Writers and Readers (Prompt 4)

Thomas C. Foster says that "reading is an act of the imagination... a reader's imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another". This occurs when the reader is reading a story because they are imagining the characters, plot, and settings in their head like a movie and relating it to their own experiences with people they have met and places they have been. Readers also try to figure out what the writer means when they say something and how it might relate to something they have read earlier in the book or in a different book. Foster says reading is an event of the imagination because
"our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle put what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to" (Foster 114). The writer gives us this story, and as readers we take it a step further with imagination. This suggests that the nature and process between reading and writing are deeply connected. The readers and writers go hand in hand; you can not have one without the other. The creativity of each the reader and writer is important because the writer is like a prompter for the reader's imagination. They establish who the story is about, where it takes place, why it is happening, and so on. The reader brings another creative element because they ask deeper questions like what is the meaning of the weather in one scene or the meaning of the color of an object. The readers are the ones who really bring the text to life with imagination.