So I noticed a while back you mentioned using dictation software. (I believe it was Dragon.) I like to write but for health reasons I need to not sit at a keyboard in 4 hour stretches of time. Add to that a diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. (Yay! Blindness if I’m not careful!). This leaves me unable to write often. Not to mention the looming depression. I was wondering if you would be willing to describe the mechanics of your process? I’m trying to find a process to do while walking.

hobbitystmarymorstan:

azriona:

dduane:

Walking is my favorite way to do it, so here I can usefully advise you.

Dragon Naturally Speaking
(scroll down the linked page for the overview) has over the years pretty much
become the gold standard for dictation software: I wouldn’t bother with
anything else. It was what we recommended to Terry Pratchett when his
Alzheimer’s first started to bite, and since then it’s only become
slicker, more responsive, and more effective. Unquestionably $100 for
the Premium edition is a fair chunk of change, but in my estimation it’s
worth it. (If you’re going to transcribe from recorded audio you
apparently now need to get the Premium version: the Home one, it seems, won’t do it.) Once upon a time you had to train it by reading it prepared text. These days you just start talking: it understands you with 95% or better accuracy right out of the box. (You will still have to teach it custom vocabulary, coined words etc, but that probably comes as no surprise.)

For
me there were two significant barriers to get over when learning to use
Dragon. The first one was the lesser one. You have to learn to speak
not just what you want to write, but also the punctuation. It takes a
little while to learn to do this easily: kind of a
caterpillar-not-watching-its-feet thing. You wind up saying things
like:

new paragraph open quotes I have no idea what
the hell I’m doing here comma close quotes she said comma glancing
around her period [or full stop, if you prefer] open quotes and I feel
distinctly overdressed period close quotes new paragraph

Now the good thing about Dragon is that if you choose, you can get by with very, very few
voice commands: or you can get quite fancy with them. I hardly ever use
anything more involved than what you see above when I’m dictating on
the road. I might add parentheses sometimes if I’m making a note to
myself about something that I don’t want to add to the narrative.

The
other barrier I found I had to deal with was not feeling stupid talking
like that, and not being bothered by having to talk like that when
telling a story out loud. That took a while longer (there’s a bit more about that here), but I can’t remember
when it last struck me as a problem. …Then again I’ve been doing this
for years… so you want to add that into your reckoning. Some people
have trouble learning to do this, and some people seem completely unable
to get past the self-consciousness, and some people have no problem
with it all right from the git-go and are never bothered. There’s no way to learn which you are until you get into it.

Now.
Once you have Dragon, if you also have a small digital recorder of even
middling-good quality, you’re no longer tethered to the computer. I
have a small ancient Sony digital recorder (there’s a pic of it on this
page at Out of Ambit) and with it in purse or pocket I can dictate just
about anywhere. Any recorder that will produce a goodish-quality MP3
will do. (With the old Sony I have to run the recording through the recorder’s
desktop software, which converts it from an old proprietary Sony audio
format to .MP3 or .WAV as you prefer. But newer recorders pretty much
seem to record directly to MP3, at least the ones I’ve seen, so that
won’t be a problem any more.) Or if you have a phone with an app that
will record in MP3, you’re sorted.

Then you go out and walk
and talk to the recorder for as long as you want or feel able. (Even
better if your phone will record: everybody just thinks you’re having a
long phone conversation.) I prefer to do this where I can’t be
overheard, which fortunately is easy for me as I live on a little narrow
country road where no one passes but the occasional car or tractor, or
neighbors walking their dogs (and the neighbors all know about the
Strange Americans Living In The Little Cottage, so when they see me
apparently talking to myself – especially since I’ve now gone over to
recording into a smartphone with a wireless headphone and the phone in
my pocket – nobody is particularly surprised).

When you’re
done you come home and connect the phone or recorder to the computer
with a micro USB cable and drag the sound file into it: then wake up
Dragon and instruct it to transcribe the recording. It gets started, and
you go off and get yourself a cup of something. Then when it’s finished
and your eyes feel up to it, you pull the transcribed text into your
preferred writing software and edit it.

…Then wash, rinse,
repeat. I find that once I’m in the groove I can easily dictate between
6000 and 8000 words of useful prose per day – one tranche in the
morning, one in the afternoon. Do that for long enough and you’ve got
the zero-draft for a novel. Or the guts of a screenplay. Or or or.

(Also, new developments: the various new Dragon apps are worth looking into. Dragon Anywhere
is particularly attractive: a subscription service that lets you
dictate directly from a smartphone into the cloud. Transcription of your
dictation happens up there – you just pull down the finished text.
It’s no good to me, unfortunately, as you need reliable highspeed wifi
or phone access, and around here there is no joining the word “reliable”
to those concepts: we’re in a fringe area. Oh well.)

Anyway, hope this helps!

Does anyone remember who was asking about this recently?

@prettyarbitrary