Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. To be honest, this is something I say about all worthwhile endeavors, because it’s the people who are left standing who win, not necessarily the most talented ones. Applied to writing, the marathon idea is that it’s essential to keep going, yet that presents problems to many.
NaNoWriMo as an Example
As a classic Type-A personality, when I heard about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, I decided to participate in 2015 with every intention of completing the 50,000 work challenge successfully, and I did. I had no idea at the time of the number of people who completed the challenge. According to NaNoWriMo’s 2017 Annual Report, 312,987 people participated worldwide in 2017. Of these, 34,678 completed the 50,000 word challenge, roughly 11%. I’m not throwing shade on anybody for anything. Some would say that my Type-A personality isn’t well suited to writing anyway, so I have no room to talk. But I imagine if people were asked why they didn’t complete their drafts during November, two answers would come up time and time again. First, they didn’t have time to write so they could complete the challenge. Another common reason is that while they were writing, they kept editing themselves, thus running out of time and steam during the month. I want to address the first reason here.
Where and When You Can Write
People write in all locations and at any time for the day. A former boss of mine who’s published 11 books on the civil war arose every day at 3:30 and wrote for three hours. (This also explains why I would get emails from him at 4:00 am, by the way.) That’s discipline. I’m not quite that driven, but I arrive at my office at 6:30 am and write for about an hour and half to two hours. However, not everyone has that level of flexibility, or perhaps they commute thirty to forty minutes—or more—to work. They also may not have a private office or writing space at home, or they have family obligations with young children, sports, etc. For those people, one option may be to dictate their work. There are several options for this, and I’m going to highlight one.
Dictating
Years ago, I had a boss who used a Dictaphone. In the pre-email era, he received tons of letters and used the Dictaphone to dictate responses to letters that his secretary would type for him. This worked well for him, and I used it while writing parts of my doctoral dissertation. I don’t have a dictation machine anymore, but everyone has access to dictation software and apps that can be used on their phones. For the second Stephanie Hart novel, I found Speechnotes.
The program is easy to use, and doesn’t require any special equipment or training. I tried it while driving to work one day (not a good idea), and found it was pretty accurate once I got the hang of it. One thing you have to do when dictating is tell the program/ app when to add punctuation, and while that’s a bit annoying, it does help to focus one on phrasing and sentence structure. Speechnotes is also forgiving in that I could stop speaking for a number of seconds without it timing out or stopping. That way, I could pay attention to the road and traffic while dictating. Again, I wouldn’t recommend it for stop and go driving, but it works well during a lunch hour when you’ve got fifteen minutes and an idea you want to flesh out. For that, it’s a winner.
When the dictation is complete, and you want to see it in print, it can be sent as email attachment or in another format if you have the premium version. The additional formats are nice, but I wasn’t compelled to purchase the premium version to get them. The dictation attaches as a text document, which I import into Word and keep on going. The only things I have to do are providing formatting such as italics, etc., but that’s no big deal. And for knocking out a couple of hundred words while I’m sitting in my car or finishing up lunch, Speechnotes or a system like it might be the ticket! The program is available in both Android and Apple formats.
