Write without Visual Aid

Do you blog, article writing, or write a book, or just simply keep diary? Are you engaged in anything to write regularly? If you are, you may have same experience I have. I write this blog, 1 x English blog, and 2 x Japanese blogs. In addition, I am one of article writers in a Japanese News Site. My challenge is always this Japanese News Site. I need to write once in a week regularly. And this site does not allow me to use any illustration, pictures, videos. No image. For example, I wrote about San Francisco 49 miles Scenic Drive in this blog. I used maps and pictures to visualize. But, in the News Article, I cannot use any of these.

However, I found this is very useful to brush up my skill of explaining things without visual aid like images. I need to visualize what I want to say and I hope to convey to the readers, first. Then I write down the image using the best words and sentences I could think of. Finally, I need to re-read or proof read what I wrote makes sense and visualize the contents for the people who read. Sometimes I am not sure if I correctly visualized what I wanted to write, so I ask my wife to read and explain what I wrote in her words.

It looks relatively easy to explain this way, but if I do not use any visual aid for an article I write, it takes me double the time or sometimes 3 times of time I write with visual aids. Some authors, professional writers, novelists are very good at it. Orson Wells is good at it. Edgar Alan Poe is good at it. Some more English or Japanese authors are very good at it. What you visualize may be different from mine, but still people can clearly visualize the scene as if we are there watching it.

Quite recently my mentor gave me an advice I should speak slowly to convey the message. I apply same principle in writing. I try to use simpler, easier words, terms, sentences to describe in case I cannot use visual aids.

Having said that, I still like using visual aids. It is not only simpler to take images to show, but also make an article colorful or sometimes dynamic, even not directly showing what I am writing about. Illustrations or literally Image help writing an article a lot!

Check my websites to find out what I am doing:
http://vur.me/shawfunami/main
http://vur.me/shawfunami/SF
http://vur.me/shawfunami/zi

Feel free to contact me:
shaw@zhenintl.ws
Shaw Funami
Fill the Missing Link