene and then try to figure out how to describe it with words.

I tend to live out scenes, particularly if I'm focusing on one character. Someone lies on the ground, I know what that ground feels like. If they look into the sun, I blink when I read that passage back. If they're talking to someone, I read that part out loud.

This doesn't mean my writing is coherent. Just a vivid, scattered daydream.

...Come with me, and you'll be in a woooooooorld of pure imaginaaaaation!

edited 26th May '11 4:11:08 PM by Leradny

By the way, is the ability to visualize stuff in your head natural or a developed ability? I began "seeing" images in my head around 2nd grade or so and then I applied it for reading shortly after.

^ A little of column A, a little of column B. Some folks with more wild imaginations can see mental images better naturally. For others it's an acquired skill.

If you could project my mental images, it'd look a lot like Team Fortress 2: minimalistic backdrop, with important features highlighted and the rest left fairly barren, but distinctive, slightly exaggerated body shapes, stances, and expressions for every character. This shows in my writing, which tends to be character-centric to a high degree, and aims more for broad descriptions than intricate specifics.

I'm hungry now.

Also environments I see are mix and match of things I have seen in real life. My only ability to create something comepletely new is to just start drawing something, and create an image. Other wise, I just imagine a mix and match of things I have seen before. The same way our dreams work in that all faces are faces of people we have seen in real life. Our mind takes elements and fragments of things we know of and have seen before and makes something out of it. Kind of like taking apart a lego model and making something different out of it.

Really, it depends on how vividly they describe it how well I see it differently than the mix-match I see in my mind. There ever is only a mix and match of four schools in my mind, for example. Or elements of part of it put into other parts or exaggerated, repeated, ect ect . I've only ever attended four schools.