Guest Post on Dictation with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium

Taming the Dragon--A Guide to Dictation

Every self-published writer knows that creating content quickly is key to success in today’s competitive market place. The faster you can write, the quicker you’ll have your first book or your first series.

There are several books on the market that will help you with this. My favorites are “2k to 10k” by Rachel Aaron, “Take Off your Pants!” by Libby Hawker, and “5000 Words Per Hour” by Chris Fox. I’ll list all the books mentioned at the end of the post.

A common thread in all the books is the importance of outlining and dictating.

After getting serious about dictating, my productivity went from 1200 to 3500 words per hour (and still rising). It took me over six months to finish my first book from the moment I began writing it. My second book, largely dictated, took two months. And that’s even though I was lazy and distracted. I could have done it much faster, had I not taken days off when I didn’t feel like it, or got sidetracked with other projects.

In this article, I’ll lay out in detail how I cracked the tough nut of dictation. I’m sure I have either ADHD or some other form of disability that prevents me from concentrating on anything for longer than five minutes. If I can do it, so can you!

First Attempts at Dictation: Total Fail

I’d been writing for a couple of months when Monica Leonelle published “Dictate Your Book”. She was also interviewed on Joanna Penn\’s podcast The Creative Penn.

As a by-note—that podcast is required listening for any author who wants to get serious about their writing!

Monica explains in detail how her productivity exploded off the scale once she got comfortable with Dragon, the premier dictation software for Windows. I stress for Windows for reasons I’ll explain a little later.

I rushed out, bought her book, purchased a full price copy of the software for Mac… and crashed. I struggled with everything, from getting the software to recognize my accent, to organizing my thoughts well enough to have anything to dictate in the first place.

I was so desperate that I contacted Monica via Twitter, and she very kindly replied with some great suggestions that helped a lot. I still had massive problems, however. I resigned myself to the fact that every writer is different, and not everything works for everybody. So I forgot about dictation and concentrated on learning the craft, writing on a regular basis, and publishing my first book.

2nd Attempt at Dictation: Much Better

Even though I’m a pretty fast typer, I never hit more than 1200 words per hour. Ever. Then a few months ago, I listened to yet another interview with Scott Baker which suddenly clarified a few things.

The lack of transcribing accuracy? Not my fault–the software for Mac has many known bugs that interfere with recognition and just generally drive users batty. One of the issues is the run-away cursor. You give a command, “Find [whatever word]”, and the cursor races through your entire document, with no way of stopping it. I literally walked away, made a cup of tea, talked to my mom for fifteen minutes, and the thing was still not finished.

The fact that the software didn’t recognize my accent? Much less of an issue with the Windows version. Plus the training facility works a lot better. You dictate your text, then go through it and correct words that Dragon misunderstood. Next time, it knows how you pronounce it. Problem solved.

So I tried again. This time I bought the proper software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium. This program is often on sale for less than $100, so it’s worth keeping eyes and ears open. I highly recommend joining Dragon Riders on Facebook where sales are quickly announced. This is a goldmine for information and best practice.

Using the windows version, I immediately got better. My word output increased from 1200 to 2000, some days even more. That still wasn’t enough, though.

Part of the issue was that I would dictate, then immediately correct what I’d written. Bad idea. It screws with the correction feature of the program (so that Dragon can’t learn user pronunciation). And it slowed me down a lot.

Takeaway: get the Windows version Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium

3rd attempt at Dictation: Taking it Outside

Then I remembered both Monica and Scott enthuse about going for walks while dictating. I wasn’t initially keen on it—my neighbors already think I’m weird enough working from home and writing romances without letting them see me talk to myself. Then I thought, “whatever, it’s not their career.”

I purchased a lapel mic and a digital recorder and took it outside. Much better. It took away the constant going back over what I’d already written.

The first time I went out, I walked for twenty minutes. But when I got back and hooked the recorder up for transcriptions, I got a nasty surprise. I’d only created 500 new words. My productivity had dropped back from 2000 to 1500.

The reason were huge gaps of dead air while I was thinking of what to say next. My thoughts were scattering here and there. I couldn’t focus. I had no idea what to say next. It was painful.

Then I read Libby Hawker’s book “Take Off Your Pants”. This opened my eyes to the importance of outlining. I used to sit down and just start writing. It felt intuitive, like a real writer would do. I never had much problem with “blank page anxiety” and could easily write ten-thousand words in several sessions.

Then I’d get stuck. My characters had acted themselves into dead-ends. I‘d forgotten where I’d wanted them to be at the end of the book. Instinctively, I’d slip into cliched tropes, over-emotional dialogue, ham-fisted characterization. Over the years, I’d started three books and abandoned them all a few chapters in.

Dictation requires you to decide beforehand what to write. You don’t need to have the whole book outlined in detail, but you should have a very good idea where you’re going with the next few thousand words. Once I’d gotten that into my thick skull, I created a rough outline, broke it into chapters, scenes, and eventually beats, and knew exactly what I’d be dictating.

So instead of walking around and feeling like my thoughts were behaving like cats that I wanted to herd into the same direction, I knew what beats I needed to hit in the next scene.

Beats

In case you’re not familiar with this term, it’s really easy: imagine you tell a friend that your car was hit by another driver today.

The scene would be the accident.

The beats are the details.

“I was driving along today when this guy in front of me started swerving from lane to lane. At first I thought maybe he was texting, but then I realized that he was crouched over. I thought that maybe he had a heart attack? So I stayed behind him but set my hazards and kept blowing my horn to alert other drivers. Then his head jerked up and he hit the breaks. I had to stop suddenly and a guy behind me hit my car.”

You’ve just created the following beats:

narrator is driving
guy in front not in control of car, maybe medical emergency?
narrator sets hazards and considers her options
sudden breaking
other car runs into narrator

You could write 100 words per beat and end up with a 500 word scene.

Takeaway: Dictation is so much easier when you know what you want to say.

Time to Talk to Myself

Now that I have the right setup, writing has become a pure joy. I outline all the key scenes, and this process gets easier every time I do it. I love outlining now—doesn’t mean that I won’t change direction if I feel like it, add more characters and side-plots, or come up with a completely different ending. Having a plot skeleton in place is awesome, though.

So when I go for a walk, I know what scene I want to work on. I turn on my recorder and pretend I’m talking to a friend. I tell them what I’m planning to do and what the beats are. This part of the recording is to warm up and get comfortable.

After I’ve done that, I begin a new recording. It took a bit of practice but I’m now very comfortable with adding punctuation as I speak (period) Just like that (period) (New line) (New line)

I don’t bother with punctuating dialogue, though. That’s just irritating and easily added to when I edit later on.

Bringing It Home

When I get home, I plug the digital recorder into my PC and hit ‘transcribe’. Dragon does this automatically, and it’s kinda miraculous how the text appears on the screen out of no-where.

This feature is only available with the Premium version so make sure you get Premium rather than the Home version!

Finally, you need to sit down and tell Dragon where it’s got it wrong. This is a little tedious but gets easier with time when Dragon learns your pronunciation.

And that’s it!

Speeding up my word count means that I can produce a 60k novel in 20 days. Add weekends and days I don’t feel like it, and call it a month. A novel in a month. And it flows better, especially dialogue, than it ever did when I typed it all.

Word of Caution

Don’t give up too soon. It took me 2 YEARS to get to where I am now. I gave up again and again—if it weren’t for my stubbornness and constantly being told by other authors how much it changed their writing life, I wouldn’t have bothered. And IT’S SO WORTH IT!

Links mentioned in this blog post