Dictating to draft
Experimenting a little to move things along!
Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
I’m smack in the middle of a ton of writing and revision, so much so that I’m barely finding time for all the other writing I love doing, especially short humour and fiction. And that’s why I’m trying something new this week: dictating stuff to my phone to move things along with a very rough draft of what’ll hopefully evolve into a bit of long fiction!
When I say ‘new’, I’m exaggerating a little bit. I’ve used my phone for dictating ideas while I walked for years. I’d be crossing the Pont du Mont Blanc and suddenly I’d have a better definition for a key critical term I was using, or an idea for a title, or for a comedic premise. And my phone was the perfect way to set things down quickly without having to scramble for pen and paper! I mostly use the basic notepad app on my iPhone for this now, having abandoned Evernote after it became unusable (if you’re thinking of making a similar move, you can migrate things over from one platform to the other so you can keep all your old Evernotes!).
However, this whole process is new when it comes to my drafting work.
I normally sit down and type things out when I’m drafting. I type quickly, so this tends to work pretty well. But I’ve been slowing down a lot lately when it comes to the drafting of my ongoing bit of big fiction (BBF?). Part of it is that I keep taking time over descriptions, or choosing the right word. Even though I’m trying to write badly (something I usually do quite well in these early stages), I’m finding it a little harder to do with fiction.
The other night, I was in my bath when I realised I hadn’t done my daily bit of drafting. But I was exhausted, and in no mood to get out of my bath to write! So I decided to try dictating to my iPad (which is never far away from me). And words started coming! They weren’t good words, but they were words, and that was all I was looking for.
I’m going to stick to this for a bit, and I’ll let you know how it goes. Do any of you use dictation software for drafting or writing? I’d love to hear about it!
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VB,
M