Snippets
By Kathleen Bolton | August 4, 2009 |
Quickie post today as Therese is still out-of-town and I am about to cope with all the fabulous entries for our Insane Analogies contest (that’s what I’m unofficially calling it). BTW, you have until midnight tonight EST to submit your entry.
Contest alert: over at WOW! Women On Writing, Sue Silverman, author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, is holding a contest to give away a copy of her latest book. Leave a comment to be entered in the drawing.
Husband Ken, he of the Single Space Gloaters Club, sent me a link to this interesting article on why certain people can visualize the written word more clearly than others:
Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of “Harry Potter” or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham.
Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.
The new study, detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Psychological Science, builds on previous work that links the way our brains process images and written words to the way they process actions we perform ourselves.
Examining these links could shed light on why some people enjoy reading more than others and how our reading abilities change with time. Essentially, some people might paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than others.
The study is a tad flawed (28 participants, 20 of them women?) but it brings up something that’s puzzled me for a while — why some people are readers and others are not. I can’t imagine not visualizing when I’m reading, and I was surprised to learn that others don’t.
I also find that my visualization abilities seemed to have strengthened over the years, maybe because I have to draw so heavily on imagination to write. Or maybe I write better because my visualization ability has been honed.
What do you think? Have you found that your visualization abilities have improved with age? Do you think writing has improved your imagination, or has your imagination improved your writing?
ETA: My good bud Michelle sent me a link to a potental promo opportunity: Skype An Author.
The Mission of the Skype an Author Network is to provide K-12 teachers and librarians a way to connect authors, books, and young readers through virtual visits.
For those entering our contest? GOOD LUCK!
Image by ~nashoba-hostina.
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
You know, when I was a kid a lot of my (guy) friends were into video games, but one of my fave computer games was a text-based role-playing game. And they would ask me, Why do you like that? It’s so boring, it’s just words! And I was like, Um, DUH, I can picture it and it’s awesome! And they were like, Um, but I can see myself shooting this guy in the leg a billion times. I don’t have to “picture” it.
:P
I think part of the reason girls read more than guys is that guys need more visuals given to them, whereas girls make more of their own visuals. (Broad strokes and generalization here, I know.) Maybe that’s why guys tend towards porn and women towards romance novels…
How fascinating, yet the strong sense to visualize makes perfect sense.
I am a voracious reader, as is my husband, and our daughter. Our son has excellent reading skills but doesn’t have our enthusiasm. Maybe this is why. Once when talking to my daughter I discovered that she does not visualize what she’s reading. I cannot imagine how that even works. I have no idea how she can enjoy reading as much as she does when I know how much the visualization adds to my own reading pleasure. I’m still hoping our son will become interested in independent reading for fun. I was a year or two older than he is before I did.
And Kristan, I loved those old text-based RPGs, too! In fact, I have no interest in playing the modern one with all the graphics, although the other 3 members of our family enjoy them.
The notion that we have differing abilities to process and visualize the written word is absolutely fascinating. Interesting to think there might be very biological explanations for why some of us are rabid readers or better readers or even better writers. I think you make a compelling point about how visualization abilities can evolve. I think my imagination has improved my writing and my writing has improved my imagination. I think this dialectic probably exists in most writers to some extent?
An interesting footnote: Now that I have children, I have found that my dormant powers of imagination have been reawakened. Having kids, telling stories, enacting scenes, has made me a more creative and silly person. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I have done more and better writing since becoming a mom.
Thanks for the scrumptious snippet!
I think the older I get, the better I visualize. More life experience = more connections to books, for me. I also reread books and find whole new meanings than I did at a younger age.
Broad strokes and generalizations perhaps, Kristan, but its true. There was a study I read somewhere (can’t seem to track it down at the moment) that showed how guys put a much heavier emphasis on visual stimulus, which is exactly why many guy enjoy porn over romance novels. It is my own opinion that women create a much more complete visualization because they pull in other senses such as their sense of smell and their sense of touch. I’ve noticed it in many books written by women, that the descriptions will be much more in-depth, where as stories written by men usually limit themselves to how something looks. Female writers also tend to write about how something makes the characters “feel”, where as male writers usually only describe how the characters react. In fact I’m much more likely to purchase a book written by a woman these days because the writing tends to create images in my mind that are so much more vivid.
Lets not start thinking that most guys need picture books though…
It’s a fascinating question, no? I agree, Erika, I too wonder if visualizing can be a learned thing as we draw from more varied experiences. Maybe successful children’s authors are able to tap into a kid’s primary visualization experiences the way that others cannot. It’s food for thought, fer sure.