Tools, talking, and tradeoffs
I’ve told myself stories since I was a child. I’ve had social anxiety much of my life and I managed it by rehearsing what I wanted to say for things in advance. That turned into telling stories and talking through things I’m interested in. Though my social anxiety has improved immensely, this habit has become part of my writing process.
A couple of years ago I trialled transcription software. I think I tried three different ones, including Google’s own and, despite some persistence, decided it wasn’t for me. For one, because I talk to myself so much (out loud), I’m quite a fast talker. I found that I was having to slow down for the software and it meant that I was focusing on the wrong thing… the tool not the process. It interfered with my creativity and was a failure.
For the most part I still type out the things that I want to say. Years of playing world of warcraft as a teenager have made me a fast touch typer so there’s not much of a problem in terms of my fingers keeping up with my brain. That said, telling my story out loud means I can repeat sections until I’m happy with the wording, or how the section integrates with my story. It’s a kind of self-editing as I go along, but means I can trial certain things before I settle on them. Typing isn’t really conducive to this way of working.
I also trialled having a dictaphone I could carry around while I tell my story (I’m also a bit of a pacer). The problem that I found with that however is that I had to sit through all the different retellings of each section, and then had the transcribe it myself. While that’s fine, I felt like I was doing double the work; it didn’t feel very efficient.
So what did I settle on? Well… ultimately I realised that the way I was doing it already worked best for me after all. I’d tell the story to myself, adjusting sections as I went along, then typing it up later on.
I don’t think it was a waste of time to go through the various different options; you often don’t know something is going to work for you (or not) until you have a go. It just turned out this time I didn’t need anything I didn’t already have.
Experimentation is useful.