Day 66: Verdict on dictation exercises

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I got up super early (as in, it’s the middle of the night) and felt better so I decided to do a few exercises in the Fool Proof Dictation book with my manuscript. The results will be messy and in extreme need of editing, but at least it will be forward momentum on writing my book, which is better than nothing.

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I decided to skip exercise #5 in the dictation book because honestly, I don’t see the point of it. The author also never mentions why this exercise is important or what it does to help you.

Surprisingly, exercise #8 was the most fun and most nerve-wracking, and I’m sure my prose was by far the worst, but it was really good to make me try thinking ahead of my dictation.

Exercises #9 and #10 made me realize the value of being able to dictate a scene more than once. It also made me realize that I need at least one pass through the scene to dictate the highlights of it so that I myself know where to go. My problem is my terrible memory, so I might dictate directly into Dragon so that I have those scene highlights transcribed and can refer to them as I do my second pass.

The exercises I found most helpful as warm-ups were exercises 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8. Exercise #1 was the most effective at loosening things up in my brain and helping to turn off the internal editor.

However, getting up super early means I’m tired early. I’m going to take a nap.

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UGH my IBS got worse so I’m going to just do writing-related work and give up on any writing today.

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Got a lot done, mostly tedious work that eventually needed to be done but wasn’t urgent.

Time spent writing: 2 hours, 13 minutes
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 7 hours, 47 minutes

My takeaway for today: Doing the dictation exercises with my manuscript resulted in very messy first draft writing, but it helped me continue the forward momentum of working on my manuscript.

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