Daughter of Mystery: Writing on skis
Dec. 26th, 2011 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjOne of the things I enjoy about getting out and exercising is that I find it a great opportunity to run the "mind movies" that I use for pre-writing my scenes. So during my little cross-country trail expeditions in the last few days, I've taken advantage of the mental quiet to get quite a bit of pre-work done for writing later in the day.
Now, as a separate observation, on various occasions I've experimented with trying to compose by dictation with fairly dismal results. It's the same sort of buffer-underrun problem I tend to have when composing on the keyboard: I can talk much faster than I can actually compose text, so there are a lot of awkward pauses and I have a hard time getting up any fluid momentum.
But today I tried something different, courtesy of the voice-notes program on my iPhone. I'd work out a bit of dialog or scene-detail while skiing. Pause, pull out the phone, flip on the recorder, dictate just that little bit (with contextualizing information if it was out of order, but mostly I was working through parts of two chapters in order). I didn't worry too much about getting the exact final text in -- just those turns of phrase that I didn't want to lose, and essential details of what needed to happen in the scene for everything to make sense.
So now I have extremely detailed outline notes, plus a fair amount of dialog, for the rest of the current POV-let and all of the next one. I'm going to see if I can fill out the actual draft for that whole bit tomorrow, direct on the keyboard.
Of course, the eventual goal is to get better at composing finished verbiage at a rate equivalent to my typing or dictation. But one step at a time. It's more important for it to be good than to be fast.
Now, as a separate observation, on various occasions I've experimented with trying to compose by dictation with fairly dismal results. It's the same sort of buffer-underrun problem I tend to have when composing on the keyboard: I can talk much faster than I can actually compose text, so there are a lot of awkward pauses and I have a hard time getting up any fluid momentum.
But today I tried something different, courtesy of the voice-notes program on my iPhone. I'd work out a bit of dialog or scene-detail while skiing. Pause, pull out the phone, flip on the recorder, dictate just that little bit (with contextualizing information if it was out of order, but mostly I was working through parts of two chapters in order). I didn't worry too much about getting the exact final text in -- just those turns of phrase that I didn't want to lose, and essential details of what needed to happen in the scene for everything to make sense.
So now I have extremely detailed outline notes, plus a fair amount of dialog, for the rest of the current POV-let and all of the next one. I'm going to see if I can fill out the actual draft for that whole bit tomorrow, direct on the keyboard.
Of course, the eventual goal is to get better at composing finished verbiage at a rate equivalent to my typing or dictation. But one step at a time. It's more important for it to be good than to be fast.
