Thread: Seriousness When reading, do you subvocalize?
View Single Post
Old 04-08-2011, 02:10 AM   #38
Cyberman tM
Evangelist
Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Cyberman tM ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Cyberman tM's Avatar
 
Posts: 439
Karma: 2248782
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Austria
Device: Inkbook Prime; Icarus Illumina;ImcoV6l;EB600;Kobo
Quote:
Originally Posted by DuskyRose View Post
One of the things that annoys me is when an author doesn't give much in the way of descriptions, so I don't start out with a good visual. I just read a couple of books with two main male characters, and the author described everyone else enough that I could grab a visual and go. But the two main characters only were 1) English 2) brothers 3) mid thirties and 4) one had thinner hair than the other. No hair color, eye color, height, skin tone, build, or anything that would tell me what the other characters saw.

I liked the stories themselves, but the character were pretty blob-like in my head until I finally settled on what they looked like.

The author may have had an idea of what his characters looked like, but he didn't get it across to me! I get frustrated with that. Makes my movie fuzzy.
That reminds me of a discussion between two characters in a short story Asimov wrote ("Gold", in case you know it).
A movie producer was complaining to the author that he didn't describe his characters, making it impossible to define a visual representation of them.

Till now I didn't really think about that beyond the obvious book->movie transition.

When I say I "see a movie" in my head when reading, it's not entirely true. I don't really see any visuals, or rather rarely. It's more of having an idea of the book running in my head.
So I'm not much bothered by missing visuals, and rely more on conversation to advance the story/describe the characters.
Cyberman tM is offline   Reply With Quote