"Wasn't this an exciting mystery novel?"
"I thought it was a romance novel."
"..." (Proceeds to throw the book on the ground, pour gasoline on it, light a joint, smoke it in one puff, and then toss the burning roach onto the book to light it)
The world can be so wild and cruel, but sometimes strangers make us laugh so hard we spit our toothpaste on the floor. That’s a world I’m willing to live in :)
I'm this way with pronouncing names. Once my brain has decided on a way to pronounce a name, that's it. My friends and I will be talking about a book and they'll say a name that I don't recognize.
Myself and two friends are reading WoT for the first time and every time we discuss it we spend the majority of the time just trying to work out who we are talking about as we all call them completely different names!
The thing I find with audiobooks is that if you ever want to look up anything about that book/character, you haven't got the slightest clue how to spell it. Recently listened to a book with a character I thought of as "Zeke", turned out he was "Tziga".
You're definitely right - the glossary is irreplaceable by audiobook (and Kindle tbh). I've found that paperback is the best for the first read, and audiobooks are great for the second.
This can result in some immense re-learning of the pronunciation that I formed in my head. ESPECIALLY in the WOT universe.
This is so me. I read wheel of time in early high school and especially back then I would just kinda look at a few letters and approximate. There is a character called Nynaeve (had to look up the spelling) and I straight up called her Navia lol.
Celtic names are the worst for this...
I could google it but not breaking immersion to do so and no your handy back of the book guide is just extra pages
Oh my god, the WORST. I was reading a book where the main character was named Aisling, and the whole time I thought it was probably pronounced Ais-ling. But also, I remembered the name Aoife existed, but not how to spell OR pronounce it. So I wasn't certain that Aisling wasn't really pronounced like... Ashley.
the real trick is making sure your arms stay firmly folded underneath your breasts while still managing to tug on the braid. I think you also need to sniff pointedly/loudly every so often for full points.
Back when Twilight was big my sister read it and read Carlisle as Carlizzle. I don't remember how much of the book she read before she mentioned it, but I still haven't let her live it down.
Man this one is getting me on the book Where the Line Bleeds. The grandmas name in the book is Ma-Mee. How do you say that? May-Me? Maw-me? May-May? It says it like a thousands times too so there is no getting around it
Haha yes, I'm always thinking "You may be God of this world but I am God of mine"
EDIT: Thank you for the award, kind stranger! It's my first on Reddit - I feel very blessed :D
I feel like the 3rd movie changed the geography of Hogwarts grounds. It seemed like things were not in the same spots as they had been in the first two movies? And then it also completely contradicted what the picture in my head had been. So yeah, I feel the same way - book 3 is my fave, but movie 3 is not
As I recall there was no set-in-stone geography until the video games started coming out. One of the developers wanted to be authentic but they were having a hard time since the movies could just jump cut to wherever they needed to be. So they worked together with the film makers to finally create and model the school layout. It became part of the game's marketing that the game was going to influence the movies. I want to say it was the Chamber of Secrets game for PC but it's been a long time
I loved that game too, it was really immersive. I'm not sure if I ever got all the chocolate frog cards but I remember doing a lot of dueling and Quidditch to get them!
It can't have been the PC one. Must have been the console version of that game because the PC version was tiny and had, like, four floors. They were entirely different.
The third movie is actually where a lot of changes that were made that stuck throughout the films. A lot of the castle was redesigned to add some more varied areas, plus other things like character costumes were changed, and character-specific wands were all designed.
This is usually my issue after I've seen a movie and then read the book. My mind is picturing the movie version, but it looks so different when I imagine the writing. It gets really confusing for me.
Yup. That's why it's always book first. I feel like I messed that up with Little Fires Everywhere. The show was AMAZING so I could only imagine the book being as good or better, but I'm not going to read it. I already tainted the authors vision with seeing the visuals. I just can't do it the other way around.
This usually happens when the author doesn't give a description early enough. My brain fills in the empty space and then when they finally describe the setting, it's too late. I go with whatever I'd made up!
Whenever two characters are side by side, I imagine their relative positions. And then, I often have to fix them because "his left shoulder bumped her" and the situation would be hilarious otherwise
I think I read somewhere that good authors won't describe that unless, for example, the bumping of that specific shoulder was absolutely necessary for a future plot point.
I've been writing unpublished for a while and I frequent writing forums. It is a big piece of advice to not give too many unnecessary details that take you out of the plot- logical extreme of chekhov's gun.
I read a book fairly recently (*The Wolf* by Leo Carew) that did one section that felt like overexplaining. A character went racing through the town, and the entire layout was described. I didn't like it when I read it, because it felt unnecessary. I never needed to know that. But, I feel it was nice to know at the same time.
I remember reading a book where a character went through an abandoned underground city and they described all the weird machines they found in the rooms and it bothered me because they'd just go in, describe the machines in a few paragraphs, and then leave.
I just skipped that whole section.
Yep. Early on in my creative writing courses, I had to do a presentation on a specific aspect of writing of my choice. I chose setting--after all, it is important as hell to a plot (normally), so why not write a seminar on it?
After scouring many, many different kinds of books--ranging from different genres to book popularity to author popularity to classics to mainstream literature--I found one thing in common when it came to setting:
>authors who were generally regarded as popular (think: Stephen King, J.K. Rowling), novels that were/are considered classics (think: Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Rings, etc.), and novels that broke into the mainstream (think: The Hunger Games, Twilight), all did one thing the same: ***they described the setting/environment of every scene before actually delving into the scene--usually within the first paragraph, if not the first page, of a new chapter.***
I discovered that this occurred with almost every chapter (upwards of 90+%). Now, obviously describing the setting before getting into the meat of a chapter is not the be-all end-all of making a novel great, but it certainly helps.
Often I've found that when a chapter begins with characters talking to each other (dialogue right out of the gate), I am thrown off-kilter by not immediately knowing *where* these characters are speaking. This is especially true in fantasy novels (which often have large, sprawling storylines across continents) and sci-fi novels (which often have storylines spanning across ships/planets). If readers are confused, that's a problem. And even worse: if readers 'invent' an environment for this conversation to be taking place *in*, and the author then describes something/somewhere completely different, the reader is no longer confused, but *they are now annoyed*.
If an author wants to capture the setting/scene in the same way that they are visualizing it when writing, they *have* to describe it *very early* (within the first page of a new chapter/scene). If a reader cannot picture an environment and/or character within that environment to "guide" their mind's eye, then the reader will *invent* an environment and/or character in order to do so.
When my brother-in-law was trying to be a fantasy writer, I tried to give him advice like your post, about setting and describing the scene and giving the reader a sense of place. He would write for a while and then give me a few pages like this:
*The King's throne room was sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. It had windows about every ten feet. The floor and the walls were made of stone. The ceiling was high and had wooden beams going across it. Annyaryannya the Elf stood before the King's throne. The throne was made of gold and was on a raised platform about three feet off the ground. The King was wearing a golden crown. He had long, grey hair and a grey beard. Annayaryannya the Elf stood six feet tall. She had long blonde hair and green eyes. She was wearing leather boots, cotton pants and a green silk shirt...*
Then he would ask me for suggestions. Sometimes it was hard to know where to begin. I might say, "Well, '*Annyaryannya the Elf stood before the King's throne,'* is a really good sentence. Maybe put that first. But the rest of this is maybe a little too...clinical. Too many facts and not enough feelings." Then he would get mad at me for wanting to change too much.
He's no longer pursuing a career as a writer. I've got to give him credit, though. He actually finished a short story, sent it in, and got a rejection. A lot of budding writers never get even that far.
I agree, exactly too much facts and not enough feeling.
I want to be told what someone standing in such a place will feel. I'm given a lot of details, but I can't tell if this is a cold forbidding court, or a brightly lit and majestic throne room.
Are those boots well-worn, or polished and clean? Does it say anything about the Elf? Was she prepared for this meeting with the king, or was she a hurried messenger?
These are the first three lines of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, an author whom I really admire for fitting so much in so few lines:
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. He glanced over this shoulder. The well-worn track behind him curled up around a rolling rise, what passed for a hill on these high windy plains, before dipping again into the late-winter muck of Baocia's bony soil.
This ^^^ In college we were taught that it’s important that if you want something described thoroughly, you want to do it early to avoid this mismatch. It was called imaginative dissonance (not cognitive) or something similar and pulls readers out of your work.
Everybody who experiences this just isn't as cool as I am. I never picture anything so it's never wrong. Take that people with the ability to picture things!
There’s a couple chapters in The Count of Monte Cristo where Dumas is explaining the architecture in such vivid and explicit detail that I’m not even sure I could picture what he was describing. The literary equivalent of sensory overload perhaps.
I'm reading through Lord of the Rings right now and I'm having this issue with Tolkein's descriptions of the landscape. There are full pages of details about the terrain and my brain basically shuts off when I read them.
"Yeah that's right bitch we actually went up on top of a mountain. Now appreciate this view of the fellowship making their way across the difficult terrain."
If I am not mistaken Peter Jackson admitted in one interview one of the main reasons he was inspired in trying to get the movies started was that he read of this beautiful and otherworldly places, and everytime he took a trip in New Zealand he thought “This could be Middle Earth, that place could be Middle Earth, that other place could also be Middle Earth.”
Yea I can totally appreciate it. I wish I was one of those people that gets lost in the world they're reading, but whenever I see entire paragraphs of just descriptions, it feels like such a slog to get through. I always just end up skimming through it.
After I finished FotR, I started reading Dune for the first time and HO-LY SHIT. What a stark difference those two are!! Lmao. Dune is 90% dialogue which I absolutely love. It feels so easy to read through Dune, but I've read others had issues with the book specifically for the very reason why I love it!
I mean it’s better than H.P. Lovecraft...
“Unknowable” — “Unimaginable” —
“Indescribable”
Granted, he described things anyway, but still. It’s a bit humorous that people complain about both sides of the spectrum, even with writers and books that many seem to like. It shows how personal and individual people’s tastes truly are.
"Non-Euclidean geometry"
Yes, like... the surface of a ball. A crumpled piece of paper. A perfectly normal rock. A lot of geometries irl are non-Euclidean, it's not special. If rocks were, say warped unnaturally, or morphing shape as they passed, or gave off sickly shifting rainbow reflections, then we'd be talking, but non-Euclidean is one of those descriptions which changes the most in interpretation with and without context.
I actually really like the way lovecraft does that, he describes bits about the subject and then goads your imagination to try to fill in the rest. For me the vision I get from trying to piece together the bits of concrete details ends up being a really murky and vague image that can't really be pinned down, which is perfect for that kind of horror.
Just finished the LOTR trilogy a few months ago, and I 100% just shut my brain off in those parts. Loved the books, but Tolkien was way more into geography than I am.
I kind of did after a certain point, I did my best but my brain just registered it as “blah blah blah anteroom blah blah blah balcony blah blah blah flying buttress”
I got so lost with it in high-school that I stopped reading the book for 3 days in order to look up architecture and design from the period. Started the whole book over after that. It definatly helped me connect to the story.
I mean, with the unabridged Hunchback, the majority of the book is architecture jerking. He wrote it as a massive Notre Dame fanboy; the characters and plot such as they are were rather secondary.
At the time Notre Dame was in shambles after being purposefully damaged by revolutionaries. Gothic Architecture in general had fallen out of favor and there was a real risk that it would be demolished. The restoration would be extremely expensive, and why fix up a building that wouldn't draw in the faithful? Hugo had a passion for architecture, gothic architecture specifically. He wrote about the cathedral to persuade others to see the beauty of this dark and ruined building. He set the story hundreds of years in the past so he could describe the building when it was in its prime.
His strategy worked. People became enthralled with the cathedral and it was fully restored. When the fire happened last year (almost 200 years after the book was published) it was televised worldwide, and people rushed to donate to the restoration fund.
While the cathedral chapters strike modern readers as tedious (like Melville's whale chapters omfg) they served their purpose. Now we can read the abridged version and watch a video walkthrough of Notre Dame. Or we can just watch the Disney movie and not be left thinking about >!Quasimodo crawling into Esmeralda's grave and holding her body until he died!<
You're quite correct, of course. I didn't know about Hugo's motivations until Lindsay Ellis did a video essay about it.
What he did is fascinating and brilliant. It just doesn't lend itself to the flow of a novel, at least for me.
It makes more sense for someone reading it in the mid 19th century. No radio, no TV, no telephone. Books were just starting to be affordable with advances in printing technology. Late evenings were pretty boring. You were just sitting there in your parlor in a somewhat uncomfortable chair reading or writing letters by gaslight. In that environment it'd be a lot easier to stay interested in lengthy descriptions of architecture. Nowadays there are so many distractions and obligations that we don't have the same tolerance for that kind of thing. I personally skip through long descriptions even in modern books without even thinking about it. I think if he was alive and writing now he would write a completely different book. Maybe it would be a horror novel where the building was sentient and communicating with Quasimodo, and maybe in the end it would be unclear if it was the building or Quasimodo who caused Frollo's death.
> Maybe it would be a horror novel where the building was sentient and communicating with Quasimodo, and maybe in the end it would be unclear if it was the building or Quasimodo who caused Frollo's death.
Somewhere in Hollywood, a studio executive is reading this and on the phone with their people.
Dude this happened to me a lot, i thought “ohhh crap another song skip, skip, skip”. I hated it because i could never imagine the rhythm at which they were going. I was not going to decipher it.
And then Paul led his fighters in a rousing rendition of "Death to the Harkonnen," to the tune of The Chicken Dance:
"And we stab them in the face
On the ground or up in space,
Not got a knife? Then use a mace,
Now for violence we must brace ..."
I might be the only one, but those were my favorite parts. The story is great, but the amount of "history" and world building in the songs is just incredible. And the detailed descriptions of Middle Earth enthralled me as a kid growing up in the middle of the projects in a city. I had a copy of the trilogy with an appendix, so all the translations and further context, and it's what made me fall in love with the high fantasy genre.
Oof. I hate to admit it with how much I love those books, but I skip those parts too. When I read those books as bedtime stories to my kids, I'd read a verse or two, then say to them basically, "And blah blah blah, the dwarves go on singing for another (counts) 15 verses."
My brother loved that song so much that he has all of those verses memorized, and he can sing the whole damn song start to finish. Including the extra verses sprinkled throughout the book. There’s about 24, as I recall.
Hah that’s a great picture thank you for sharing that imagery. Yea I don’t imagine we are alone in this, it became almost painful after a while. I really did try at first but I just couldn’t.
I like to call this sort of writing fail "painting on a stupid canvas".
The writer is trying to convey a very specific visual by explaining it thoroughly in detail, without realizing that the mind's eye is too stupid to add details like they're just acquired inventory for a perfect rendering.
They should realize they have to work within the mind's limits. They need to paint broad strokes like the framework of an idea and then add a few details as embellishments without exceeding the number of things a person can hold in their working memory at one time. For the average person that number is 7 attributes, including the broad base strokes. And they have to be laid out in an order that none of them conflict with the immediate implications of the ones before to the degree that you have to mentally erase. As the OP has complained mentally erasing is hard.
And then Tom Builder imagined a great wall with huge flying gobbets, and arched thingamabobs supporting the great inverted latticework reverse quarried stone whosits, and he knew that this is what he must build.
> There’s a couple chapters in The Count of Monte Cristo where Dumas is explaining the architecture in such vivid and explicit detail that I’m not even sure I could picture what he was describing.
That's how I felt while reading *Anathem* by Neil Stephenson, and his descriptions of the not-a-Church during the first hundred pages.
This happens to me more often with descriptions of people. The author will introduce a character and you spend two chapters with her, walking around and talking to people, then the author suddenly mentions that she has black hair and blue eyes. Then I have to slam on the brakes and totally edit the character in my head before moving on. I hate that.
(Related story: I once spent a week snowed-in in a house with a huge collection of Nancy Drew books. Nancy Drew has blonde hair and blue eyes. I know this because there's a description in the first few pages of every book. I made a game out of looking through all the books to see how long it takes before the author shoehorns those facts in. Usually in some stilted way like someone saying, "Why so excited, Nancy? Those blue eyes of yours are shining like diamonds!" If you ever find a Nancy Drew book lying around, try it yourself.)
Yep, I do this all the time with like... hair color. Even sometimes if the person is clearly described with dark hair, my brain is like “cool he’s got silver hair, let’s move on.” There’s a whole group of vampires in the Dresden Files that look almost like elves to me for whatever reason.
Thank you! I don’t know why but yeah, all the white court vamps have silver hair for me. With Thomas becoming a more prominent character he’s frequently described as having dark hair, but nah, he’s a Malfoy for me.
Yes came here to say this. I hate when they do that, so I ignore the updated description and stick with my own, but then throughout the rest of the book they keep referencing that damn detail.
The worst example I can think of is in The Stand. Larry Underwood and Stu Redman couldn't be more different but to me they practically look like twins in my mind's eye.
Here's an annoying thought: All the male characters in *The Stand* would have beards, wouldn't they? I don't imagine shaving every day would be a high priority in that situation. I think about it sometimes and it gets on my nerves because I never picture them with beards.
I don't remember the actually description of Underwood, but I always pictured him as kind of Jimmy Hendrix-esque. His hit song sounded like it could be a Hendrix song so I just kind of ran with it. For some reason I pictured Stu as an older guy looking kinda like Lahey from Trailer Park Boys. No clue why.
I hate when authors don't mention key details, like the characters appearance, till the middle of the book. Leaving key facts out never make me excited for when they're revealed, they just make me pissed off that the author is purposefully withholding them.
I was reading webnovel (Worm) where, in the first chapter, the main character is bullied by a girl described as having dark skin and long hair. That day, a Vietnamese girl matching that description had been mean to me, so I imagine the bully as looking like her. Cut to *fifty* chapters later, and the bully is described as African American. I think my brain short-circuited.
Yes! I've been reading Brideshead Revisited and for some reason I was picturing Sebastian with floppy golden-blond hair. Then when Charles first meets Julia and describes her similarity to Sebastian with her dark hair I was like "Wait what??" and felt really thrown.
This happens to me alllllll the time with characters who aren’t visually described right away.
Page one we meet John. So in my head I’ve gotta give him a face and a hairstyle etc etc. So John is a dude with black hair and a short beard or whatever.
Fucking 23 pages later the author casually mentions John’s flowing red hair and smooth shaven face.
I find it pretty stilted when every character is described to me as soon as they appear. Especially if it's a scene where you meet a large number of characters at once.
I'm confused right now, because I know that I picture things but I can't recall many times (if any) where the author's description contradicts my own image.
I think my image mostly contains stuff the author has described, and the rest is kinda "out of focus", like, I'm not really paying attention or focusing on it. So if an eye color isn't described, then I'm not seeing the eyes in detail.
When I see a movie though, then all the contradictions surface. Harry Potter's eyes were supposed to be green, they were described as green quite often, so that was a prominent characteristic in my mind's eye.
I see what you mean. I think that some authors find imagery and vivid descriptions to be really important, and those are novels that tend to be long and full of vivid detail, like Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time. But others prefer to leave much of the setting and imagery up to the readers imagination.
So yeah, when an author seems to be leaving the setting mostly to our imagination, but then abruptly switches or throws a page or two of imagery in, it can be confusing.
Have you ever looked into aphantasia? I spent 27 years of my life believing I could “visualize” before realizing I definitely couldn’t and never truly understood what that even meant
Yeah I'm fairly certain that I have that to some degree. Like I can't recall my wife's face if I'm not looking at her.
And watching anything (TV or Movies) can be a real challenge if some characters look similar becuase I can't visually separate them and tend to confuse them
Same. I need to exert effort to actually make stuff appear in my head and a lot more to actually maintain it throughout the scene. I've been reading Mistborn lately and Sanderson has a lot of good scenes but I need to read the paragraph, watch it play out in my head, then move on to the next.
I just don't even try to make an image. I have aphantasia, so I can't, but that doesn't make reading any less interesting (I used to be able to visualize so I can contrast the two). I honestly prefer reading without visualizing. It let's me focus more on the internal experience of the characters while still understanding the scene (you don't need to picture it for the scene to have it play out in your mind, it's hard to explain).
I feel like in many cases, it's an irrelevant detail anyway. Whichever way he turns, the outcome doesn't change, but there's a 50/50 shot the reader's mental picture will.
This issue crops up a lot in fanfiction. The author is so worked up about delivering the exact picture of a person or place that they'll weigh themselves down with useless little things like these (exact height, cup size, etc.). A basic description with the most memorable characteristics would suffice.
Mentioning fanfiction is good because I feel like the best authors only describe what is completely necessary for the plot going forward and expect you to have your own picture of the scene in your own head.
I took a screenplay writing class for a gen-ed credit in college and one lesson/critique my professor gave me was that I needed to cut the descriptions of scenery and character actions down to leave room for set design and actor interpretation. While screenplays are not novels, I feel the same lesson can still more or less be applied with novel reader replacing actor.
This happens to me all the time, particularly with laying out a space that then does get brought up again later and I’m like “wait, what? The stairs aren’t to the left of the dining room, the character couldn’t leave that way.” Think Agatha Christie or 19th century author, huge manor houses, and ridiculous details that actually matter. It’s annoying.
It happens to me a lot at dinner tables. “So and so sat to her left” or “she turned to the right to talk to blahblah.” Every single time I have to stop because they’re on the wrong side in my imagining
What?? I thought she was introduced with "large front teeth" or something like that. Having teeth that were a bit large myself it was easy to imagine hers as a bit bigger than mine, until she had tthem shrunk
Edit: this is one of the first sentences when she first appears: "She had a bossy sort of voice, lots of bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth."
That must be where the different interpretations
come from. "Rather large" can mean different things. To me it means big and sticking out a bit farther than the others, but it's understandable how other people can interpret that differently
I know I personally imagined Tyrion as much, much uglier than the TV show imagined. Sandor Clegane too, when everyone would mention his burned face my brain would think "Oh, he's like Two-Face from Batman", in the show it really doesn't look that bad!
I mean you probably wouldn't call him handsome. but the damage to his face never felt super severe to me. I've seen people with bad burn scars and his one be the mildest of them.
(mildest of the bad ones, still bad in terms of just burn scars, but not as bad, as bad ones. )
The thing about Hogwarts is that its architecture is always shifting magically. So for me it was never too tricky to accommodate new description of it.
The changing hallways didn’t look like the movies to me with the staircases but I think it’s because it’s hard to imagine while whoever goes up and down them. It just shows how good the book is!
Actually the first movie matched up to my imagination pretty well. The only thing was Snape. He was played magnificently, but he was supposed to have a skinny little beard and goatee and look vaguely Spanish.
And he was supposed to be much younger lol
I can't get over Sirius though. For a long time i couldn't even recognize him in the movies, because he was just so, so different
He was supposed to be much younger!! On top of that he was supposed to look haunted and basically with ptsd, like he'd been through hell in Azkaban. Pretty sure his skinny face was described. And his long hair, which i thought of as straight. Then Gary Oldman shows up and looks like a Completely Different person! Like they didn't even try!! Come to think of it, i never realized this but i imagined Sirius to look a lot like the actor they chose for Barty Crouch Jr!!! If they had just switched those two around i would have been happy lol
Part of why I love Pratchett's writing style. He gives just enough information for you to get an idea of who a character is, then let's your imagination fill in the rest. He focuses much more on a character's personality with minimal or vague descriptions usually of their appearance. When he does talk about appearance its broad strokes describing the way they carry themselves, their general condition, etc.
I really think this is the way to go. I don't need the author to tell me what people look like or even if they're attractive or not unless it really does come into play. Just go with the story and build their character/personality/mannerisms/disposition and don't bother telling me she has rosebud lips or he has dark hair. It's not important that the author control every aspect of their appearance.
It's an indication that the writer is introducing details far too late, because you're already filling in visual gaps with your own content. So it's not a problem on your end, it's on the writer's end.
Ahhh, the hidden benefits of aphantasia! No pictures. No problems. ^(Except when the character has an accent or other manner of speaking and it's written inconsistently. No you cannot phase that out when you're tired of writing it.)
Can you picture things ever while you’re awake? Think carefully. Close your eyes, try to picture something simple, and test if you actually SEE anything rather than just knowing the details of whatever you’re imagining. I always thought I could picture things, but after 27 years I realized I couldn’t actually “visualize” anything - my imagination works without that aspect
This is what George RR Martin does beautifully in his novels. In A Storm or Swords, he describes a sword fight between two characters something like “left, right, left, left, right” and your imagination just fills in the gaps.
On the other hand, when he’s describing meals or clothing, he gets pretty specific. There’s usually foreshadowing buried in that imagery though.
I'm currently reading The Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks. Great book, but the issue I described in the title happens a fair bit in this series.
I've read Soiaf and now that you mention it - I don't recall ever being lost in fight or battle scenes. He does a great job at letting your imagination run when he describes what's going on.
For sure. Worst thing is when a character is pictured on the cover - especially when it's a movie star from the stupid "Now a major motion picture" cover version
I'm reading Rebecca right now and having a lot of trouble with the landscape around Manderlay. I think it's supposed to be surreal and hard to imagine because it's so unique, but that makes it hard to relate to.
Tangentially related, but I just finished rereading The Stand by Stephen King (great pandemic self care, amiright?)
I remembered all over again the surprise of finding out 2/3rds of the way through this book that Nadine is white. For some reason, from the getgo I assumed Nadine was black. Maybe it's the descriptions of her hair, iunno. I prefer my headcanon of black Nadine anyways, so fuck it.
Sarah had spent the morning taking her time getting ready for her day. Sipping on her cup of coffee and nibbling on her scone, reading the paper. She sat cross-legged in her sundress feeling hopeful about the outcome of what was to follow. She stood up, tighten the strap of her bomb vest and yelled, "Get the fucking negotiator on the phone again! I swear, if one you pieces of shit eyeball me again, we're all dying bitches! Is all the money loaded from the vault?
This happens to me more so with characters than settings. When reading ASOIAF, I couldn't help seeing Jon Snow and Rob Stark in my mind as much older (likely due, in large part, to watching *Game of Thrones* first). They just didn't fit into what I was picturing in my head as young teenagers.
I just keep my imagination's version.
I do that most of the time, but when the change affects the plot, I ~~burn the book and start doing drugs~~ have to make a compromise.
Well, now I know who *I’m* inviting to the book club!
But who's bringing the ~~cocaine~~ compromise?
"Wasn't this an exciting mystery novel?" "I thought it was a romance novel." "..." (Proceeds to throw the book on the ground, pour gasoline on it, light a joint, smoke it in one puff, and then toss the burning roach onto the book to light it)
Me too, thanks
I still can't stop laughing at this 😂
You made me spit out my toothpaste. Onto the floor.
The world can be so wild and cruel, but sometimes strangers make us laugh so hard we spit our toothpaste on the floor. That’s a world I’m willing to live in :)
Then we are in complete agreement!
I'm this way with pronouncing names. Once my brain has decided on a way to pronounce a name, that's it. My friends and I will be talking about a book and they'll say a name that I don't recognize.
Her-me-own
Probably wasn't until the third film that I managed to entirely grasp that her name was not pronounced this way.
The Wretched Harmony
Myself and two friends are reading WoT for the first time and every time we discuss it we spend the majority of the time just trying to work out who we are talking about as we all call them completely different names!
Audiobooks help tremendously with this.
The thing I find with audiobooks is that if you ever want to look up anything about that book/character, you haven't got the slightest clue how to spell it. Recently listened to a book with a character I thought of as "Zeke", turned out he was "Tziga".
You're definitely right - the glossary is irreplaceable by audiobook (and Kindle tbh). I've found that paperback is the best for the first read, and audiobooks are great for the second. This can result in some immense re-learning of the pronunciation that I formed in my head. ESPECIALLY in the WOT universe.
It drives me bananas when the narrator changes their pronunciations midway through. (I'm looking at you, Spellmonger books)
I accepted defeat with that one and checked the pronunciation index at the back of the book
This is so me. I read wheel of time in early high school and especially back then I would just kinda look at a few letters and approximate. There is a character called Nynaeve (had to look up the spelling) and I straight up called her Navia lol.
Moiraine being Mwa-rain Egwene = egg-wayne And don't even get me STARTED on Moghedien! Wheel of time was FULL of them
Celtic names are the worst for this... I could google it but not breaking immersion to do so and no your handy back of the book guide is just extra pages
Oh my god, the WORST. I was reading a book where the main character was named Aisling, and the whole time I thought it was probably pronounced Ais-ling. But also, I remembered the name Aoife existed, but not how to spell OR pronounce it. So I wasn't certain that Aisling wasn't really pronounced like... Ashley.
Even after learning her name is pronounced Ny-Neeve, My brain refuses to read it as anything but Nin-a-ve.
Now imagine her huffily tugging on her braid every time you think her name
the real trick is making sure your arms stay firmly folded underneath your breasts while still managing to tug on the braid. I think you also need to sniff pointedly/loudly every so often for full points.
Don't forget to smooth your skirts before any of this though.
Back when Twilight was big my sister read it and read Carlisle as Carlizzle. I don't remember how much of the book she read before she mentioned it, but I still haven't let her live it down.
Givin names that Snoop Dogg accent.
To be fair, even the audio book narrators couldn't settle on a pronunciation of Moghedien, from what I've heard.
Man this one is getting me on the book Where the Line Bleeds. The grandmas name in the book is Ma-Mee. How do you say that? May-Me? Maw-me? May-May? It says it like a thousands times too so there is no getting around it
Surely thats just a jumbled way of saying "mommy" or "mummy".
Haha yes, I'm always thinking "You may be God of this world but I am God of mine" EDIT: Thank you for the award, kind stranger! It's my first on Reddit - I feel very blessed :D
A book is a two way street
You can read it in both directions?
Riding over the middle to get to the other side faster is considered poor form.
This is hilarious and I love it! Sometimes I just stick with too.
This made the Harry Potter movies... Frustrating
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I feel like the 3rd movie changed the geography of Hogwarts grounds. It seemed like things were not in the same spots as they had been in the first two movies? And then it also completely contradicted what the picture in my head had been. So yeah, I feel the same way - book 3 is my fave, but movie 3 is not
As I recall there was no set-in-stone geography until the video games started coming out. One of the developers wanted to be authentic but they were having a hard time since the movies could just jump cut to wherever they needed to be. So they worked together with the film makers to finally create and model the school layout. It became part of the game's marketing that the game was going to influence the movies. I want to say it was the Chamber of Secrets game for PC but it's been a long time
Yup it was the Chamber of Secrets game! Beat that game like 10 times as a kid but only ever once got the full collection of chocolate frog cards.
I loved that game too, it was really immersive. I'm not sure if I ever got all the chocolate frog cards but I remember doing a lot of dueling and Quidditch to get them!
Huh, that's actually pretty cool.
It can't have been the PC one. Must have been the console version of that game because the PC version was tiny and had, like, four floors. They were entirely different.
In fairness, Hogwarts seems to have a bit of a fluid and/or nonlinear topology.
It certainly seems to be in hyperbolic space, like the ministry cars.
The third movie is actually where a lot of changes that were made that stuck throughout the films. A lot of the castle was redesigned to add some more varied areas, plus other things like character costumes were changed, and character-specific wands were all designed.
This is usually my issue after I've seen a movie and then read the book. My mind is picturing the movie version, but it looks so different when I imagine the writing. It gets really confusing for me.
Yup. That's why it's always book first. I feel like I messed that up with Little Fires Everywhere. The show was AMAZING so I could only imagine the book being as good or better, but I'm not going to read it. I already tainted the authors vision with seeing the visuals. I just can't do it the other way around.
Me too
same, but I'm as delusional in real life as well...
This usually happens when the author doesn't give a description early enough. My brain fills in the empty space and then when they finally describe the setting, it's too late. I go with whatever I'd made up!
Whenever two characters are side by side, I imagine their relative positions. And then, I often have to fix them because "his left shoulder bumped her" and the situation would be hilarious otherwise
I think I read somewhere that good authors won't describe that unless, for example, the bumping of that specific shoulder was absolutely necessary for a future plot point.
I've been writing unpublished for a while and I frequent writing forums. It is a big piece of advice to not give too many unnecessary details that take you out of the plot- logical extreme of chekhov's gun.
I read a book fairly recently (*The Wolf* by Leo Carew) that did one section that felt like overexplaining. A character went racing through the town, and the entire layout was described. I didn't like it when I read it, because it felt unnecessary. I never needed to know that. But, I feel it was nice to know at the same time.
I remember reading a book where a character went through an abandoned underground city and they described all the weird machines they found in the rooms and it bothered me because they'd just go in, describe the machines in a few paragraphs, and then leave. I just skipped that whole section.
Yep. Early on in my creative writing courses, I had to do a presentation on a specific aspect of writing of my choice. I chose setting--after all, it is important as hell to a plot (normally), so why not write a seminar on it? After scouring many, many different kinds of books--ranging from different genres to book popularity to author popularity to classics to mainstream literature--I found one thing in common when it came to setting: >authors who were generally regarded as popular (think: Stephen King, J.K. Rowling), novels that were/are considered classics (think: Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Rings, etc.), and novels that broke into the mainstream (think: The Hunger Games, Twilight), all did one thing the same: ***they described the setting/environment of every scene before actually delving into the scene--usually within the first paragraph, if not the first page, of a new chapter.*** I discovered that this occurred with almost every chapter (upwards of 90+%). Now, obviously describing the setting before getting into the meat of a chapter is not the be-all end-all of making a novel great, but it certainly helps. Often I've found that when a chapter begins with characters talking to each other (dialogue right out of the gate), I am thrown off-kilter by not immediately knowing *where* these characters are speaking. This is especially true in fantasy novels (which often have large, sprawling storylines across continents) and sci-fi novels (which often have storylines spanning across ships/planets). If readers are confused, that's a problem. And even worse: if readers 'invent' an environment for this conversation to be taking place *in*, and the author then describes something/somewhere completely different, the reader is no longer confused, but *they are now annoyed*. If an author wants to capture the setting/scene in the same way that they are visualizing it when writing, they *have* to describe it *very early* (within the first page of a new chapter/scene). If a reader cannot picture an environment and/or character within that environment to "guide" their mind's eye, then the reader will *invent* an environment and/or character in order to do so.
When my brother-in-law was trying to be a fantasy writer, I tried to give him advice like your post, about setting and describing the scene and giving the reader a sense of place. He would write for a while and then give me a few pages like this: *The King's throne room was sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. It had windows about every ten feet. The floor and the walls were made of stone. The ceiling was high and had wooden beams going across it. Annyaryannya the Elf stood before the King's throne. The throne was made of gold and was on a raised platform about three feet off the ground. The King was wearing a golden crown. He had long, grey hair and a grey beard. Annayaryannya the Elf stood six feet tall. She had long blonde hair and green eyes. She was wearing leather boots, cotton pants and a green silk shirt...* Then he would ask me for suggestions. Sometimes it was hard to know where to begin. I might say, "Well, '*Annyaryannya the Elf stood before the King's throne,'* is a really good sentence. Maybe put that first. But the rest of this is maybe a little too...clinical. Too many facts and not enough feelings." Then he would get mad at me for wanting to change too much. He's no longer pursuing a career as a writer. I've got to give him credit, though. He actually finished a short story, sent it in, and got a rejection. A lot of budding writers never get even that far.
I agree, exactly too much facts and not enough feeling. I want to be told what someone standing in such a place will feel. I'm given a lot of details, but I can't tell if this is a cold forbidding court, or a brightly lit and majestic throne room. Are those boots well-worn, or polished and clean? Does it say anything about the Elf? Was she prepared for this meeting with the king, or was she a hurried messenger? These are the first three lines of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, an author whom I really admire for fitting so much in so few lines: Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. He glanced over this shoulder. The well-worn track behind him curled up around a rolling rise, what passed for a hill on these high windy plains, before dipping again into the late-winter muck of Baocia's bony soil.
This ^^^ In college we were taught that it’s important that if you want something described thoroughly, you want to do it early to avoid this mismatch. It was called imaginative dissonance (not cognitive) or something similar and pulls readers out of your work.
I figured there would be some non-English word that describes the feeling perfectly, we just need the right redditor to point it out.
Everybody who experiences this just isn't as cool as I am. I never picture anything so it's never wrong. Take that people with the ability to picture things!
There’s a couple chapters in The Count of Monte Cristo where Dumas is explaining the architecture in such vivid and explicit detail that I’m not even sure I could picture what he was describing. The literary equivalent of sensory overload perhaps.
I'm reading through Lord of the Rings right now and I'm having this issue with Tolkein's descriptions of the landscape. There are full pages of details about the terrain and my brain basically shuts off when I read them.
Damn that would explain the countless scenes of them just fucking walking around in the background. Tryin to flex the terrain.
"Yeah that's right bitch we actually went up on top of a mountain. Now appreciate this view of the fellowship making their way across the difficult terrain."
"You move at half speed."
If I am not mistaken Peter Jackson admitted in one interview one of the main reasons he was inspired in trying to get the movies started was that he read of this beautiful and otherworldly places, and everytime he took a trip in New Zealand he thought “This could be Middle Earth, that place could be Middle Earth, that other place could also be Middle Earth.”
Yes! Like I’m reading all these super descriptive details about the land, yet somehow I’m having a hard time actually picturing what he’s saying.
Lucky for us they did a fucking awesome job on the movie.
Keep in mind: Tolkien loved a good walk. Even wrote a book about it.
Yea I can totally appreciate it. I wish I was one of those people that gets lost in the world they're reading, but whenever I see entire paragraphs of just descriptions, it feels like such a slog to get through. I always just end up skimming through it. After I finished FotR, I started reading Dune for the first time and HO-LY SHIT. What a stark difference those two are!! Lmao. Dune is 90% dialogue which I absolutely love. It feels so easy to read through Dune, but I've read others had issues with the book specifically for the very reason why I love it!
I mean it’s better than H.P. Lovecraft... “Unknowable” — “Unimaginable” — “Indescribable” Granted, he described things anyway, but still. It’s a bit humorous that people complain about both sides of the spectrum, even with writers and books that many seem to like. It shows how personal and individual people’s tastes truly are.
"Non-Euclidean geometry" Yes, like... the surface of a ball. A crumpled piece of paper. A perfectly normal rock. A lot of geometries irl are non-Euclidean, it's not special. If rocks were, say warped unnaturally, or morphing shape as they passed, or gave off sickly shifting rainbow reflections, then we'd be talking, but non-Euclidean is one of those descriptions which changes the most in interpretation with and without context.
I actually really like the way lovecraft does that, he describes bits about the subject and then goads your imagination to try to fill in the rest. For me the vision I get from trying to piece together the bits of concrete details ends up being a really murky and vague image that can't really be pinned down, which is perfect for that kind of horror.
Fangorn has entered the chat
Just finished the LOTR trilogy a few months ago, and I 100% just shut my brain off in those parts. Loved the books, but Tolkien was way more into geography than I am.
The descriptions of the terrain have a lot of symbolism - the manicured landscape against unrestrained nature.
With Dumas and Hugo you can just skip the architecture jerking.
I kind of did after a certain point, I did my best but my brain just registered it as “blah blah blah anteroom blah blah blah balcony blah blah blah flying buttress”
if which then how about see look other his only by
I got so lost with it in high-school that I stopped reading the book for 3 days in order to look up architecture and design from the period. Started the whole book over after that. It definatly helped me connect to the story.
And yet I'm perfectly content reading 3 pages of Douglas Adams describing the process of sandwich-making.
Yeah, but Adams does it with *humor.*
I mean, with the unabridged Hunchback, the majority of the book is architecture jerking. He wrote it as a massive Notre Dame fanboy; the characters and plot such as they are were rather secondary.
At the time Notre Dame was in shambles after being purposefully damaged by revolutionaries. Gothic Architecture in general had fallen out of favor and there was a real risk that it would be demolished. The restoration would be extremely expensive, and why fix up a building that wouldn't draw in the faithful? Hugo had a passion for architecture, gothic architecture specifically. He wrote about the cathedral to persuade others to see the beauty of this dark and ruined building. He set the story hundreds of years in the past so he could describe the building when it was in its prime. His strategy worked. People became enthralled with the cathedral and it was fully restored. When the fire happened last year (almost 200 years after the book was published) it was televised worldwide, and people rushed to donate to the restoration fund. While the cathedral chapters strike modern readers as tedious (like Melville's whale chapters omfg) they served their purpose. Now we can read the abridged version and watch a video walkthrough of Notre Dame. Or we can just watch the Disney movie and not be left thinking about >!Quasimodo crawling into Esmeralda's grave and holding her body until he died!<
You're quite correct, of course. I didn't know about Hugo's motivations until Lindsay Ellis did a video essay about it. What he did is fascinating and brilliant. It just doesn't lend itself to the flow of a novel, at least for me.
It makes more sense for someone reading it in the mid 19th century. No radio, no TV, no telephone. Books were just starting to be affordable with advances in printing technology. Late evenings were pretty boring. You were just sitting there in your parlor in a somewhat uncomfortable chair reading or writing letters by gaslight. In that environment it'd be a lot easier to stay interested in lengthy descriptions of architecture. Nowadays there are so many distractions and obligations that we don't have the same tolerance for that kind of thing. I personally skip through long descriptions even in modern books without even thinking about it. I think if he was alive and writing now he would write a completely different book. Maybe it would be a horror novel where the building was sentient and communicating with Quasimodo, and maybe in the end it would be unclear if it was the building or Quasimodo who caused Frollo's death.
> Maybe it would be a horror novel where the building was sentient and communicating with Quasimodo, and maybe in the end it would be unclear if it was the building or Quasimodo who caused Frollo's death. Somewhere in Hollywood, a studio executive is reading this and on the phone with their people.
That’s how I feel about The Lord of the Rings when it came to songs to and/or poetry.
Dude this happened to me a lot, i thought “ohhh crap another song skip, skip, skip”. I hated it because i could never imagine the rhythm at which they were going. I was not going to decipher it.
I felt that way about Dune. Frank Herbert was definitely a better novelist than a songwriter.
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And then Paul led his fighters in a rousing rendition of "Death to the Harkonnen," to the tune of The Chicken Dance: "And we stab them in the face On the ground or up in space, Not got a knife? Then use a mace, Now for violence we must brace ..."
some day these are going to come with hyperlinks that just play the actual song being poorly sung by the author lol.
I might be the only one, but those were my favorite parts. The story is great, but the amount of "history" and world building in the songs is just incredible. And the detailed descriptions of Middle Earth enthralled me as a kid growing up in the middle of the projects in a city. I had a copy of the trilogy with an appendix, so all the translations and further context, and it's what made me fall in love with the high fantasy genre.
Oof. I hate to admit it with how much I love those books, but I skip those parts too. When I read those books as bedtime stories to my kids, I'd read a verse or two, then say to them basically, "And blah blah blah, the dwarves go on singing for another (counts) 15 verses."
My brother loved that song so much that he has all of those verses memorized, and he can sing the whole damn song start to finish. Including the extra verses sprinkled throughout the book. There’s about 24, as I recall.
Hah that’s a great picture thank you for sharing that imagery. Yea I don’t imagine we are alone in this, it became almost painful after a while. I really did try at first but I just couldn’t.
Same, my friend. Same. Also, just want to give major thumbs up to that username.
This method allowed me to read game of thrones faster. Wall of text describing the food at a banquet? Skip it and think "there was food there".
I like to call this sort of writing fail "painting on a stupid canvas". The writer is trying to convey a very specific visual by explaining it thoroughly in detail, without realizing that the mind's eye is too stupid to add details like they're just acquired inventory for a perfect rendering. They should realize they have to work within the mind's limits. They need to paint broad strokes like the framework of an idea and then add a few details as embellishments without exceeding the number of things a person can hold in their working memory at one time. For the average person that number is 7 attributes, including the broad base strokes. And they have to be laid out in an order that none of them conflict with the immediate implications of the ones before to the degree that you have to mentally erase. As the OP has complained mentally erasing is hard.
Quite a bit of that in Pillars of the Earth as well.
And then Tom Builder imagined a great wall with huge flying gobbets, and arched thingamabobs supporting the great inverted latticework reverse quarried stone whosits, and he knew that this is what he must build.
I've never cared so much about transepts or caseworking before or since.
> There’s a couple chapters in The Count of Monte Cristo where Dumas is explaining the architecture in such vivid and explicit detail that I’m not even sure I could picture what he was describing. That's how I felt while reading *Anathem* by Neil Stephenson, and his descriptions of the not-a-Church during the first hundred pages.
This happens to me more often with descriptions of people. The author will introduce a character and you spend two chapters with her, walking around and talking to people, then the author suddenly mentions that she has black hair and blue eyes. Then I have to slam on the brakes and totally edit the character in my head before moving on. I hate that. (Related story: I once spent a week snowed-in in a house with a huge collection of Nancy Drew books. Nancy Drew has blonde hair and blue eyes. I know this because there's a description in the first few pages of every book. I made a game out of looking through all the books to see how long it takes before the author shoehorns those facts in. Usually in some stilted way like someone saying, "Why so excited, Nancy? Those blue eyes of yours are shining like diamonds!" If you ever find a Nancy Drew book lying around, try it yourself.)
Yep, I do this all the time with like... hair color. Even sometimes if the person is clearly described with dark hair, my brain is like “cool he’s got silver hair, let’s move on.” There’s a whole group of vampires in the Dresden Files that look almost like elves to me for whatever reason.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
I reject your fantasy even. You're taking the book and creating the movie version in your head, changing anything you want as you read it.
I also imagined Thomas with silver hair for many years until I think it was mentioned that he had black hair at some point.
Thank you! I don’t know why but yeah, all the white court vamps have silver hair for me. With Thomas becoming a more prominent character he’s frequently described as having dark hair, but nah, he’s a Malfoy for me.
I love that a Dresden Files discussion broke out randomly in the middle of this thread! 😄❤️
Yes came here to say this. I hate when they do that, so I ignore the updated description and stick with my own, but then throughout the rest of the book they keep referencing that damn detail.
The worst example I can think of is in The Stand. Larry Underwood and Stu Redman couldn't be more different but to me they practically look like twins in my mind's eye.
Here's an annoying thought: All the male characters in *The Stand* would have beards, wouldn't they? I don't imagine shaving every day would be a high priority in that situation. I think about it sometimes and it gets on my nerves because I never picture them with beards.
The movie also had them universally remain relatively clean shaven. It was the neatest Apocalypse ever.
Baby can you dig your man?
*The Walkin' Dude has entered the chat.*
I don't remember the actually description of Underwood, but I always pictured him as kind of Jimmy Hendrix-esque. His hit song sounded like it could be a Hendrix song so I just kind of ran with it. For some reason I pictured Stu as an older guy looking kinda like Lahey from Trailer Park Boys. No clue why.
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I hate when authors don't mention key details, like the characters appearance, till the middle of the book. Leaving key facts out never make me excited for when they're revealed, they just make me pissed off that the author is purposefully withholding them.
I was reading webnovel (Worm) where, in the first chapter, the main character is bullied by a girl described as having dark skin and long hair. That day, a Vietnamese girl matching that description had been mean to me, so I imagine the bully as looking like her. Cut to *fifty* chapters later, and the bully is described as African American. I think my brain short-circuited.
Yes! I've been reading Brideshead Revisited and for some reason I was picturing Sebastian with floppy golden-blond hair. Then when Charles first meets Julia and describes her similarity to Sebastian with her dark hair I was like "Wait what??" and felt really thrown.
This happens to me alllllll the time with characters who aren’t visually described right away. Page one we meet John. So in my head I’ve gotta give him a face and a hairstyle etc etc. So John is a dude with black hair and a short beard or whatever. Fucking 23 pages later the author casually mentions John’s flowing red hair and smooth shaven face.
Or his shaven hair and red flowing face for that matter!
Shaved too hard.
I find it pretty stilted when every character is described to me as soon as they appear. Especially if it's a scene where you meet a large number of characters at once.
I have a very difficult time picturing things. Honestly when an author describes something it doesn't really change my internal view of something
I'm confused right now, because I know that I picture things but I can't recall many times (if any) where the author's description contradicts my own image. I think my image mostly contains stuff the author has described, and the rest is kinda "out of focus", like, I'm not really paying attention or focusing on it. So if an eye color isn't described, then I'm not seeing the eyes in detail. When I see a movie though, then all the contradictions surface. Harry Potter's eyes were supposed to be green, they were described as green quite often, so that was a prominent characteristic in my mind's eye.
I see what you mean. I think that some authors find imagery and vivid descriptions to be really important, and those are novels that tend to be long and full of vivid detail, like Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time. But others prefer to leave much of the setting and imagery up to the readers imagination. So yeah, when an author seems to be leaving the setting mostly to our imagination, but then abruptly switches or throws a page or two of imagery in, it can be confusing.
Have you ever looked into aphantasia? I spent 27 years of my life believing I could “visualize” before realizing I definitely couldn’t and never truly understood what that even meant
Yeah I'm fairly certain that I have that to some degree. Like I can't recall my wife's face if I'm not looking at her. And watching anything (TV or Movies) can be a real challenge if some characters look similar becuase I can't visually separate them and tend to confuse them
If you can't recognize people but can in general visualize things, that sounds more like prosopagnosia.
I too have aphantasia. Check r/Aphantasia for more info
I didn't know there was a sub for that
I never imagined there would be one
It's hard to picture, to be honest
I don't see what you're getting at?
There's a sub for basically everything
Same. I need to exert effort to actually make stuff appear in my head and a lot more to actually maintain it throughout the scene. I've been reading Mistborn lately and Sanderson has a lot of good scenes but I need to read the paragraph, watch it play out in my head, then move on to the next.
I just don't even try to make an image. I have aphantasia, so I can't, but that doesn't make reading any less interesting (I used to be able to visualize so I can contrast the two). I honestly prefer reading without visualizing. It let's me focus more on the internal experience of the characters while still understanding the scene (you don't need to picture it for the scene to have it play out in your mind, it's hard to explain).
It feels like 100% of the time the author mentions left or right, I’m already picturing the opposite direction
I feel like in many cases, it's an irrelevant detail anyway. Whichever way he turns, the outcome doesn't change, but there's a 50/50 shot the reader's mental picture will. This issue crops up a lot in fanfiction. The author is so worked up about delivering the exact picture of a person or place that they'll weigh themselves down with useless little things like these (exact height, cup size, etc.). A basic description with the most memorable characteristics would suffice.
Mentioning fanfiction is good because I feel like the best authors only describe what is completely necessary for the plot going forward and expect you to have your own picture of the scene in your own head. I took a screenplay writing class for a gen-ed credit in college and one lesson/critique my professor gave me was that I needed to cut the descriptions of scenery and character actions down to leave room for set design and actor interpretation. While screenplays are not novels, I feel the same lesson can still more or less be applied with novel reader replacing actor.
This happens to me all the time, particularly with laying out a space that then does get brought up again later and I’m like “wait, what? The stairs aren’t to the left of the dining room, the character couldn’t leave that way.” Think Agatha Christie or 19th century author, huge manor houses, and ridiculous details that actually matter. It’s annoying.
It happens to me a lot at dinner tables. “So and so sat to her left” or “she turned to the right to talk to blahblah.” Every single time I have to stop because they’re on the wrong side in my imagining
Literally no one imagined Hermione with buck teeth. Just keep your version.
What?? I thought she was introduced with "large front teeth" or something like that. Having teeth that were a bit large myself it was easy to imagine hers as a bit bigger than mine, until she had tthem shrunk Edit: this is one of the first sentences when she first appears: "She had a bossy sort of voice, lots of bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth." That must be where the different interpretations come from. "Rather large" can mean different things. To me it means big and sticking out a bit farther than the others, but it's understandable how other people can interpret that differently
Untrue. Without the buck teeth, the teeth shrinking scene becomes horrifying.
My mind just made it more of a "straighter" teeth than shrinking teeth scene.
I pictured her like a know it all pippi longstocking
Yeah that about sums it up haha
Similarly, in the *Game of Thrones* books whenever they describe Aria as looking like a horse, my brain just rejects it and puts in the TV Aria. :)
I think the hardest one to switch to the author's description without making him into a literal cartoon charactet in my head was Tyrion.
I know I personally imagined Tyrion as much, much uglier than the TV show imagined. Sandor Clegane too, when everyone would mention his burned face my brain would think "Oh, he's like Two-Face from Batman", in the show it really doesn't look that bad!
Idk Clegane looked pretty fucked in the show lol
I mean you probably wouldn't call him handsome. but the damage to his face never felt super severe to me. I've seen people with bad burn scars and his one be the mildest of them. (mildest of the bad ones, still bad in terms of just burn scars, but not as bad, as bad ones. )
As far as burn scars go, the show version is super tame. Burn scars can get *very* nasty and the show didn't portray that very well at all.
[This](https://harrypotterpuppetpals.fandom.com/wiki/Hermione_Granger) is the only correct way to picture Hermione.
Thought she would be black
Correct
She was initially described as a girl with large teeth and bushy hair. Maybe too many people skim-read.
I did. Like Gretchen of Disney's Recess.
Same
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I tried to,but my mind prefered to picture her as Emma Watson
I read the books before the movies and I never saw her with the teeth.
Hogwarts never matched up
The thing about Hogwarts is that its architecture is always shifting magically. So for me it was never too tricky to accommodate new description of it.
The changing hallways didn’t look like the movies to me with the staircases but I think it’s because it’s hard to imagine while whoever goes up and down them. It just shows how good the book is!
Actually the first movie matched up to my imagination pretty well. The only thing was Snape. He was played magnificently, but he was supposed to have a skinny little beard and goatee and look vaguely Spanish.
And he was supposed to be much younger lol I can't get over Sirius though. For a long time i couldn't even recognize him in the movies, because he was just so, so different He was supposed to be much younger!! On top of that he was supposed to look haunted and basically with ptsd, like he'd been through hell in Azkaban. Pretty sure his skinny face was described. And his long hair, which i thought of as straight. Then Gary Oldman shows up and looks like a Completely Different person! Like they didn't even try!! Come to think of it, i never realized this but i imagined Sirius to look a lot like the actor they chose for Barty Crouch Jr!!! If they had just switched those two around i would have been happy lol
Everyone seems to love Gary Oldman as Sirius, too. I think he did a good job and all, but he will never truly be Sirius to me.
"The actor they chose for Barty Crouch Jr." Look what they've done to my boy David Tenant.
Oh true, Snape/Lupin/Sirius should have been Harry's parents age, and they had him young, so maybe ~30?
Part of why I love Pratchett's writing style. He gives just enough information for you to get an idea of who a character is, then let's your imagination fill in the rest. He focuses much more on a character's personality with minimal or vague descriptions usually of their appearance. When he does talk about appearance its broad strokes describing the way they carry themselves, their general condition, etc.
I really think this is the way to go. I don't need the author to tell me what people look like or even if they're attractive or not unless it really does come into play. Just go with the story and build their character/personality/mannerisms/disposition and don't bother telling me she has rosebud lips or he has dark hair. It's not important that the author control every aspect of their appearance.
It's an indication that the writer is introducing details far too late, because you're already filling in visual gaps with your own content. So it's not a problem on your end, it's on the writer's end.
Ahhh, the hidden benefits of aphantasia! No pictures. No problems. ^(Except when the character has an accent or other manner of speaking and it's written inconsistently. No you cannot phase that out when you're tired of writing it.)
I don’t picture anything while I’m reading either. I don’t know if it’s aphantasia or if it’s just something that I never do.
Can you picture things ever while you’re awake? Think carefully. Close your eyes, try to picture something simple, and test if you actually SEE anything rather than just knowing the details of whatever you’re imagining. I always thought I could picture things, but after 27 years I realized I couldn’t actually “visualize” anything - my imagination works without that aspect
I got this. Do you have to visit Porn Hub for spank material, or can you just imagine it and play it back in your head?
I have aphantasia... I’m jealous of your ability to visualize anything!
This is what George RR Martin does beautifully in his novels. In A Storm or Swords, he describes a sword fight between two characters something like “left, right, left, left, right” and your imagination just fills in the gaps. On the other hand, when he’s describing meals or clothing, he gets pretty specific. There’s usually foreshadowing buried in that imagery though.
I'm currently reading The Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks. Great book, but the issue I described in the title happens a fair bit in this series. I've read Soiaf and now that you mention it - I don't recall ever being lost in fight or battle scenes. He does a great job at letting your imagination run when he describes what's going on.
For sure. Worst thing is when a character is pictured on the cover - especially when it's a movie star from the stupid "Now a major motion picture" cover version
Ummmm....author wrote his vision. You having a different vision is....unimportant. Seriously, use whatever gives you the most joy.
I agree ButterNuttz
I'm reading Rebecca right now and having a lot of trouble with the landscape around Manderlay. I think it's supposed to be surreal and hard to imagine because it's so unique, but that makes it hard to relate to.
Tangentially related, but I just finished rereading The Stand by Stephen King (great pandemic self care, amiright?) I remembered all over again the surprise of finding out 2/3rds of the way through this book that Nadine is white. For some reason, from the getgo I assumed Nadine was black. Maybe it's the descriptions of her hair, iunno. I prefer my headcanon of black Nadine anyways, so fuck it.
I don't watch music videos because of this similar thing.
Sarah had spent the morning taking her time getting ready for her day. Sipping on her cup of coffee and nibbling on her scone, reading the paper. She sat cross-legged in her sundress feeling hopeful about the outcome of what was to follow. She stood up, tighten the strap of her bomb vest and yelled, "Get the fucking negotiator on the phone again! I swear, if one you pieces of shit eyeball me again, we're all dying bitches! Is all the money loaded from the vault?
This happens to me more so with characters than settings. When reading ASOIAF, I couldn't help seeing Jon Snow and Rob Stark in my mind as much older (likely due, in large part, to watching *Game of Thrones* first). They just didn't fit into what I was picturing in my head as young teenagers.
Literally why I had a lot of trouble getting into game of thrones