Day 883: Dictation, day 49

I had a bad bout of IBS yesterday, so I only did the bare minimum of writing. I thought that it wouldn't be hard to do just five minutes of dictation, but it really is just easier to type. There seems to be a lower threshold of resistance to just starting it. I wonder why? Dictation is just talking. It must be because it's still difficult for me to do--to reorganize my thoughts so that I speak my writing instead of sending it to my hands--so getting started is harder. Typing is no longer difficult for me, so it's easier to get started typing.

I actually ended up doing several "frogs" yesterday first thing after I woke up. My IBS wasn't quite so bad at the time, and it was mentally relieving to get those things out of the way before I got down to my writing. However, by the time I was ready to write, my IBS had gotten much worse and I had to take medication to calm it down. Unfortunately, that left me feeling tired and sluggish, which was why I opted to simply do the bare minimum yesterday.

Today I feel better, and while I do have some IBS discomfort, it’s not as bad as yesterday. I also have a quieter day with fewer house chores to do, and I feel much more at ease, having more time to get work done. I wonder if that makes me inefficient, since I’m not pressured to try to get work done in a certain amount of time.

Or will it help me work better since I don’t have the stress of time pressure and other tasks that need to be done? I really love how my entire day is clear and I have lots of time to do my writing. I feel relaxed and at ease, un-stressed. What’s more, I feel happier to get started on work than I have in the past several weeks.

However, it was STILL difficult for me to get started on dictation. There’s a resistance to starting because it’s such a difficult thing for me to do—it requires a lot of my brainpower, mostly because my memory is probably my weakest area.

So I tried something that I actually got from the dictation book, The Productive Author's Guide to Dictation: Speak Your Way to Higher (and Healthier!) Word Counts by Cindy Griggs, which is visualization. I stopped and visualized the process of dictating. My visualization made me realize that the dictation isn’t all that different from when I type and write—I still have lots of moments of silence as I think about what to write next.

I think I have been trying to pressure myself to not have silence because it decreases my writing speed, but that would actually be changing the way I write, not simply changing my output from my hands to my mouth. I think that with dictation, I need to instead simply accept the silence as a way that I write.

However, the reason I wanted to do dictation was to write faster, and if the silence doesn’t make me write any faster with dictation, what would be the point? So I thought that maybe I can find other ways to write faster using dictation. I can say a lot more than I can type in the same amount of time, so I think that instead, I need to get used to simply saying the first thing that comes to mind, even if it’s not exactly right. When I type, I usually try to tweak it right then and there to say exactly what I want it to say, but when I dictate, instead I need to just make a note of it and keep going. It’s how I used to write on my Alphasmart because the screen only allowed you to see 4 lines of text and it was tedious to move the cursor around, and that seemed to help me write faster.

So now I’m starting on my dictation for the day. I hope it goes well and I can make progress on my goal to increase my writing speed.

***

My dictation wasn’t great. I had much more silence than usual, and I also ended up repeating myself a lot. I wanted to just leave it and fix it later, but it’s hard to do when I can’t even finish the sentence. So there were a lot of words I had to delete.

I wonder if the dictation would work better for me if I dictated directly into my manuscript? When I tried it before, it was very slow, but seeing the words might help me compose my thoughts better. I think I will try doing that tomorrow, only for 15 minutes or so, to see how it goes.

Why is it that I can dictate a freewrite blog post or journal entry, but I can’t dictate my fiction? What is so different about the two? Maybe it’s because I don’t care as much about my sentences when I’m journaling. I probably need to stop trying to edit my sentences in my head when I write fiction. That’s easier said than done, but there has to be a way since I don’t edit my sentences when I’m journaling.

Writing streak: 361 days

My takeaway for today: Try visualization to battle procrastination before dictation writing.

My second takeaway for today: Don’t be afraid of the silence, it’s a natural part of how I write.

My second takeaway for today: Focus on saying the first thing I can think of even if it’s not exactly right, and just making a note of it and going on.

My third takeaway for today: Try dictating directly into the manuscript for only 15 minutes tomorrow to see how that goes. Maybe it’ll help me compose my thoughts better than dictating into a recording.

My fourth takeaway for today: Try to figure out why it’s different when I dictate fiction versus a journal entry. Maybe it’s the sentence structure and editing that in my head?