visualizing

[mizkit]

I've had all kinds of fun conversations today. One was about perceived popularity. I'm going to write about that later, but right now I've gotten into the visualization conversation on Too, and I think it's completely fascinating, so I'm going to talk about that instead

Comments

[peartreealley]

I can, with much effort, visualize, but not generally, and not for terribly long.

Things usually come to me in words. When people talking about seeing a scene in their head, it's usually coming at me in sentences and paragraphs, like someone is talking to me.

Paperback Writer talks about how she visualizes a scene from beginning to end (and, actually, said she does most of her planning by visualizing and holding it in her head, too), and I tried and tried, and I can't do either. I've got to write it down. Not because I won't remember it otherwise, but because that's how it forms to me.

Which is why I brainstorm better if I can write down what I'm thinking.

Huh.

Thanks, I suddenly make more sense to me now ;)

[shadowhwk]

What she didn't mention is that I raised my hand too. And we wrote together at the time. No idea how that worked.

Yes, I visualize. I can do the 3-d image rotate. I play movies in my mind when imagining scenes. Which is why I get very frustrated when I can't convey the image onto the page.

Temple jacks and downloadable thoughts, man. It's the wave of the future.

[mizkit]

What it *really* doesn't explain is why *I* wrote the 12 page snowstorm...

[shadowhwk]

But it explains the 12 page sex scene, don't it?

[mizkit]

*laugh*! Yes!

And no!

Because I think the reason I get so into the details of a sex scene is because I *don't* see what's going on, so in order for it to seem clear to me, I have to write out every. Little. Detail. Otherwise you have the moral equivilant of the 3-armed romance heroine in my head, or something...

[ghost_light]

I do visualize, and I am able to manipulate images in my head. My mom is not as good at it as I am, so she would always make me come in to "pre-see" what a room would look like before she started rearranging the furniture. That was my first hint that I was very good at visualizing and imagining things.

When I wrote and when I played on Mushes or chats I was generally able to see what my characters looked like and the setting around them. As an actress, I make choices based on how I think the character should look, not just on my physical self. For example, one of my Ren Fair characters walks very differently than I do, I just think of her as being heavier and having a more rolling walk and I bring that out. Another character was hyper-nervous and I chewed at my fingers and fingernails the whole time I was on stage even though I cannot STAND nail-biting in my real life.

I do like poetry, but I mostly read and remember writers like Shel Silverstein, Emily Dickenson and Siegfried Sassoon.

[debela]

I don't visualize. My husband does, and so I have done unto him as was done unto you - and it's incredibly useful.

Kit knows this, but I'm just stating it for the record: I don't visualize at all and I rarely hear voices if at all. This is incredibly frustrating if I'm drawing, because if I don't have a model, I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing until it comes out on the page. (I know: I'm drawing a woman! I don't necessarily know *which* woman, for example.)

It's not that I don't know the facts - I can break them down and I'm aware of the component traits and can describe them to someone, but I can't see it in my head. It's a purely intellectual interaction. I determined arbitrary traits for my characters, but I didn't visualize them, which led to a lot of looking at pictures of other people to isolate which bits struck me right, for example. (This is how Kit got me to watch LFN, in fact.)

[jesshartley]

I write like I knit, weaving sentence by sentence, word by word, together. I can /somewhat/ visualize specific things... a gesture... a snapshot... a blow.. But I don't see things mentally well in three dimensions (Pat has to draw things out for me when we're talking about changes to the yard or the like, and it's /magic/ for me when pieces of a pattern or three dimensional craft project actually change from 2-d to 3-d).

[annathepiper]

This sounds pretty close to how it works for me. I tend to be able to visualize things in bits and pieces--and generally I visualize my characters better if I've 'cast' them as someone in my head, someone who I've seen in real life and whose expressions I can easily bring to mind. If I haven't done that 'casting', I only get the bits and pieces.

Same deal with surroundings... I have to construct it bit by bit and if I try to visualize it, it comes out sort of dreamlike in my consciousness. When I actually convert that into words, I look for the words that feel right. But there's not necessarily a connection between that and a picture I've built in my head.

[mizkit]

With exceptions of secondary characters in THE QUEEN'S BASTARD, whom I cast as actors specifically because it amused me, I could not tell you who *any* of my main characters look like. I could give you a type, but not a specific. I might recognize Morrison if he walked down the street, but I don't know what he looks like.

(Ok, the exception here is Jo, whom I accidentally wrote to look like a high school classmate of mine who went on to be a supermodel. But that was pure coincidence!)

[annathepiper]

Heh, it sounds like you and I aren't terribly far off from each other in how this thing works for us. Except I cast more of my characters than just the secondaries. ^_^

Once in a while I'll be able to sort of mentally cobble together my own image of what a character will look like, but it's almost like taking an extant photo of someone else in my brain and trying to Photoshop it until it looks right. For example, my heroine in Faerie Blood doesn't match up with anybody I know in real life, actors or otherwise. So I sort of have to think of it in terms of "oh, she's got this person's eyes, and this person's complexion, and this other person's general bone structure."

[das_uber]

do you visualize? If so, can you do the 3D image thing?

Yes and yes. I had no idea that anyone didn't do this. Wild. This is actually the main way that I figure out how something works and remember it.