My Experiences with Dictating

I meant to title this blog as “HOW TO DICTATE LIKE A PRO” but there’s about a thousand books on Amazon that promises the same thing, some of them even free, so…yeah…

…where was I going with this?

>_>

Right.

So, instead of giving you tips on how to dictate like a pro, I’d like to talk about my experiences with dictating, which so far, have turned out pretty darn well. I’ve been getting a consistant 3-4k an hour from dictating, but there are others who can get 5k+ so that’s why I’m not really a pro.

But I digress.

I’m not sure if I talked about this before, but the act of dictating my books has always been a bit of a love/hate thing for me.

For one thing, I love writing over 3k an hour without having to worry about carpal tunnel syndrome. For another, I’m fascinated with the idea that I can just say whatever’s on my mind and the computer will capture all of my words without judging me. (Stenographers, I know you’re judging those criminals all the way from here to Arkansas. If you don’t, you’re a saint.)

Here’s the thing though.

The truth about dictating?

It’s actually not that easy. Actually, it’s pretty hard.

To go from typing completely stream of conscious to “And then he said, comma, open quote gee period close quote next paragraph is…really mind-boggling.

I have to admit, it really takes me out of the story when I have to concentrate on getting the punctuation in there. There are some dictating gurus who say that you can just add all the punctuation in later, but that didn’t work for me. I tried that once and almost tore out my hair because, to me, those commas and quotation marks were really important to me. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of what I had just said ten minutes ago.

Another thing, when you’re dictating nowadays, you usually do it for several reasons as are listed below:

1. You don’t want to sit down. Sitting down is not good for you and unfortunately, most people write sitting down (I’ll cover treadmill desks on a different day)

2. You’re trying to keep the cartilage in your wrists and arms from disentigrating before you hit fifty.

3. You’re trying to save your eyesight, so you don’t go blind before you hit fifty (might be a little too late for me though, I’m like Velma without my glasses)

4. You want to write faster.

The problem I had when dictating was this:

I got comfortable. Really comfortable. Like, put my feet up on the table and lean back in my seat, wearing a comfy headset/mic combo. A lot of times I would cushion my head on my arms and stare up at the ceiling.

Unfortunately for me, this put me really far from the computer screen. When I was typing my stories, I would frequently refer back to my previous passages, just to make sure I didn’t repeat points and also because I have the memory of a goldfish. But when I was dictating my stories, I couldn’t see the screen, didn’t have a very good idea of what I had said five minutes ago, so there are times where my characters are basically have the same conversation twice, like they had simultaneously suffered short term memory loss.

It sounds funny, but that’s something that I found rather frustrating. Of course, I could always look at the screen while I’m dictating, but I feel like it kind of defeats the purpose of dictating. (Also, I have really bad posture so leaning back in my seat was good for me. I haven’t had any shoulder/back pain since I started dictating woohoo!)

To combat this, I now use notes that I hold in one hand and I frequently refer to it to make sure I hit the beats and don’t backtrack.

Also, dictating is not perfect. I know there’s a lot of people who vaunt their 98%+ accuracy rate, but I’m not sure if that includes fiction writers. I know for a fact that I am no where near 98%. Maybe not even 95% percent and I have a very clear voice and an excellent mic/sound card. So that’s one more checkmark against dictating.

On the other hand, though, you do talk much quicker than you write, so by the time you’re done editing the mess that showed up on your screen, it’s more likely than not that you’d still finish faster than just typing the whole thing out from start to finish.

TLDR; if you are patient and don’t expect miracles but want to write more in less time, then dictating is totally the way to go. It’s been a rough path getting to where I am now, but I am comfortable and I will probably keep on dictating in the future as well.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go and pack. I’ve got a plane to catch tomorrow morning.

So see you folks later!