All this fuss about AI…

…and I’m here wondering if I should learn dictation.

Call me a late adopter (because that’s absolutely accurate — I didn’t get a touchscreen phone until I was 24), but I can’t get myself too excited about ChatGPT right now.

Not for my creative work, anyway. I’m getting very excited about the opportunities it presents in my day job as a careers advisor, because as far as I can tell the possibilities are wide and expansive, and as students will still need me to navigate it with them, I don’t even think it will do me out of a job.

That may not be the case, as an author, but I’m choosing not to worry about it. Not because it’s not worrying (look, when the head of PRH is telling authors to auto-generate content in ChatGPT it’s hard not to worry), but because I’d just… give up if I gave into it.

Anyway, in some ways, I’ve been using AI/tech to help me write for years, haven’t I? What else is Word’s Editor function? What else is Grammarly? What else is ProWritingAid? Of course, the difference there is, it’s still substantively my work, and coming from my imagination, but tech solutions have certainly helped me become better.

I suspect, in the long run, we’ll find AI solutions that work with authors, rather than the current crop of vaguely sinister companies who’ve recognised just how profitable the “I would like to be a published author” market is. Because… as well as being an author, I’m also a reader, and I know that while I might be tempted to skim-read an AI-generated story out of morbid curiosity at some point, I mostly want the books I read to be, well, human. I doubt I’m alone in that.

But all of this is beside the point, because I’m not intending to use ChatGPT to write my next books.

I might use more tech, though. Namely, dictation.

After all, if it’s good enough for the likes of John Milton, Dan Brown, Henry James, Barbara Cartland, Winston Churchill and Terry Pratchett (thanks for that lovely list goes to Joanna Penn at the Creative Penn) then it’s definitely good enough for me.

And, in a world full of evolving technology, why wouldn’t I at least give it a shot?

Apparently, if I get the hang of dictation, I’ll be able to tell stories faster, which in the long run might mean I can produce books faster.

In the above-linked article by Joanna Penn, she talks about dictation as a potential way for writers to be healthier too - no longer hunched over a keyboard, we could write while out in the great outdoors, chatting away to our dictaphones (or, more likely, our smartphones).

Let me just take a step back and address that thing I said about speed, first.

I don’t want to write quickly because I think that’s the best way to write. I don’t want to write quickly because I feel the need to “churn out content” (although, I don’t not feel that pressure, either). The main reason I wish I was quicker at writing is that I suffer from a terrible malady called Shiny New Thing Syndrome.

There’s always a key moment when SNTS strikes: usually about the 60-70k mark of the first draft of a project, or right when I’m meant to be editing a draft. There’s something about that moment that just… inspires me in a totally different direction.

The benefit of SNTS is that I have a minimum of 8 novel ideas on the go at any given time. In fact, I’ve just had a poke around in my OneDrive and the current tally sits at 12, not including a short story collection and the novel I’m editing with Chicken House. And they all have a minimum of 20-30k words written.

It’s just… not one of them has an ending.

Or, more accurately, a written ending. They’ve all got endings — in my head. Or plotted down in a haphazard outline. But in order to get the endings written, I’d need to be able to focus on one idea for long enough to pour all the ideas out of my head and onto the page, and my brain is not always helpful.

So my thought was… if I could dictate faster than I can type, I might have a better shot at getting some endings down. Or, at least, capturing as much of the magic that comes from SNTS before another project calls to me, like a siren on the rocks below.

It took me 16 years to write All Hell. I don’t have that kind of time again. For my own sanity, I don’t have that much time again.

Which brings us back to health, doesn’t it?

Maybe I’m searching for an impossible panacea for my anxiety, stress and the pressure I’m piling on top of myself. And maybe that’s never going to work. But on the other hand, dictation has potential for me, I think.

So much like my recent spate of editing content, I think I might do some blogging to talk through my experiences with it.

I didn’t write this post via dictation. But watch this space…