The Writer’s Coin

My process for writing fiction may sound stupid or weird to some, but it works for me. And anyway, it may have just gotten stupider. Picture me sitting in front of my computer — only now I have one of those half headsets on with a little boom mike hovering in front of my mouth. I look like I’m about to take your Taco Bell order or give you a tour of Lake Michigan. Alas, I’m creating fiction — and the great thing is I never have to go out in public with this thing on. I should probably start at the beginning before I talk about Dragon Naturally Speaking, a speech-recognition program I’ve recently started using.

My Process

When I write fiction, things happen in a certain order. The capturing and notating of ideas is something I’ve covered before, but it basically goes like this: I have an idea, I write it down somewhere so I don’t forget, and then I eventually sit down with a pen and paper and devote an hour or two to writing it all out. After that, I’m left with my first draft, which I’ll usually edit once (still on paper and usually a week or so after that to give me time to look at it with fresh eyes) before moving on to the next step.

The next step is getting my story/essay typed up into the computer. This gives me another chance to do some minor editing before getting it typed up and closer to being finished. A whole lot of editing and tweaking happens after this. Later on I’ll send it out to magazines and journals to try and get it published. But I’ve noticed that this “typing” up stage is taking up huge chunks of time. All I’m doing is sitting there and typing — which is not very fun and wastes valuable time. I still have my NaNoWriMo novel sitting in a pile of papers somewhere (40,000 words all written by hand) — I haven’t put it on paper or edited it because it seems like such a huge, boring task. But I’d like to.

When I realized what a time suck this transcribing stage had become is when I started thinking about speech-recognition software. I tried typing directly into my computer — skipping the writing by hand step — but that didn’t work. My fingers want to type so fast that the creative part of my brain falls behind, and what I write comes out sounding like something Dean Koontz wrote. If I could just read my story/essay out loud, I would save a whole bunch of time. Not only that, I’d also start hearing my words out loud, which is something tons of writers recommend. I think it really does help to hear what you’ve written as part of the editing process because it gives you a new way of editing and lets you “hear” how a reader would read it. So this solution would have two huge upsides.

Finding the Right Program

I’m a bit of a Techie, so I had heard of Dragon before. They are known as making the speech-recognition progam, that was the first place I tried. The problem? Their basic package costs around $100 — way too rich for my blood, no matter how many writing problems it would solve for me. So I did some research, downloaded some trial software that’s out there (there’s tons of it), and even tried finding the Microsoft XP utility that’s out there (Vista includes a program but I don’t have Vista).

Anyway, none of that really got me excited and so I never seriously looked into it after that — part of me knew that Dragon Naturally was probably the best program out there for me. Enter the finance portion of this post: I regularly check websites like Bradsdeals.com to see if there’s anything out there I need that’s on sale (or I’ll just run Google searches for it like “Dragon Naturally deals”). Lo and behold, Dragon Naturally Speaking was on sale via Buy.com for only $39.99 w/free shipping. I was tempted — that’s a fantastic deal! So I went to the website and poked around, only to realize that Google Checkout would take another $10 off if I bought it through them.

That was the clincher — I ended up getting it for $29.99, and it even included the silly headset that makes me look like a customer-service representative.

Was it Worth It?

I took a few minutes to install and train, and yes I look kind of silly, but I used it yesterday to dictate an eight-page essay. It took me around 15 minutes to get it all on paper. Granted, there were some hiccups: names and slang words like “yup” and “yeah” didn’t get picked up. The document will need to be edited once I print it out, but I was going to do that anyway. Taking only 15 minutes to get an eight page story into my computer so I can edit it is definitely worth the $30 I spent. Now I’m excited to get through my “novel” to see how bad it really is and if there’s anything worth salvaging.

I’m usually very wary of buying a product when I think it will help me solve a problem. It makes me feel lazy and that I’m just shopping for the sake of shopping, especially when it comes to techy stuff like this. Let’s face it — speech recognition is cool and this program is pretty sweet. But I’m happy to report that, so far, I’m happy with my purchase and it’s saving me time and getting me through my writing process in a much more efficient manner. I’ll post more on this as I use it more and more, and if anyone out there uses it or has questions about it, don’t hesitate to email me or drop a comment.

Tags: dictation, dragon naturally speaking, nuance, speech recognition, writing process