This is an ABC podcast.

There was a terrible shriek, and they loosed their arrows.

A winged creature swooped through the shadows, its storm-painted feathers stirring up the hot air.

It was all angles, like a wolf dunked in water, or a bird scrunched and then twisted

back into shape.

Riannon Williams is a fantasy author, and this creature, a dreadwretch, is the product

of her wild imagination.

Its beak was hooked, its scaly talons peeling, leaking shadow.

She has spent a lot of her life daydreaming about these make-belief worlds,

and about 18 years committing them to paper.

And in an instant, their arrows turned to ash at her feet.

Perhaps the bigger mystery in magic though is how an author's words translate into the minds of individual readers.

I was given the most beautiful sketchbook by a girl called Nim.

She'd just drawn pages and pages of character artwork and little moments from the book.

And it blew me away and it really, you could have pulled it from my brain.

It was so accurate.

How does that happen?

And why do we feel so angry when our mental images of books don't line up with what we see in film adaptations?

Now, those that have read the book complain that the movie sort of simplifies the story,

but they have different requirements for story and everything, of course, visually versus in words.

But inevitably the film's not the same as the book.

However, if you've read the book, you've got your own visual context.

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