I wrote 3,547 words today, which is crushing it on any usual day. It might be the most I’ve ever written in a single day…though I don’t think that’s quite true. Pretty sure when I finished the last 30 pages or so of the first draft of Starstuff I wrote almost 8,000 words. So, yeah. Massive day on the word count…
But…
I’m very frustrated right now with my process. I honestly don’t know if dictating is for me. I really don’t know. I don’t like it. And I don’t mean the efficiency, and that I still have to sit with my program and go through and make corrections, or even that I still have to do another pass sitting at the computer with my actual keyboard and do rewrites for tone and voice…I don’t even mean all that stuff…
I mean, I’m not sure if I like it. It’s not pleasurable for me. I feel incredibly disconnected from my story when I write like that every time I’ve done it, and what comes out from that is prose that’s just going through the motions. There’s no muse, no inspiration or emotion. I’m not feeling anything. And it’s not even actually the prose itself that’s the problem…I read it back, and it’s always better than I thought it was…it’s my own relationship to that prose. It’s foggy. I can’t see or feel it. It feels like someone else wrote it. It confuses me. Give me anxiety.
Now…I will say this: I don’t think I’m ready to give up on dictation quite yet. I’m going to keep my promise to write using dictation for 30 days straight…but it’s not going to be on my book for a while. I’m going to use some other sort of exercises or practice to further develop that skill and see where that takes me. But, I have this book right now, I’m 13,000 words in…and I feel like someone else wrote it. It’s not me. There’s nothing about it right now that is exciting me, and that is death to a creative endeavor.
I fully realize that part of this discontent has to do with the fact that I’m switching my expectations for writing: I now *must* write. It is now (soon going to be) my profession. That certainly adds pressure…but just the thought of sitting down in my chair tomorrow morning with my iPad and my keyboard and my headphones with some music in-hand took an enormous weight off my shoulders, which means that RIGHT NOW, dictation may not be for me. I’m leaving that door open, and in fact I’m going to finish this fucking 30-day challenge to myself to learn the craft of dictating fiction…but I’m going to take the pressure off for a bit.
We’ll see what happens in the next 20 days. Maybe I’ll have a breakthrough with transcription. Or maybe I’ll realize that my time would be better spent practicing my typing skills rather than dictation. We’ll see. But, shit…even at only 40 words per minute typing, which is probably what my average is when I’m in the zone, is, 2,400 words per hour. If I have a daily goal of 3,000 words when drafting, that’s less than 1.5 hours of typing per day. 5,000 words per day is only slightly over 2 hours. Very, very fucking doable. So…do I NEED to dictate? Fuck no. Not going to lose a whole draft of a novel over it, that’s just making even more work for myself.
Right now, anyway.
So…yeah. The book is moving along. I just learned how to set a goal in Scrivener that will let me know once I’ve hit my session goals. I’m going to start that shit tomorrow morning. Wish me luck 🙂