Visual Writing: Writing by Manipulating Visual Representations of Stories

Abstract: We introduce "visual writing", an approach to writing stories by manipulating visuals instead of words. Visual writing relies on editable visual representations of time, entities, events, and locations to offer representations more suited to specific editing tasks. We propose a taxonomy for these representations and implement a prototype software supporting the visual writing workflow. The system allows writers to edit the story by alternating between modifying the text and manipulating visual representations to edit entities, actions, locations, and order of events. We evaluate this workflow with eight creative writers and find visual writing can help find specific passages, keep track of story elements, specify edits, and explore story variations in a way that encourages creativity.