How do you experience books?
Okay, this is a topic loriel_eris and I got right into at our weekly coffee this week and I'm really curious to see other opinions.
We were chatting about reading and how we experienced books (and, naturally, fic). When I'm reading I see everything. To me, reading creates an exact picture, I experience it like I'm watching a film/TV show, which is why, when I find an incredible fic, I can find it hard to remember that it isn't an episode. I can go back to it, momentarily thinking to just hit play and watch more, before remember I was reading, not watching.
In the same way, I'll create worlds with every work of original fiction I read. I can see every character, every place, every single thing that happens. It's why, although I always want to read books before I'll see a film version of it, that can be hard for me, because if the film doesn't capture it the way I saw it, it's hard for me to like it, because it's wrong.
So, naturally, I'm fascinated by the way loriel_eris experiences books. She's as avid a reader as I am, perhaps more so, so when she explained to me that all she sees is the words, I find it hard to understand the appreciation. Now, don't mistake my meaning, I appreciate every word and, if something isn't well written, I can't read it, but to me a word brings a picture an every single word shapes that picture into a perfect image of the world the author is weaving me into. Lori says the most she gets are irrelevant flashes of images, things that aren't necessarily associated with what she's reading. To her it's about a narator telling a story and there doesn't have to be a picture to go with it. SHe loves the experience of being told a story, of it being just perfect. Which I fin hard to understand. I don't see how there can be no world created with the words. (loriel_eris, if I'm explaining this wrong, please correct me!)
So, yeah, seriously, fascinated and intrigued.
So, on that note, how do you experience a book? Do the words create pictures, or do you only see the words on the page? Do stories mean something else to you?
This was really something I was going to post on my other LJ, but I'm so curious that I figured to post it on my fandom LJ, because I have more people on the flist and, therefore, more PoV's. I'm going to leave this post unlocked and open a wee poll.
Please leave a wee comment and let me know, because, seriously, fascinated! (I added a writing question, because I'm curious to see if it's the same.)
Poll
We were chatting about reading and how we experienced books (and, naturally, fic). When I'm reading I see everything. To me, reading creates an exact picture, I experience it like I'm watching a film/TV show, which is why, when I find an incredible fic, I can find it hard to remember that it isn't an episode. I can go back to it, momentarily thinking to just hit play and watch more, before remember I was reading, not watching.
In the same way, I'll create worlds with every work of original fiction I read. I can see every character, every place, every single thing that happens. It's why, although I always want to read books before I'll see a film version of it, that can be hard for me, because if the film doesn't capture it the way I saw it, it's hard for me to like it, because it's wrong.
So, naturally, I'm fascinated by the way loriel_eris experiences books. She's as avid a reader as I am, perhaps more so, so when she explained to me that all she sees is the words, I find it hard to understand the appreciation. Now, don't mistake my meaning, I appreciate every word and, if something isn't well written, I can't read it, but to me a word brings a picture an every single word shapes that picture into a perfect image of the world the author is weaving me into. Lori says the most she gets are irrelevant flashes of images, things that aren't necessarily associated with what she's reading. To her it's about a narator telling a story and there doesn't have to be a picture to go with it. SHe loves the experience of being told a story, of it being just perfect. Which I fin hard to understand. I don't see how there can be no world created with the words. (loriel_eris, if I'm explaining this wrong, please correct me!)
So, yeah, seriously, fascinated and intrigued.
So, on that note, how do you experience a book? Do the words create pictures, or do you only see the words on the page? Do stories mean something else to you?
This was really something I was going to post on my other LJ, but I'm so curious that I figured to post it on my fandom LJ, because I have more people on the flist and, therefore, more PoV's. I'm going to leave this post unlocked and open a wee poll.
Please leave a wee comment and let me know, because, seriously, fascinated! (I added a writing question, because I'm curious to see if it's the same.)
Poll