What Are Your Goals For 2016? (Write More With Dictation Software)

It’s still the first month of the year, so I think this post is still valid. Anyway, in the past couple weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it is I want to accomplish this year.

And in the last few weeks especially, I’ve come up with a lot of ideas for stories that I’m excited to write, but find that between the full time day job and co-producing the I Know Dino podcast, I’m often too tired or unmotivated at the end of the day to actually see through. Weekends are tough too, since I want to fit in time to see friends and family, plus catch up on my blogging and dinosaur-ing.

That’s why I was so intrigued by Monica Leonelle’s Write Better, Faster book. She talks about writing via dictation, which I hadn’t even considered as an option until now. But she makes a good point, that it’s much faster to make your word count, plus it saves your wrists. It might make it harder to go to your favorite coffee shop to write, but I plan to still do that on some of my weekends to figure out my outlines.

Outlining is another important part of the process. For example, the more details you have about what chapters you want to write and what scenes to include in each chapter, the faster and easier it is to actually get your ideas down on paper/your laptop.

I haven’t started using the dictation method yet, though I did buy dictation software last year, called Dragon, because I thought it would help my husband and I to transcribe notes from our podcast’s interviews. We ended up using Fiverr instead, and I’ve been looking for a way ever since to take advantage of it. The program is fairly intuitive–the first step is to record yourself reading a sample they give you, so that the software can learn how you pronounce words and transcribe more accurately.

Another program you can try is Windows Speech Recognition (WSR). I have a Mac, so can’t speak too much about the software, but Tech Tools for Writers gives some helpful tips for getting started.

As usual, The Book Designer has an insightful post on things to keep in mind when editing your dictated book. Things to keep in mind include your first draft of a dictated book tends to be wordier, pause when dictating to figure out what exactly you want to say, and go through several rounds of editing afterwards.

Once I get some outlines down for books I plan to write this year, I plan on trying out this new-fangled way of writing. I’ll let you know how it goes.

By the way, I first learned about Monica Leonelle via a deal I got from Goodriter, a free email list that sends you weekly deals on writing courses, books, software, and more. (And no the link to Goodriter is not an affiliate link, though all the links to Amazon in this post are.)