quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles Now, having answered all those questions about your imagined scene, try to hold it all in your head at once and really "see" and "hear" everything as you described it to yourself based on those questions. Tough, isn't it? ----- Any thoughts?

wow, others must have boring lives if they can't imagine stuff like this


it's a bad question though. if you ask 'imagine a businessman entering a subway', then you're limiting the rest of the 'scene'. you should rather ask. "imagine a subway scene".

EDIT - oops, that's what ^HE^ said.


if I knew that you were testing to see how vivid my imagination was, I am sure I would readily extrapolate and expand the ideas beyond the man, but if you just say that you are not really stimulating the subject enough.


all of the detail in movies and what not doesn't come from a single thought alone - it is often developed as part of a relatively long collaborative process.

EDIT - lol i just read your 'collaborative fiction' thread



now read gabriel garcia marquez or umberto eco and you will bear witness to the testament of truly imaginative minds

quote:

Originally posted by nchs09 Are you kidding? books paint such a vivid image that you can see, feel and sense every aspect of it. At least thats what good writers do... Now i have not encountered a great writer in my time.. but reading books from great novelist from back in the day is like watching a movie x100000

i agree.

Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis comes to mind... although it's not the kind of stuff you want to imagine in great detail, it's impeccably written. there were moments when i actually had to put the book down and take a moment to clear my mind before i finished reading.

___________________
+ + + AMBROSIA
lovebirds tracklist archive | vincenzo tracklist archive

books are always better than movies..simply because they convey much more detail than can be squeezed into two hours. It may be difficult to verbally describe every tiny visual detail in a movie scene, but skilled authors can do a very good job. When it comes to character emotions, thoughts, memories, etc...there is no comparison. No movie can portray these things as well as a good book. IMO, movies really prevent the viewer from developing an emotional attachment to the people on screen...because you don't know what the characters are thinking...You don't know how their brain is processing what is happening around them...or what they might remember about events that took place before the movie...You just see them doing things without knowing what is really motivating them.

Imagination is incapable of filling in those kind of gaps.

Last edited by Capitalizt on Feb-08-2008 at 00:11

quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles On another board, I made the remark that imagination (as far as constructing scenes out of a few words in a novel) is very limited, and that this is one reason why books are generally not that good at portraying action effectively. Someone there took issue with my remark, saying that the whole point of imagination was to "break free of limitation." Here's my response to him: Imagination is extremely limited. Try imagining a simple scene -- say, a businessman boarding a subway with a crowd of people on it. Then start asking yourself specific questions about what the businessman looks like, what the other people look like, their clothes and facial expressions, what the subway looks like, what each person on the subway is doing. Now ask yourself what sounds you hear, which people are talking and which are silent, the sounds made by the subway car itself, the sounds of the subway doors as they open. If you're like most people, when I said, "imagine a businessman boarding a subway," you didn't really have much of all that in your head at all until I started asking questions; rather, you had a few words plus a very vague, hazy image that's quite difficult to really flesh out and hold in your mind without some very strenuous imaginative work. A film, on the other hand, provides all of that detail in a few seconds. Now, having answered all those questions about your imagined scene, try to hold it all in your head at once and really "see" and "hear" everything as you described it to yourself based on those questions. Tough, isn't it? ----- Any thoughts?

i'm starting to think that you copied this from someone else. ironic isn't it?

quote:

Originally posted by jennypie Omg I thought that was Adam Levine...SWOOOOOOOOOOOON.

OMG I don't know who he is... but massive agreements with the SWOOOOOOOOOON!

I'll make sure that I include him in my imaginations from now on...

quote:

Originally posted by Vernon_H i'm starting to think that you copied this from someone else.

Why do you think that? And where do you think I got it from?

quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles On another board, I made the remark that imagination (as far as constructing scenes out of a few words in a novel) is very limited, and that this is one reason why books are generally not that good at portraying action effectively. Someone there took issue with my remark, saying that the whole point of imagination was to "break free of limitation." Here's my response to him: Imagination is extremely limited. Try imagining a simple scene -- say, a businessman boarding a subway with a crowd of people on it. Then start asking yourself specific questions about what the businessman looks like, what the other people look like, their clothes and facial expressions, what the subway looks like, what each person on the subway is doing. Now ask yourself what sounds you hear, which people are talking and which are silent, the sounds made by the subway car itself, the sounds of the subway doors as they open. If you're like most people, when I said, "imagine a businessman boarding a subway," you didn't really have much of all that in your head at all until I started asking questions; rather, you had a few words plus a very vague, hazy image that's quite difficult to really flesh out and hold in your mind without some very strenuous imaginative work. A film, on the other hand, provides all of that detail in a few seconds. Now, having answered all those questions about your imagined scene, try to hold it all in your head at once and really "see" and "hear" everything as you described it to yourself based on those questions. Tough, isn't it? ----- Any thoughts?

exactly the reason i quit the novel i was trying to write about 3-4 months in. i have an excellent imagination for plot, but not so much for everything else you need to write a decent book.

___________________