It's a Game Changer, no more two-fingered typing.

I’ve been modifying the way that I write.

Since I started typing, back in the last century, I’ve always used one or occasionally two fingers from each hand on my keyboard. Over the years, writing official reports and letters, I got quite fast.

When I started writing novels, I just carried on with the same technique. I found that I could manage about 2000 words on a good day.

Then I discovered the joys of dictation. At first, I only used it on my phone to record notes and ideas when I was out and about. That got me some strange looks but I didn’t care. I never arrived home trying to recall what had occurred to me while I was unable to write anything down.

Finally, I took the plunge and got a microphone for my desktop computer, now I dictate about half of all my output. At a lot faster speed than I could ever type. All I have to do then (all?) is go into the text afterwards and tidy it all up.

At first, it took me a long while to edit, probably as long as it took to type it in the first place. Largely due to the software getting used to the way I spoke, the gaps I left and the fact that I get excited, speak too fast and forget to say things like full stop and new line.

Now, as I’m getting more used to it, I’ve relaxed and I’m getting a lot better. As with most things, familiarity increases the standard of the product. Not only that, I’ve found that auto-correct does a lot of the work for me while I’m speaking. Then, find and replace sorts out the names and any unusual words, like the planet and character names I’ve come up with, slang and technical terms.

I have to be alone though, I can’t talk into the microphone if there’s someone else around who can hear what I’m saying.

I’m finding it so much more productive to babble on when the ideas are flowing. Sometimes I found it hard to keep up with my mind when I was typing, although I always assumed that was a good thing. I’ve realised that I was actually editing as I typed, and because of that I was missing the good stuff that was wrapped up in the babble.

Now I can see that there’s an advantage to getting it all down and sorting it out later. As for whether this will actually increase my output, we’ll have to wait and find out.

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