It’s true! I’m a handicapped author – or so some of my peers would have me believe. Yes I’ve been around computers for over thirty years but I never actually learned to type properly. I can input code. I type my emails and blogs. On a good day might use three or even four fingers to do it.
Throughout my writing career I’ve drafted every word with pen and paper. If I’m writing a blog or sometimes a short story, I will then laboriously type it up as fast as two fingers will allow. For any longer works I’ve relied on my partner who gets me to read it out loud while he types it for me. Or else, the ever patient and accommodating Sean in Dublin, gets sent scanned pages or even iPhone images of pages which he lovingly copied-types into my Dropbox.
I’ve tried all the geeky toys that came my way and have written onto smart paper, smart pads or even used smart pens which transmitted my words to the computer screen. I was a Star Trek teen. I knew that you could just talk to your computer and it would do what you wanted. Of course that was science fiction wasn’t it and you couldn’t really do that could you?
Well actually, you can!
I’ve been a user of word processors ever since the characters were bright green on a black screen and were then printed out by a noisy spinning golf ball. Then Microsoft Word came along and I’ve loved it for ever and a day.
Of course now, I’m a serious writer (ahem) but I’m still filling my notebooks with hundreds of thousands of words. It’s even easy for me to track and measure them. I write an average of two hundred and fifty words per page, so three hundred and twenty pages will deliver me an eighty thousand word novel. I’ve always told myself that typing would slow me down since I love to just write as the story pours out of my head.
Timelines, character bios, etc. all get written at the start of the notebook and get added to as I go along. I will probably always be filling notebooks but the world turns and technology brings me new toys. I discovered Scrivener. I’m not going to attempt to describe it all here as I’m sure many of you are already using it. For a writer it is the bee’s knees. Researching, planning, plotting, caging plot-bunnies for the future. All are possible with this tool.
Of course the software as a template and the content still needs to be typed in. I was still handicapped! Then came salvation. Fairy sci-fi waved his (not gender specific) magic wand (stylus?) and produced Dragons. Have I lost the plot and drifted from science fiction to fantasy? No, not quite. I first met Dragon Dictate as an app on my phone. I had to tread carefully so as not to upset Siri since I was not sure if he was the jealous type. Now I had another reason to talk to my phone and if I wanted to send a text message I just dictated it and the job was done.
One day, I saw a TV interview with one of my writing heroes, author Sir Terry Pratchett. He was explaining how he still managed to keep writing as Alzheimer’s started to steal his mind. He was talking to his computer! Suddenly my Star Trek dream was reality. I installed the Dragon software and started talking, but my computer insisted on translating everything into Klingon. I was spending more time correcting and editing than if I’d gone back to typing with two fingers.
Okay, so talking to the screen didn’t work. I decided on a more direct approach and bought a headset with a decent microphone. Voilà! I read the first two chapters of my current WIP and it appeared on the screen at the same speed that I was reading it. I almost cried. I’m not handicapped any more. I am cured. Now I don’t need to depend on the goodwill of loved ones, nor do I need to get frustrated when they are genuinely busy and I want my typing done now!
So is everything now rosy in the garden? Of course not. For one thing, the best nerd is only happy until the next toy comes along. Ian bought me a small digital voice recorder. Looks like a slim version of the old-style Dictaphone, but this can listen to me for weeks and save everything that I say. This nifty little gadget plays nicely with Dragon too. I simply plug it into the computer and it downloads my recordings direct into Word or Scrivener. Magic!
Of course when I am talking to Dragon I need to be in a quiet environment. This has led to changes in my writing habits. I like to write while listening to music. Yesterday I was dictating and listening to a recording of Sunday nights Prom concert broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As soon as the bass soloist burst into song, a message appeared on my screen telling me to ’please say that again’.
I also like to write in coffee shops. Talking to my laptop would probably not go down well. Apart from disturbing customers, the content of my stories might have some of them running for the doors.
About that new toy? How about a Bluetooth headset? I could be baking a quiche while dictating my latest novel at the same time.
Writing this blog post today, marks the next big step for me. Today I have taken off my water wings for the first time, plunged into the pool and even pushed off from the side. I have no handwritten notes in front of me to read from. I’ve simply sat in front of my laptop, told my Dragon to “wake up” (he’s just told me that he is already awake) and simply spoken what came into my head to watch it appear on the screen. I am flying without wings, mixing metaphors, and it feels great.
For me, novelists have always been storytellers. There is an ancient oral tradition of storytelling from long before the invention of writing. When people ask me how I write, I always say that I see stories in my head and then I write them down. Now technology has allowed me to complete the circle and be at one with my storytelling Irish ancestors. I can sit down and tell stories to my computer and my Dragon will type them for me.
That’s magic!
T.J. Masters is a writer of m/m fiction for Dreamspinner Press and details of his work can be seen at www.tjmasters.com
Scrivener and Dragon Naturally Speaking can both be Googled for more information.