Story Sensei

These are my thoughts on week 3 of the Fictator-in-Training Roadmap by Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. Actually, it’s more about the third module of the Fictation course she has, since the Roadmap is taking us through her course. In this third module, she recorded herself dictating her entire novella, from outlining to the end of the rough draft. She fast-forwards through most of it so you’re not literally watching her dictate the entire novella, but she stops sometimes to comment and give tips. I didn’t find this all that useful, except for a few videos where she’s trying different apps. She even tries dictation on her mother’s old PC computer. I did like how she compared 3 different recording/transcription apps on her phone and showed the differences in accuracy between all three, plus her pros and cons for each. As I mentioned before, she doesn’t go into services that cost a lot of money such as Dragon Anywhere, but I recently heard about an AI transcription website called turboscribe...

The second week in the Fictation online course goes into the nuts and bolts of dictating fiction. I really like this section of the course because of the exercises that Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer gives. The exercises are really quite excellent for getting you into the mindset to dictate your own fiction, as opposed to other exercises from other books I’ve read, which merely get you used to dictation in general. Her exercises ease you into the mindset of where you need to be in order to start dictating fiction, which is a completely different skill than dictating a journal or an email or any kind of nonfiction. This week in the roadmap, she also has you watch the first two videos of the next segment in her dictation online course, in which she videotapes herself dictating some fiction, although she does fast forward through most of it. But the parts that are in real time show exactly how fast or slow she’s speaking, which is really helpful to give an example of how fast you can dictate ...

My journey with dictation has not been easy, but I’ve been kind of stubbornly trying to make it work, because I want to write faster, and I also want to protect my wrists, which started giving me problems many years ago when I was still offering critiques with my Story Sensei critique service. I had to stop that because my right wrist was having issues. Last year, I took a dictation boot camp by Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer, and I liked it a lot. It was mostly aimed at people who had never done dictation before, while I had been dictating for a few years, although not very successfully sometimes. I still found the boot camp helpful, and I bought her fiction dictation online class, which she calls Fictation. I went through the course and enjoyed it. She started a supplement to her dictation course called the Fictator-in-Training Roadmap, which goes through her dictation online class and then also includes some additional coaching, so I decided to buy it. At the moment, the roadmap course...

I've been dictating my fiction manuscript for a few days now, and I'm a bit disappointed. It takes me longer to think in long phrases or complete sentences, and so my word count per hour rate has been less than when I type. I suppose I simply need to get more used to dictating fiction, and then hopefully my word count per hour rate will increase. I do admit I like the fact that it's reducing the strain on my hand when I type or use the mouse. It's been very easy to navigate within the document when I use Dragon on my computer, and I've been able to make most corrections by using verbal commands within the program. I was having issues with my wrist several years ago because of using the mouse, despite trying lots of different types of mice (mouses?), rollerballs, and track pads. With Dragon, even though there is more editing that needs to be done because of errors with the transcription, the editing is almost entirely mouse-free. I have found that I need to put t...

Now that I'm over my bout of writer's block, I suppose I'm feeling a little panicked about getting as much done as I can before the next bout of writer's block hits. I know that's very irrational, because sometimes writer's block hits because of some problem with the writing that I have to address, so writing more now might only hasten the arrival of my next bout of writer's block. Even when I was working in biology research, I was always interested in optimizing processes. I've carried that over to my writing, and tried to optimize my writing process over the years. So I did some Internet searches on writing faster, and I found the books 2k to 10k , and 5,000 Words Per Hour . Both books had very good tips and advice. In the 2K to 10K book, I liked the advice about jotting notes in detail about the scene you're about to write. I had never done this consistently, but when I did, I noticed that writing the scene went much more smoothly. I also li...