I thought I should report back on my dictating efforts.
The best thing I can say about it is that DOES make copy-typing faster. Copy-typing of any kind is gruelling, though: cue days of aches and pains in back and neck, as I stare fixedly at the screen, typing rather badly. (Contrary to what one might believe, typing doesn't get any better the more you do it.) It was painful stuff. All the joy of handwriting a short story were nullified by the sheer utter tedium of having to convert it onto the screen.
Several small factors made it harder: my headphones weren't long quite long enough to place my tablet where I wanted it (yes, hello, iPod people, why are your headphones so damn short); there was also quite an irritating break in typing every time I had to physically stop the playback (by touching the screen's pause button) and often I'd miss.
You try hitting a half-centimetre circle with a pinkie and see how accurate you are.
So it was slow-going and laborious. It would have been lovely to have one of those dictaphone things with a foot pedal but when I priced them on Amazon, they cost nothing less than a fortune.
However, at long last the short story was transferred to the screen where I could edit it. There's nothing quite likely slowly reading your work out loud and then even more slowly retyping it to realise just how bad it is. I had an awful lot of work to do to get it up to scratch.
It's odd that a piece of work seems so brilliant when you're writing it and that afterwards, when you begin editing it, you realise what crap it is. The creative process is divine. The editing process is hell. How feeble we are at reproducing our imaginations on the page.
Or, at least, I am.
I've just finished writing a second short story by hand (another fantasy tale, part of the same universe). This one was much harder. Two thirds of the way through, I had to ditch everything and start again. This time I'm far more aware of its shortcomings and am actually looking forward to editing it to fix it up. It also has a plot hole which I don't seem able to fix.
Perhaps all I need to do is distract the reader. Heh heh heh.
The best thing I can say about it is that DOES make copy-typing faster. Copy-typing of any kind is gruelling, though: cue days of aches and pains in back and neck, as I stare fixedly at the screen, typing rather badly. (Contrary to what one might believe, typing doesn't get any better the more you do it.) It was painful stuff. All the joy of handwriting a short story were nullified by the sheer utter tedium of having to convert it onto the screen.
Several small factors made it harder: my headphones weren't long quite long enough to place my tablet where I wanted it (yes, hello, iPod people, why are your headphones so damn short); there was also quite an irritating break in typing every time I had to physically stop the playback (by touching the screen's pause button) and often I'd miss.
You try hitting a half-centimetre circle with a pinkie and see how accurate you are.
So it was slow-going and laborious. It would have been lovely to have one of those dictaphone things with a foot pedal but when I priced them on Amazon, they cost nothing less than a fortune.
However, at long last the short story was transferred to the screen where I could edit it. There's nothing quite likely slowly reading your work out loud and then even more slowly retyping it to realise just how bad it is. I had an awful lot of work to do to get it up to scratch.
It's odd that a piece of work seems so brilliant when you're writing it and that afterwards, when you begin editing it, you realise what crap it is. The creative process is divine. The editing process is hell. How feeble we are at reproducing our imaginations on the page.
Or, at least, I am.
I've just finished writing a second short story by hand (another fantasy tale, part of the same universe). This one was much harder. Two thirds of the way through, I had to ditch everything and start again. This time I'm far more aware of its shortcomings and am actually looking forward to editing it to fix it up. It also has a plot hole which I don't seem able to fix.
Perhaps all I need to do is distract the reader. Heh heh heh.
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