Would you use/have you used illustrations in your novels? Do you believe it can affect positively or negatively?
Just to wax pseudo-philosophical on the subject in general (what, me do that?! ), some of my favorite illustrators hate illustration, because of the way it robs the reader of the ability to form their own mental imagery. So what they do instead is what one of them calls picture-making. Where illustration commonly involves depicting very specific moments from the story, they instead paint or draw pictures that were loosely inspired by the themes of the story or something that just came to mind while reading it.
That's exactly the argument: Does visualization help you live in the world, or places your imagination into boxes. I guess it depends on the reader. About the second part, picture-making, I did not really got what you want to say, please elaborate
Careful, it can be dangerous asking me to elaborate. I tend to do too much of it with no prompting at all. Ok, most illustrators will begin by reading the book and then choose certain moments they want to illustrate. Le'ts just say for instance 'John Carter, the greatest swordsman on Mars or Earth, leapt gracefully, his powerful thighs propelling him several leagues over the rugged Martian terrain, and he drew his saber en-route.' Most illustrators will then draw that image, careful to follow descriptions of what all characters and the terrain etc look like, and trying to duplicate the image depicted in words the way they see it in their head. But the guys I'm thinking of will instead do a much more abstract image of a man floating weightlessly over a mountainous landscape, or perhaps not show any landscape at all. And they won't try to follow the descriptions of the characters either. In other words they start with the imagery inspired by the words in the book, but from there they abstract out an image that captures the essence of it without slavishly including all the details. Let me try to find the kind of image I'm talking about. Ok, here: I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to be an illustration of, but it's vague and non-specific, seems to be some kind of death-angel that might be emerging from a dream. It's by Jeffrey Jones, one of my favorites. I doubt there was actually a death-angel figure in the story (I'm not sure) but possibly the idea of death stalking the land made him think of this.
I must say though, I do love some illustration (in the original sense of the word) when it's divorced form the book it was originally made for. You know, when it's collected into a book of the works of a particular illustrator, or just posted online. In fact, when I read an illustrated book, I take the drawings or paintings as a certain artist's idea of what things look like, it doesn't seem to replace my own ideas. Or if it does, it doesn't usually bother me. What bothers me is if they're bad (by my estimate of course) or just inappropriate to the story. I used to subscribe to a couple of monthly digest-sized magazines. When I would buy old back issues from the bins of book stores (issues from the 70's or earlier) there were always appropriate illustrations that I thought were quite good, but when I subscribed (in the late 90's or early 2000's) each magazine had switched to using only one illustrator for everything, that I didn't think were very good. That really soured the experience for me.
Other end of the spectrum: Me. A long time ago, I used to avidly read Enid Blyton's The Five (if it was called that in English, at the time I was stuck with Dutch). The versions I got at the library had a sparse few pictures, depicting an exact scene, and I enjoyed that enormously. I always seemed to have trouble forming clear pictures of characters, but this way I knew exactly what to picture when Blyton wrote about Julian, Anne, Dick and George. Side-note: It was the girl-wants-to-be-boy my kid-brain had a crush on. Always wondered how that situation would turn out when George became too mature to hide... things. Weren't any pictures of that in the book.
My client actually recently published the illustrated short story I wrote for her (my name's on it - it's work for hire, not ghostwriting). It looks very special. Having said that, probably not great if you're self-publishing because that makes formatting the file a pain and then the cost of colour printing rather steep. Still, cool to see it out!
