So I was away from home over the weekend, which was highly conducive to things like relaxation, plotting with my Evil Muse, and reading. Funny how you can focus on the pleasures of life when there aren’t, say, a sink full of dishes and teens calling your name.
I read through – it’s a very quick read – Kevin J Anderson and Martin Shoemaker’s On Being a Dictator while I was away from home. It’s been a topic on my mind, and Martin and I have talked about it in person a time or two. With the longer commute, dictation is something I have to seriously work at. And you do have to work at it, it turns out. Both Martin and KJA say in the book that they started out brainstorming and using recordings for notes. It was a slower process to turn that into storytelling through a microphone. I was inspired.
I did do something Martin suggested in the book, and bought a voice recorder for working in the car. I can, and do, have an app on my phone, but it’s not easy to manipulate while driving, and I’d rather not add any risk to my commute which is already fraught with other idiot drivers and suicidal deer, and suddenly ice. Also, I’ll look into a unidirectional mike. I’m not going to splurge on the one he uses just yet. Let’s see how this goes… I have a hands-free setup so I’ll bash that into what I need to start out.
I already started, on the weekend, recording the First Reader and I talking about Tanager’s Flight. I also recorded some bits of scene that came to me while in the shower (recorded after the shower, I don’t take my phone in there!). So I’ll have some transcription to do. And I need to check my version of Dragon Naturally, I cannot remember if I have the ability to transcribe from recordings. If not, I’ll do it manually, or ask my mother. (Hi, Mom!)
And now, I must away to work. I’m going to set the phone to record the whole time and ramble on…
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5 responses to “Practicing Dictation”
let us know how well it works!
So this morning, recording on my phone I ‘spoke’ most of a chapter. Should finish it on my way home. I surprised myself!
As cursedly as I type, if I had the brains given a cockroach, (waves to archy) I’d look into that.
I would LUUURVE to be able to dictate content for my books, but, alas, it’s just not possible. As in flat-out IMpossible. No, I don’t have a speech-impediment — in fact, I have a professional-quality speaking voice. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a morning-drive DJ on a Top-40 AM radio station in Michigan, and in the five years prior to the publication of my first book (“Unsinkable”- The Full Story of the RMS Titanic — shameless self-promotional plug there) I made my living doing voice-over work for radio and television commercials in the Southeast, along with a couple minor documentaries). No, the problem — actually there are two of them — that prohibits me from dictating any content is a technical. The first is that, when I’m writing non-fiction, I MUST have the capacity to fact-check the content: Do I have that quote right? Is that the correct date? Am I describing the locale/geography/topography correctly? Was that a Panzer III aust. G or a III ausf. J? Was that extra 1/2 inch of armor on Arizona’s main deck or the splinter deck? Did the — well, you get the idea. Obviously there are several circumstances — driving immediately comes to mind — where fact checking of that sort simply isn’t something I can do.
The second problem is more, well, problematic. You see, my speaking voice and my writing voice are two utterly different creatures. For some reason, my writing style is completely distinct from my speaking style — my writing “voice” is NOT my speaking “voice.” Cadences, word choice, sentence structure are all very different from one to the other. What makes this interesting to me is that, somehow, my “writing voice” apparently sounds (reads) British — there are more people, on both sides of the Pond, than I can accurately recall who, having only known me through my writing, have been surprised, even amazed, to discover that I’m an American. They were convinced, from reading my books, that I was a Brit. Mind you, it’s something that I’ve never actively cultivated or undertaken: I’ve gone back to papers I wrote as an undergrad and I find the same thing — so it’s been going on for decades. The mental shift that takes place when I switch from one to the other is instantaneous, and something of which I am totally unaware as it occurs — and over which I have no control: it just happens. So again, even when writing fiction, I wouldn’t be able to dictate my text: were I to sit down and simply transcribe what I’d dictated, it would appear (and read as) completely alien to me. Which means, of course, that I would wind up having to completely rewrite the dictated passages in my “writing voice,” which would be no savings of time whatsoever.
I have a friend (let’s call him DW so no one accuses me of name dropping) who for a variety of reasons uses dictation software (I believe it’s Dragon), and from all appearances (he’s insanely successful and his output is prodigious) he’s able to dictate in his writing voice. It took me a while to realize just how he did this (I wanted to learn his secret so I could steal it and use it myself!), but then, after a while, I realized that DW’s conversational style really isn’t “conversation” — even when he’s sitting across the table, having lunch with you, he’s telling a story. (Truth be told, the man’s a born storyteller.) So it makes sense that he would be able to adapt to dictating his text as easily as he seems to have done. The only downside of this is that since he switched from typing to dictating, his novels have grown appreciably in length, which means I have to expend more of the time I should be devoting to my own writing projects to reading his works instead. Not to mention the fact that, by buying his books, I wind up taking hard-earned money out of my wallet and putting it in his — and he already has far and away more money than I do. Then again, he’s married and has a bunch of kids, so maybe he truly does need all that filthy lucre more than do I. But I digress — my point is that because there are no appreciable differences between his speaking voice and his writing voice, he’s been able to make dictation work for him. (Damn!) So I’m hoping, Cedar, that you don’t have a problem similar to mine, and this experiment in dictation becomes a useful tool for you, as I’ve seen other authors make it work very well for them. Alas (insert heavy sigh here), it just can’t happen for me….
Hmmm. Seems to be a unique example of “situational vocabulary,” where your talking/writing style changes contingent of the status of the person recieving the benefit of your blandishments. We all do this to a lesser or greater degree. This is an extreme example, but examine the way you talk to a banker or college administrator vs. the way you’d speak to a distantly-related toddler visiting with her family for the holidays.
In Texas, this ability is almost required, as the varied levels of educational level, English (and Spanish) speaking ability, and cultural values (small-town redneck vs. carpetbagger banker) dictate an almost chameleon-like malleability. For example, I will be attending a wake this week. I expect there will be the deceased former employees, blue-collar all, cheek by jowl with some of his former clients, an affluent group indeed. One of the benefits of living in Houston is the lack of rigidly stratified groups you might find in a Manhattan or D.C. cocktail party.