Experimenting with Dictation for Writing

Belonging to writers’ groups there’s always a lot of ideas that are thrown around. One of them is using voice dictation. While I have experimented with this to create fiction, it has never been terribly successful for me. It seems that for fiction at least my voice goes more rapidly than my brain.

However, the commodity that I am trying to preserve is time. Therefore if I use voice dictation for other tasks to speed them up, that still allows my fiction writing to be more productive as I have more time to do the less efficient task of typing that I use for that.

In that theme, I am using Google Docs and a microphone to dictate this blog post. While  I do not think it produces as thoughtful a blog post as if I were typing and thinking and pausing, it does allow me to write a blog post far quicker, hopefully making my blogging easier and therefore more consistent, and freeing up the additional time for my fiction writing. 

This is an experiment so I am unsure if I will continue.  However, blogging does so far appear to be a more successful way to utilize this technology. In part it is because I use more common words, In fiction I am speaking of wyrms (I had to hand correct that for the dictation here) and place names along the lines of Tattoine and Lothlorien. For a blog, that’s in general not necessary. For success even with this blog post, however, it still helps for me to have a firm idea/outline of what I want to say ahead of time.

What ways do you have to improve the efficiency of your writing practice or provide more time for fiction writing? Have you tried dictation and what have the barriers been? I will admit that I find dictation much more effective for writing a factual blog post where I am less concerned with word choice rhythm and the beauty of prose. But I doubt I will ever graduate to using it for my fiction where it my concerns go far beyond just content.

Let me know in the comments below!