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The Art of Dictation
How AI makes me more analogue.
In the forty years I’ve been writing, I’ve discovered that half the battle of becoming a writer is trying to find out how you write. It’s a continuous learning process. And I have just had another breakthrough.
I have all my best ideas when I write in longhand. My problem is that, when you have as many notebooks as I do, finding anything in them again is extremely challenging.
For the last fifteen or twenty years, I’ve struggled to do Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages technique (as she explores in her book, The Artist’s Way). The action of waking up, grabbing a notebook and pen, and then writing three pages of whatever comes to mind, is relatively easy. The challenge has been how to capture that information digitally. Having a digital record of the content offers the quickest way to search through it in the future. But turning that longhand data into digital data has always meant typing it up.
Despite being a professional writer for nearly four decades, I’m not a touch typist. I’m a bit more than a two-finger typist, but typing three pages of notes and ideas often takes half an hour or more (not helped by my untidy handwriting). Add that to the half an hour I spend writing those Morning Pages in longhand, and this exercise takes up a useful chunk of my day.
