A Digital Writer
Four years in …
Hiram Falls’ 9th revision is underway; the novel is nearly ‘finished.’ In this post, I share some of the things I am learning about writing.
I am dictating this. With its latest models of MacBooks, Apple has returned the speech-to-text technology it once had. It works. It’s amazingly accurate. And it’s a weird way to write.
When I was a newspaper reporter and used a black Royal manual typewriter, I had to think out what I wrote beforehand. So, after covering something, I thought out the lede, the important points, the structure on my way back to the newsroom.
The shift to IBM Selectrics was a breeze. I could achieve a typing speed of 125 words a minute and almost, almost catch up to my brain.
Computers, though, brought a major shift. I became lazier. I just sat down and wrote. I could fix it later. Move things around. Zap things that didn’t make sense or that meandered. Whoa; spell-check?
Dictating, though, is like jumping from an airplane and not knowing whether you have, in fact, put the parachute on your back. You have no time to think it out. You’ve heard the refrain: “I wish I’d thought about it before I said that.”
