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I'm what one would call a "visual thinker". Actually, I didn't know what to call it until I read this paper by Gerald Grow. Basically I have problems translating/conveying the mental images I create in my head, either verbally or through writing. I hit on all the symptoms he talked about in the article, which included:
I can't tell you how often I sound like this when I try to explain something, even when it should be so simple.
Those are just 4, but I hit on nearly all of them that's in the article. I can see the scene playing out in my head, but I just don't know how to properly convey it to someone. The "you know what I mean" bit above explains my writing and verbal style so well, and when they don't get it, I just want to shake them even though I know it's my fault. It's because I can see it, and I think I'm explaining it correctly, but it just doesn't connect. My prose has suffered because of this. So frustrating.
Picture this - I have this vision of a scene playing out in my head, let's say this scene from High Plains Drifter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL2la06bUns I'm some invisible being in this scene watching it unfold in front of my eyes, and through my writing, the only way you can know what's going on. When you hear or read how I describe the scene, it wont play out anything close to that scene. It's hyperbole, but you might just end up immersing yourself in a strip club when you read my description.
What I want to know is, is there a remedy for this? A course that teaches you how to navigate a scene so that you can properly convey it to someone? I'm imagining something that plays a live scene like above and then asks you to narrate the scene, then maybe it points out the details of the scene that you should have mentioned in your narration, the things that would have brought the scene alive to the reader. Maybe if I continually do something like this with various scenes, I'll eventually know how to guide readers through my own scenes.
If anyone has any methods or knows of any tools that can specifically help a "visual thinker", your help would be much appreciated.
1. Naming imprecise or lacking: "The doohickey bollusked up my thingamajig." Broad, vague nouns and adjectives.
I can't tell you how often I sound like this when I try to explain something, even when it should be so simple.
2. Words as labels for unseen pictures, labels for complex but unexplained thoughts. Effort to label large visual wholes at once, without analyzing them into their parts. Each verbal element seems to refer to more than it says; words have multiple or cryptic, rather than specific, meanings.
Words imprecise. Connections unclear. Syntax slippery. Words don't seem real to the writer. Has a "You know what I mean" quality.
Slips of the tongue can betray the visual thinker's tenuous relation to words. In the middle of a statement, visual thinkers sometimes insert a word which names some object in the room their sight just happened to fall upon, like this conversation in a kitchen: "Yesterday when I was driving to school, the dishwasher overheated and I had to stop at a service station."
In a conversational pattern I often observe, a visual thinkers stop in mid-sentence, stumped for a word: They can see it but not say it. Teachers could accuse such students of not thinking. They are thinking, though; their thoughts just happen to arrive in visual, not verbal, form.
Those are just 4, but I hit on nearly all of them that's in the article. I can see the scene playing out in my head, but I just don't know how to properly convey it to someone. The "you know what I mean" bit above explains my writing and verbal style so well, and when they don't get it, I just want to shake them even though I know it's my fault. It's because I can see it, and I think I'm explaining it correctly, but it just doesn't connect. My prose has suffered because of this. So frustrating.
Picture this - I have this vision of a scene playing out in my head, let's say this scene from High Plains Drifter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL2la06bUns I'm some invisible being in this scene watching it unfold in front of my eyes, and through my writing, the only way you can know what's going on. When you hear or read how I describe the scene, it wont play out anything close to that scene. It's hyperbole, but you might just end up immersing yourself in a strip club when you read my description.
What I want to know is, is there a remedy for this? A course that teaches you how to navigate a scene so that you can properly convey it to someone? I'm imagining something that plays a live scene like above and then asks you to narrate the scene, then maybe it points out the details of the scene that you should have mentioned in your narration, the things that would have brought the scene alive to the reader. Maybe if I continually do something like this with various scenes, I'll eventually know how to guide readers through my own scenes.
If anyone has any methods or knows of any tools that can specifically help a "visual thinker", your help would be much appreciated.