Day 506: The writing streak might have actually been helpful
Kept up my writing streak
Even though I’ve been sick the past week, I still managed to keep up my writing streak. I only did 100 words a day, and most of the time they were absolutely terrible words, but I still managed to do a little bit of writing every day.
I felt absolutely horrible and there were a couple times when I just wanted to not do my writing for the day. After all, what was the point when it wasn’t feeling well? The reason I wasn’t writing was because of my health, not because of laziness or neglect.
But I still did my 100 words a day, grumbling and complaining.
However, I have to admit that when I did some writing today, it wasn’t all that difficult since I’ve been writing a little bit in my novel every day. When I have taken a break from writing before, getting back into it is a little mentally painful because it had become a bit unfamiliar, and also getting back into the momentum of writing is difficult.
But this time, since I’d been reading the scene a little every day, it was still fresh in my head so I didn’t have to review the scene or my blocking notes, and I could just jump into it without problems.
So I guess the streak was important to enable me to get back into the writing more efficiently.
Trying dictation again
I am fully aware that I gave up on dictation (multiple times, actually) but during the past week, I read a few books I borrowed from the library, and one of them was a dictation book I’d been wanting to read. I hadn’t been able to decide if I wanted to spend the money on it, but then I saw that it was available at the library, so I borrowed it.
The book had two points that made me reconsider dictation for my fiction: One point was that you needed to retrain your brain to have the words come out of your mouth instead of your hands, and the second point was that you needed to start with writing that you didn’t care about very much, because the process of retraining your brain was going to be long and hard.
That actually made a lot of sense to me. Dictation has always been a very messy editing process, and it was frustrating to have to do it on writing where if I’d typed it, I’d have spent less time on it. The comparison drove me nuts.
The book said that the retraining will be hard, but eventually you’ll get better at it and the dictation will be cleaner. But until you get to that point, doing it on writing that you don’t care as much about—a short story, or an article—will reduce that frustration.
I actually decided not to take that advice because I have so little energy that I don’t have enough to spare for a side writing piece. But I did take away the underlying motivation for the exercise, which was to give up thoughts of the dictation being anywhere near as great as you’d like it to be, and just to dig in for the long haul.
So I did some dictation today. It was awful. I’d dictate a sentence and then not remember what I’d dictated in the paragraph before. It was a bit distracting to dictate the quotation marks (next time I think I’ll just leave them out—another dictation book recommended that, and to just add them in when doing edits since it’s usually pretty obvious where in the writing you wanted the quotation marks). And I ended up needing to take a couple hours to troubleshoot when Dragon didn’t recognize my microphone.
My writing speed was also pretty terrible. It was faster than if I’d typed it, but because of the extra editing time, it ended up being slower than typing (I calculated it was about 790 words/hour as opposed to about 950 words/hour when typing).
But I guess I’ll keep at it for a while longer. I’ll need to do several hours of dictation before I’ll actually get it to be somewhat usable, so I just need to grin and bear the bad dictation for now. I have to trust that it’ll get cleaner eventually, if I keep at it.
Unfortunately, because I’m so tired from fighting with Dragon, I’m not going to do any blocking today.
***
Writing: Time spent: 39 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 1154 words
Writing: Overall writing speed: 1756 words/hour
Writing streak: 19 days
Editing: Time spent: 48 minutes
Blocking: time spent: 0
Email/Social Media streak: 0 days (reset since I didn’t check email)
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 51 minutes (battling with Dragon and my computer)
My takeaway for today: Stick with the dictation and just expect it to be very bad for a while, and let it go.
Even though I’ve been sick the past week, I still managed to keep up my writing streak. I only did 100 words a day, and most of the time they were absolutely terrible words, but I still managed to do a little bit of writing every day.
I felt absolutely horrible and there were a couple times when I just wanted to not do my writing for the day. After all, what was the point when it wasn’t feeling well? The reason I wasn’t writing was because of my health, not because of laziness or neglect.
But I still did my 100 words a day, grumbling and complaining.
However, I have to admit that when I did some writing today, it wasn’t all that difficult since I’ve been writing a little bit in my novel every day. When I have taken a break from writing before, getting back into it is a little mentally painful because it had become a bit unfamiliar, and also getting back into the momentum of writing is difficult.
But this time, since I’d been reading the scene a little every day, it was still fresh in my head so I didn’t have to review the scene or my blocking notes, and I could just jump into it without problems.
So I guess the streak was important to enable me to get back into the writing more efficiently.
Trying dictation again
I am fully aware that I gave up on dictation (multiple times, actually) but during the past week, I read a few books I borrowed from the library, and one of them was a dictation book I’d been wanting to read. I hadn’t been able to decide if I wanted to spend the money on it, but then I saw that it was available at the library, so I borrowed it.
The book had two points that made me reconsider dictation for my fiction: One point was that you needed to retrain your brain to have the words come out of your mouth instead of your hands, and the second point was that you needed to start with writing that you didn’t care about very much, because the process of retraining your brain was going to be long and hard.
That actually made a lot of sense to me. Dictation has always been a very messy editing process, and it was frustrating to have to do it on writing where if I’d typed it, I’d have spent less time on it. The comparison drove me nuts.
The book said that the retraining will be hard, but eventually you’ll get better at it and the dictation will be cleaner. But until you get to that point, doing it on writing that you don’t care as much about—a short story, or an article—will reduce that frustration.
I actually decided not to take that advice because I have so little energy that I don’t have enough to spare for a side writing piece. But I did take away the underlying motivation for the exercise, which was to give up thoughts of the dictation being anywhere near as great as you’d like it to be, and just to dig in for the long haul.
So I did some dictation today. It was awful. I’d dictate a sentence and then not remember what I’d dictated in the paragraph before. It was a bit distracting to dictate the quotation marks (next time I think I’ll just leave them out—another dictation book recommended that, and to just add them in when doing edits since it’s usually pretty obvious where in the writing you wanted the quotation marks). And I ended up needing to take a couple hours to troubleshoot when Dragon didn’t recognize my microphone.
My writing speed was also pretty terrible. It was faster than if I’d typed it, but because of the extra editing time, it ended up being slower than typing (I calculated it was about 790 words/hour as opposed to about 950 words/hour when typing).
But I guess I’ll keep at it for a while longer. I’ll need to do several hours of dictation before I’ll actually get it to be somewhat usable, so I just need to grin and bear the bad dictation for now. I have to trust that it’ll get cleaner eventually, if I keep at it.
Unfortunately, because I’m so tired from fighting with Dragon, I’m not going to do any blocking today.
***
Writing: Time spent: 39 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 1154 words
Writing: Overall writing speed: 1756 words/hour
Writing streak: 19 days
Editing: Time spent: 48 minutes
Blocking: time spent: 0
Email/Social Media streak: 0 days (reset since I didn’t check email)
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 51 minutes (battling with Dragon and my computer)
My takeaway for today: Stick with the dictation and just expect it to be very bad for a while, and let it go.
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