Rather than discuss anything “out there” in the genre today, I’m going to take a trip inside, and I’m going to drag you–kicking and screaming, if necessary–with me.
Specifically, I want to take you inside the mind of a writer. Oddly enough, this writer.
As best I can tell, from multiple conversations with other authors, I’m a bit of a weirdo. (Well, okay, I knew that, but I’m speaking specifically about how the creative mind works.) Not unique, but definitely not the norm. And the reason is, I don’t tend to think visually.
Let me define my terms. Obviously, I process the world as visually as anyone else. Few things inspire my imagination like evocative artwork or a magnificent landscape. I’m a relatively quick reader. My eyesight is pretty good (making my eyes rank highly among the few parts of me that actually do what they’re fricken’ supposed to).
No, when I say I don’t think visually, I mean that literally. I don’t think visually. I don’t create visually.
Let’s take the following text, which is excerpted from The Conqueror’s Shadow.
Men dashed across open ground and crunching snow, hearts pumping, sweating despite the blue nip in the air, shivering with more than cold as voluminous clouds of mist, advancing against the prevailing wind, poured from the palisade. It frothed as it came, the leading edge splitting and tearing and bubbling in agitation, curling at the corners. A wave of malice swept ahead of it, unholy herald of its master’s deathly advance. Here and there, not quite masked by eddies in the swirling fog, appeared blood-gleaming eyes or pale grasping hands. Several of Losalis’s slower men vanished with a terrifying abruptness as the mists rolled over them, their fear-filled, ear-splitting shrieks dragging on and on and on . . .
They began to emerge, then, humanoid shapes coalescing from the mists. Pale-skinned with reddened eyes, trailing streamers of fog as they walked, leaving infinite ranks of bloody footprints behind them in the snow. Mist took on the shape of shadow, shadow the substance of man, as they appeared, each after each, from the thinning mists, the ones in back stepping over the rent and bloodless bodies of the men they’d slaughtered. Tall and short, gaunt and stout—all manner of men and women, but all dark of hair and pale of skin.
In the ranks behind Losalis, someone whimpered, someone gasped. Even the general himself had to grit his teeth, clench his fist tight about the hilt of his saber, and command his feet with muscles of stone and will of iron that they would not run.
Do you see it in your head? Do you have a strong visual image of that scene? I don’t. I didn’t when I wrote it, and I still don’t today.
Most authors–again, based on conversations I’ve had–would create that scene by first picturing it in their mind, and then using the keyboard or pen to describe what they “saw.” I don’t work that way. I don’t get images, at least not very often. My writing comes to me as description. As words, or at least as ideas that are partly conveyed by words.
I’ve had more than one person tell me that they don’t believe me when I say this, because I have such visual scenes in my books. But again, the truth is, those scenes come to be as description. The fact that it might be fluid and/or detailed description doesn’t change that. I tell it, I describe it; I rarely if ever see it.
Lots of people, when reading a book, see the action unfolding in their heads. When playing a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: the Requiem, they see at least part of what the DM/Storyteller is describing to them. Again, I don’t. Oh, occasionally a particularly vivid description will cause a slight flash of imagery, but usually? I absorb the description, I can tell you what’s going on, I’m fully immersed–but descriptively, not visually.
And I have to admit, sometimes I feel like I’m missing out. Like I’d get more out of my favorite books, or playing RPGs, if I did generate mental images of what I was reading/hearing/creating. But it just doesn’t happen often. Heck, after The Conqueror’s Shadow I wrote a second book about Corvis Rebaine, and I hope to do more–and I’m willing to bet that many of my readers have a clearer idea of his appearance than I do. (I don’t mean in general terms; obviously, I know what he looks like. I’ve described him enough. But I mean in the little specific details that writers don’t touch on and readers fill in.) I have no idea if it’s because I read more than I watched movies and TV growing up, or if it’s just part and parcel of how my brain is wired. But there it is.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s an upside. It means that I can write gory scenes without flinching. (I can usually, but not always, read them that way, too.) And it means that, in the company of close friends, I can make the foulest, most disgusting jokes or comments, because I know that while they’re picturing what I said, I’m blissfully not. (And the looks on their faces nourish me like the nectar of the gods.)
Until, of course, I get one of those occasional visual images that do hit me from time to time, and then I get as grossed out as anyone.
Maybe this is more common than I think, and lots of other writers think this way as well. Or maybe I’m a circus freak with a broken brain. I’m okay with either, really. But I think that, for anyone interested in genre fiction, one of the best ways to understand the genres–especially if one is interested in writing one’s own stuff–is to get a glimpse of the thought processes involved. I’ve shown you a bit of mine, so how about it? Are you a visual thinker? A descriptive thinker? Something else entirely?
Show me your brain.
ARI MARMELL is the author of The Conqueror’s Shadow (Spectra) and Agents of Artifice (Wizards of the Coast). His forthcoming novels include The Warlord’s Legacy (Spectra, January 25, 2011) and The Goblin Corps (Pyr Books, mid- to late 2011). He’s also contributed to about 2,479 different role-playing game books, for two different editions of Dungeons & Dragons and several of White Wolf’s World of Darkness games. The Conqueror’s Shadow will be available in mass-market paperback as of next month, and is the perfect jumping-on point if you’re at all interested in his writing. Or know someone who is. Or just feel like buying a book. Or, well, any reason at all. Ari’s not picky.
You can see more of Ari’s credits, and read more of his so-called “thoughts,” at mouseferatu.com, or find him on Twitter at twitter.com/mouseferatu.
You and I are opposites, if I cannot picture it in my head I usually can’t write it. But, hey, everyone has their way of doing stuff, if it gets the job done what difference does it make. Haters gonna hate.
Though, unlike most people it was easier for me to picture the excerpt from the book. Of course I paused at every few sentences and let my mind translate what my eyes saw.
I didn’t realize descriptive thinking was a “different” way of thinking, until your post. I guess I just never thought about it till now.
I don’t picture things/people/actions in my head, whether I’m reading or writing. The words are the thing/person/action. I have to actually stop and put effort into visualizing a scene from words. I can do it, but it takes conscious effort and it doesn’t seem to add much value so I seldom bother. The words have all the power they need without pictures (for me).
TOS: Yep, that’s me. I can make myself visualize, but it comes so unnaturally that it’s rarely worth the effort, and rarely adds much to the experience.
Like I said, you and I may be more common than I think, but at least in my experience, we seem to be in the minority.
Ari, I started a new book tonight (”The Waters Rising”) and discovered an exception to my descriptive thinking: directions.
When I read sentences like these: “They had entered a third of the way down the eastern side of the rock. The high point was ahead, a little to their left, the southwestern corner, buried in the mountain, and from there the massive pavement sloped diagonally all the way to the northeast corner…”, I’m compelled to stop and draw a map in my head.
Weird anomaly, but maybe it’s also why I like maps. I have one hall in my house covered with them.
TOS: Heh. I’m so not a map guy, myself, it’s not even funny. (Which, I’ll admit, occasionally causes me some difficulties when designing D&D adventures.)
Heck, I didn’t even have a map when I wrote The Conqueror’s Shadow and The Warlord’s Legacy. I just kept track of locations via a page of notes. When we finally decided to put a map in TWL, we had to go through and create it based on written descriptions.
Hmm, great post to make one think, Ari. I am most certainly a visual thinker and it vexes me to no end when I cannot recreate in my mind what the black-and-white letters on the page are trying to tell me, from action sequences to direction scenes like TOS listed. In fact, it’s not unusual for me to act out a scene or particular movement here in my lair to make sure what I’m writing is visually possible, observable, and accurate.
Ari
I think in the same way when writing, reading and pretty much any scene. I have always thought of this as a handicap I guess and don’t understand when people talk about “seeing scenes in their head.” For a long time I just thought that people were bullshitting me. After the first Gulf War I was ordered to go through several therapies. One of which was a therapy involving visualization. When I told the Psychologist that I was not capable of visualization, he of course assumed I was lying and sent me to group therapy instead. I am a long time avid reader and RPGer, I don’t know if this would have anything to do with it or I’m just mentally handicapped?
Keith
Wow. Never really considered this before, but it makes perfect sense. I’m a visual thinker. It’s the way I write. It’s the way I game. But we have one dude in our RPG group who has to have everything explained to him in exacting detail, and now I totally get it. Based on your post, Ari, my friend is a classic descriptive thinker. I’m going to have to share this post with him. Thanks for the insight!
I can visualize scenes, but I usually prefer to appreciate the desciptive language for what it is. If I want visuals, I watch a movie or play a game, not pick up some text. Words don’t always translate directly to images, and vice versa — I don’t think that means that the media or the viewer is lacking.
Every so often I go on the web to see if there are more out there like me, and here is at least one more! I can’t visualise, at all (except when asleep). To me the “wave of malice” and the “voluminous clouds of mist” are of the same form in my mind (conceptual only – one’s kind of wet and the other is kind of evil).
I hadn’t heard the term “descriptive thinker” until tonight (which is what led me here). Although that sounds close it still doesn’t ring completely true to me, because it has nothing to do with the words, but the base concepts themselves – kind of like the “code” in The Matrix (not the picture of the letters falling from the top of the screen, but the bits and bytes in the background). If I want to remember something, my mind doesn’t need words (or pictures). Quite often it’s blank anyway so it’s not so easy to tell the difference.
In fact the idea of being able to ‘hallucinate’ at will sounds a bit freaky. I sometimes wonder if I’m rabidly schizophrenic but completely oblivious – can see no images, hear no voices.
I can sort of sometimes get a sense of space or of the colour of an object or even a shape, but it’s nothing I’d safely call visual (not like a dream). And I also find it gives me an unfair advantage when trying to gross people out, especially when they know I “can’t see pictures in my head”. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t know what I was doing, but I do still have a very good idea of what I would see in my head if I could.
I also tend to be a verbose detail freak, so I’d better leave it there!