Diane, make a note of that.
I’m not saying I wanted to learn dictation so I could pretend to be Agent Dale Cooper, but I’m also not not saying that.
I’ve had some success this first week, and I thought it might be nice to share it…
First things first, let’s get down to brass tacks:
How much did I write?
drumroll, please… I wrote just shy of 20,000 words. In a week.
I wrote just shy of 20,000 words in a week where I also attended a 2-day conference for my day job and took some social-intensive days off to see family and friends in Yorkshire. I wrote just shy of 20,000 words in fits and bursts, sort of 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, mostly revolving around the notes app on my iPhone.
And I’d say at least 70% of that was via dictation.
Is that a let-down, that it’s not 100%? Well, it’s only my first week, and I also spent an inordinate amount of time reading blog posts about which is the best dictation software and how you shouldn’t look at the screen while talking, and all kinds of other things that frankly, were pure procrastination. Also, like, I wasn’t going to dictate while other people were around, was I? I’m still that same shy, bookish kid who doesn’t like people looking at her! So, some of the writing had to happen with thumbs on a smartphone keyboard, or forefingers tip-tapping on an actual keyboard (and no, I can’t type properly, why do you think I wanted to go all Twin Peaks in the first place?).
So how did I do it? Well…
Tech stuff:
Yes, I read approximately three Google-ranked pages of blog posts and reviews about tech that I might need to help me dictate. I learned that Dragon Professionally Speaking and various other Nuance products are considered the gold standard, but I also learned that they have significant drawbacks. Not least… the price. I’ve only sold one book so far, and that was a fluke (this is sort-of a joke, I don’t really think it was a fluke, it just feels fluke-y) — I can’t afford $700 for software that I will then have to train to understand my voice and the weird cyberpunk naming conventions I want to use.
I learned too, that many people recommend the purchase of a dictaphone like the one in the main image, because it means you don’t need to be sat at your PC as you write, and there is software that can transcribe the audio for you later, like Otter.ai which I already use for work, and can confirm does not understand my accent. My accent isn’t even hard to understand. Anyway, I also didn’t see the point of buying a dictaphone when I already own… a smartphone.
So, despite all my many hours of reading, I decided to use… my iPhone. And the voice recognition software that comes for free with iOS.
And so far? That’s been absolutely fine for me.
I did give the dictation function in Word a go, but my Chromebook is a bit old which I think got in the way of the functionality. It does that when I’m typing, too — sometimes Office 365 just utterly malfunctions and deletes half of what I’ve just typed. So I’m not giving up on Word, I’m going to try it over the weekend because I’ve got four days off at home.
But as an on-the-go option, my phone and Apple’s dictate tool has done the trick just fine. I’ve been dictating into the notes app, so I can look at the screen as I go if I want, but personally, I don’t find that massively distracting. Apple does understand voice commands for punctuation, but I don’t use semi-colons or anything, I’ve stuck to “comma”, “full stop”, “new paragraph” and “open/close quotes”. Anything more would get a bit confusing for me, I think.
A real benefit of using the Notes app is that I can go in and fix anything egregious with text, even while the dictate function is still going — so when I’ve later transferred the notes to my master document for this draft, I haven’t had loads to fix later. Although, the way that I make that transfer from Notes to Word is probably a bit convoluted: I “share” the note to the Pages app, which stores it in my iCloud drive. Then, later on, I open both my Word file and my iCloud drive and copy/paste from Pages to Word.
If my main desktop was a Mac, I’d probably just write in Pages, which would solve the whole thing. Alternatively, I could dictate directly into Pages on my phone, but for some reason I quite like using Notes… that’s all for me to sort out, anyway.
Prep:
One thing that’s definitely worth talking about is how I prep for dictation because it’s a little different (although not, like, massively) to how I prep to type.
It’s probably no surprise to anyone that I am a huge daydreamer. Very often, I’ll have a snippet of a scene in my head, and then as I’m having a shower or doing the washing up or lying in bed before sleep I’ll sort of play out the rest of the scene. I do this a good few times until I’m happy with how it feels, and then I’ll open my laptop or PC, open my master document, and try to replicate what I’ve just played out in my head into words. And sometimes that is so hard. I don’t always have the vocabulary to describe exactly what the scene looks like, or how the choreography of it all should operate. So, sometimes I’ll jot myself down a bunch of bullet points of the stuff I can’t quite get right on this occasion, and I can come back to it later.
With dictation, I just open the app and start talking, and I’ve found it so much easier to explain what I’m trying to say. The book I’m writing is 1st person POV, so I’m putting myself in my character’s voice as I speak, but she talks a lot like I do, so that’s okay. Also, since I’ve started dictating I’ve noticed that I have a “typing persona” I wasn’t aware of. My typing persona is a lot like me, except she uses bigger words. She thinks way more about sentence structure and the beauty of the prose she’s putting down. Sometimes she’ll think things like, is there a nicer way to phrase that?
My typing persona is great. She helps me write cleaner drafts. But, as I’ve mentioned before, when I’m just trying to get the damn draft written, I don’t necessarily care if it’s clean. Yet. And my typing persona puts up so many barriers to my being-able-to-write-at-all that my spoken persona just doesn’t. Also, my typing persona really likes me to write chronologically, and sometimes that stops me in my tracks, if I get to a point in the book I haven’t got good ideas for yet, or am just not in the mood to write. My spoken persona, by contrast, is quite happy for me to just add a new note and come up with ideas from anywhere in the story arc. It’s… freeing.
Final thoughts this week:
I’m obviously going to need my typing persona from time to time. She’s going to help me later, when the first draft is done, wrangle it into something readable that is in my style, coherent and hopefully I’m proud of.
But in the meantime, I want to spend more time with this spoken persona. She seems to think she can help me get a first draft out in no time. If she’s right, she might just be my new best friend.
Make a note of that, Diane.