Fundamentally, an author has just one job: to get words out of their head and onto a page. Most of us these days simply type into a word processor. And why not? It's quick, it's easy, and it makes editing a breeze.
I've done it that way for close to forty years. As an undergraduate, I had a typewriter and I typed all of my essays. That was pretty weird back then - it wasn't something my professors had seen before. I'm actually not a big fan of typewriters. I know they're cool and retro and all, but I find them noisy, slow, and hard to work with. But still, there was something magical about tapping away with my fingers and making words appear on the paper.
A year or so later, in my second year at college, I got an Amstrad 9512 word processor, and I discovered the joys of writing on a computer, which was even more radical. The Amstrad was incredibly basic and clunky, but it was fun, and it worked. All of a sudden I had access to bold, italic, and a few other basic typographical tools. Then a few years later, when I encountered LaTeX, MacWrite and Microsoft Word, I discovered the joys of abusing all the different fonts, layouts, and the many other features we take for granted these days. (Who else remembers the early days of so-called desktop publishing, when we inflicted countless design nightmares upon the world - because we could?)
That said, typing isn't really my preferred way of writing. I get fed up sitting at a screen, at a desk, for hours on end. My eyes don't like it, my back doesn't like it, and my butt gets tired.
I really like writing by hand. On paper, or in a notebook, with a nice pen, or even a pencil. There's something very satisfying and pleasurable about the physical nature of writing that way, creating an actual manuscript, instead of dots on a screen and bits on a disk. And of course when I write by hand I'm not chained to my desk: I don't have to stare at a screen, and I don't have to worry about my laptop running out of power.
However, writing by hand has some big drawbacks. Apart from the fact that I can't actually read my writing most of the time, the work still needs transcribing from the notebook into a digital form before I can share it with anybody or publish it. And of course notebooks can get lost or damaged, but once I've written something in Google Drive it's pretty much there forever even if I accidentally delete it, and it’s accessible any time I need it from any device I happen to be using. I like it for rough drafts and notes, but it’s just not the smartest solution for finished work.
However, I've recently been experimenting with dictation. Text to speech has started to get really good these days. The technology is embedded into our phones, and it's used by hundreds of millions of people every day, so it's actually getting really accurate at interpreting what we say, and even dealing with issues of homonyms or weird accents. Obviously you're going to run into problems if you're writing fantasy or science fiction or other material that has strange names or words, but on the whole it works just fine.
It does feel a little odd sometimes to dictate to my computer, but it's not a completely ridiculous approach. Dictation was common until about forty years ago. Many well-known authors dictated their work to an amanuensis - everyone from Agatha Christie, Dan Brown and Winston Churchill to John Milton, Voltaire, Dumas and Dostoevsky. This is just the same, except that I have to correct it myself. And frankly, I can speak just about as fast as I can type, so in terms of productivity, it's just as good.
Of course the biggest downside is that anyone else in the house can hear what I'm saying, which can make me feel somewhat self-conscious. And it's annoying for them too, so it's not always an ideal solution from a practical point of view. But if I'm alone in the house, it works just fine.
However the best thing about dictation is that I can write while I’m doing something else. I dictated this blog, for example, while I was tidying the kitchen, clearing away the dishes from my lunch, making Turkish coffee, and marinading some fish for tonight's dinner. I can walk around doing whatever I need to do, keep talking, and by the time I finish my chores there's a blog post on the screen ready to go. Actually, walking is a big part of why I like this. I do a lot of my writing while walking on a treadmill. This is even better because I'm not stuck in one place: I can write literally anywhere I can walk.
Originally, I did all of my dictation by talking into my laptop, but I realized a few weeks ago that there's no reason why I couldn't go totally mobile, so now I’m experimenting with dictating into my phone: I just dictate into Google Keep and copy it across later. This gives me even more freedom to be wherever I want to be.
I think maybe one of the reasons why this process works well for me is that many of my stories are designed to be read aloud. So speaking aloud when I write really helps me to get the storytelling feel the way I want it. I have to do it anyway: when I've written a story, the first phase of editing is to read it aloud and listen to myself saying it. Most of the time, my first draft of the story is just me literally talking to myself. So why not record that?
Dictation is still something I'm playing around with, and I think I probably need to find some better dictation software then whatever is built into Google or MacOS, but it's certainly an interesting creative process.
I'd love to know if any other authors have used text to speech in their writing. And if so, what tools did you use and how well did it work for you?
Don't let's leave Robert E Howard off that list. He may not have dictated his stories per se, but he apparently did speak them aloud (and very loud) when writing, which must have been interesting for his parents.