I don’t have enough time to write.
To be fair, this is a perennial problem. Most recently, it’s been related to the many hours I poured into the Sacramento Book Festival which happened a week and a half ago, and also to the other weekend events during Pride Season that I attend, and where I manage a table for our local Queer Sacramento Authors Collective group.
So I’ve been scrounging for more writng time.
A few days a week, I walk over to meet Mark at the Starbucks on the Sacramento State campus. These solo walks take 15-20 minutes, and there’s literally nothing else for me to do while I’m walking (unless you count being present in the moment LOL).
So I figured, why not try to write using voice to text dictation? I’ve done it before, a long time ago. I used to use the Dragon app, but back then it required a lot of training and you had to have a special headphone and and and…
These days, the dictation algorithms are pretty good, although I find that some that may be using artificial intelligence have actually degraded a bit. I avoid the use of AI wherever I can, but sometimes it’s just stuffed into things you can’t help but use. Sigh.
I’m actually writing this column using voice to text dictation – Apple’s own native version. It’s not perfect, but it does well enough that it saves me having to manually type things out, and my thoughts tend to flow a bit more freely. Of course, then sometimes I stumble and you get some really weird output on the screen LOL.
Plus, there is a fun game of trying to figure out what word you actually intended – recent example, when the app typed “sex date” instead of Sac State. But really, wouldn’t college have been more fun if it was all one big sex date? (Yeah yeah, I know, for some of you it was).
When I’m walking, I use my iPhone to write, and dictate into an email. That way, I can just send it to myself as soon as it’s done. For some reason, the voice to text on my phone seems to be a little more wonky than the one on my computer, but it still works well enough to get the ideas out of my head and onto the page. Then a second draft at home cleans up any errors.
One thing this method requires is a working knowledge in your head of where you’re at in the story. Before I leave for my walk, I take a quick look over the last part of the story to remind myself where I left off. And of course, it’s much harder to do research while you’re walking, so there’s a lot of [insert name here] and [look this up later] in my dictated scenes.
This method helps me to really focus on the story, and to not be distracted by social media and the hundred other things that demand my attention at home. Of course you also have to remember to look up now and then to make sure you aren’t crossing the road in front of a car that’s barreling down at you at 70 miles an hour.
Dictation also works well for me sometimes at night. I’m not always up to sitting at my computer at 11 PM and tapping a story out, but I can hop into bed and dictate the scene into my phone, send it to myself, and clean it up later. It feels like a lot less work.
All in all, I’m liking my new experiment so far. The one limitation I’m finding when dictating on my Mac is that the app stops working periodically. I found a workaround – shutting down Safari and restarting it usually clears up the problem. But it can be frustrating when you just want to dictate a quick something and all of a sudden it’s not working.
And sometimes dictation is a little too fast and easy, and catch up to my thoughts and am not ready to write the next part. It’s a nice problem to have, but it does require me to think ahead a little. It helps if I visualize the whole scene ahead of time and have an idea where it’s going so I don’t slow myself down.
I’m hoping these dictation apps continue to get better and better, AI notwithstanding. I love being able to express my thoughts and write my stories without having to run all the words through my clunky fingers into my keyboard.
And bonus – easier for me means more stories for you!
To my writer friends, do you use dictation for your writing? What apps do you use? What do you like best about it, and what limitations have you found?