What Dictation Looks Like & Reflections on Being a Writer
On my laptop is a feature that allows me to dictate what I’m saying. This is on the laptop which I bought in February of this year. On the F5 key is a microphone, and when I hit this microphone, I am able to speak the words you are reading right now in the sport post. As you can see from the previous sentence, this is not perfect. I did not say sport post. I said blog post. Obviously, clarity and how I speak plays a role in this.
Well, I don’t expect this feature to be perfect, I am left wondering how much of this is a viable option when I am dictating a story using my word program. For example, I did not start the last sentence with the last word “well”. I started it with the word “while”. “Well” and “while” sound similar. Words like this will make it harder to know what I was really saying. Sure, the fact that these words came at the beginning of a sentence, makes it easier to decipher what I was trying to say, but there will be times where these inconsistencies occur in the middle of a sentence. That can change the whole meaning of a sentence. I am not sure I can even go back and reread what I spoke in order to clean up these messages. Messes such as the one that just occurred at the beginning of the sentence and at the end of the last sentence. I did not say “messages”. I said “messes”, and I had to physically type “messes” in because no matter how many times I said, the correct word, the program did not understand it. These are the kind of errors that makes dictation a huge pain in the butt.
Other errors likely to occur will be incorrect spelling of a word. The English language has some words that have the same sound, but based on their meaning, they will have different ways of spelling them. While this program does a good job of picking out most of these, nothing is perfect, and this could end up being a nightmare for someone who reads through this and tries to clean it up to edit it in order to get it ready for publication. Let’s say, I mean the word “discrete”. But I meant DISCREET, not the word that just came up in the last sentence. Granted, I have been known to make this mistake while typing, but those mistakes would be few, and far between because most the time I will get the right spelling for the word.
While the technology is impressive, it cannot compensate for every mistake. Someone has to go over the words to read them. I cannot just speak the book and have it ready for an editor. I would have to have someone come in and clean it up. That would take considerable time. The way I figure it, it will take anywhere between 30 minutes to 1 hour to do one chapter. I cannot expect anyone to do this amount of work for free. I don’t think my eyes can tolerate doing this work without substantial breaks and time. I just got through editing, the Earls jilted bride, and my eyes needed a break for well over a week after that. The longer the book, the more intense edits are. It gets even more complicated when you have to look at punctuation, because even though I speak the punctuation as I’m saying it, it doesn’t always come out correctly.
The average cost of an assistant is $15 an hour. Sometimes it’s more if the assistant has more experience. I figured that it would cost me anywhere between $350-$500 to pay someone to go through and clean up the Dictation on my book. That is in addition to the other expenses that go into publishing a book. One of the most frustrating things writers have to deal with is this idea that it’s so easy to write a book, and because it’s so easy, the book should be free. I don’t mind offering a free book from time to time. I have quite a few books that are permanently free. But I, like other writers out there, cannot offer every single book free. In order to keep writing and publishing books, writers have to make more on the book then it cost to produce the book. And right there in the last sentence, the “then” should have been “than”. Yet another error that has to be compensated for when someone is reading over what I dictate.
To get back to my point, however, this idea that authors are greedy for asking for money for their work is tiresome. We do a lot of work when we write our books and get them ready for publication. It takes time and effort to produce a story that people will enjoy. Books don’t magically pop up out of nowhere. There is a lot of work people never see that goes into making a book. The love of storytelling is what propels us to do this, but we can get burned out because this is not an easy job to be in. For one, it doesn’t pay very much for most writers. I know there is a lot of bragging from the six-figure authors, but keep in mind that most authors are not making that. Most authors aren’t even making enough to pay their bills. The worst part is that it seems that no matter how much we do to create a professional product, we can’t please everybody. There’s always someone out there, who will have a complaint, and no matter what the complaint is, the customers always say this right, so the writer is left to just suck it up. And on top of that, you have to worry about people, stealing your work, and publishing it as if it’s their own. So no, it is not wrong for us to ask to be paid for book. In order to be able to afford producing a book, we have to make the money. In order to have a viable business, we have to make a profit. In short, I don’t think I can afford an assistant to go over all of my chapters in the book that I dictate. The cost is too great. I am not making the kind of money I used to make.
And this brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point of this entire post. My eyes just may not be able to handle this. I have been off the computer for three days now. My eyes have felt like normal. I had a headache around my eye, but I think that stem more from stress than eyestrain. I have a lot going on in my personal life. It’s not necessarily bad, but I do pretty much run around from sun up to sundown every day, and that’s not even time on the computer. During the course of dictating this post, I have made an effort to clean up some of the errors the dictation is making. I guess at the moment, when I feel fine, but I have had some interruptions along the way, so I have been on the computer for a total of two hours on and off. If writing is like this with a Dictation software I just don’t know if I’m up for this. It’s more than dry eye. It’s eye strain. I have seen the ophthalmologist and optometrist. There is nothing structurally wrong with my eyes. I have the narrow tear ducks, and my eyes don’t produce enough oil, which is why I’m having dry; however, I really do believe all of the years I sat in front of a computer screen hour after hour, day, after day, month, after month, without any sufficient breaks, has contributed to the condition I am currently in. This is something that I don’t think most people will see in writing groups.
In writing groups, authors are encouraged to do whatever it takes to get those words on the page. There are books about writing 5000 words in a day. Sometimes are books about writing your first draft in a week. I think that is horrible advice. By advice to writers, is it take care of your eyes. Maybe you’ll be fine. Maybe you can’t go for a long period of time and not be affected the way I have been, but if I could go back in time, I would have told myself to slow down and to take those breaks. Have a feeling that my future self would tell my current self to take those walks, to spend the time cooking meals that are high in nutrients instead of taking a shortcut and getting prepackaged, pre-processed foods. I do not want to end up on medication, and I don’t want to end up going to a doctors office all the time. I am currently in good shape except for my eyes. My priority is going to be my health. My second priority is going to be my family and my friends. My kids are on the cusp of adulthood where they will start moving out. I want to spend as much time with them as I can while they are still here. I am lucky that I have friends in that I can spend time with. And, so let’s not leave him out, my husband needs some time and attention too. He and I have been married for 23 years, and we still date. I think that’s important. I don’t only love reading and writing about romance, but I have been very lucky to have the kind of marriage that I like to portray in my books. Relationships need to be nurtured, just like our health.
I am going to end a post here. I did my best to edit the errors I found, except for the ones that I wanted to point out. I will say that I was going back quite a few times to correct things so that people could understand what I was saying. However, I am sure there are errors that I missed along the way.
