Voicing My Drafts: A Writing Revolution
This time I draft a writing tip
To help you clear the noise
Listen to recordings of
Your rambling natural voice
Earlier this year, I learned a few banger lessons about my writing process. I was spinning my wheels over editing my copy, and things were just taking way too long.
In the past, I typed my first drafts on the keyboard, without any voice recording or dictation. For a variety of reasons, I shifted to recording a voice memo, transcribing it, and then editing from the transcript.
I used my iPhone – just the Voice Memo app. I tried several other options, and the hurdles of extra steps plus the fact that the audio quality on the new iPhones is pretty awesome, made it an easy call.
I am experimenting with several transcription services—the most authoritative appears to be Rev, and I'm using that and Happy Scribe. If you have any suggestions for me, I'm all ears.
Here are four reasons I feel like this has helped me up my writing game:
I started to notice some quirky things about my talking style; specifically, I repeat myself often. I realized this may be slowing down my editing process, and that I need to be careful about this little quirk if I want to produce more efficiently.
My speaking voice is more colorful than my writing voice, and it’s also more accessible, at a lower reading level. Voice has the benefit of emotional emphasis, pause, speed, etc. And I feel like reading through the transcript has helped me identify style and voice tendencies that my keyboarding loses in translation. For example, in my voice recordings I'm more vulnerable than in my writing. It's an easy area for me to improve upon now in my writing.
Editing the transcription gives me a container, a set of boundaries to work with. I found myself cutting down from the draft, and trying to constrain it even more. When I'm drafting using the keyboard, I have to imagine or create an artificial end point. I can feel when the energy is done, or the idea is done, when I'm recording a voice track. But that’s hard to feel when I'm writing my draft. It's easy to meander and increase the word count when drafting by keyboard.
I don't edit myself as much when I'm talking. For a while now, when typing out my first draft, I would edit my words and thoughts before I even got the whole sentence out. I would draft a partial sentence and think, nope, not that—all the time.
I'm not sure if this will be a permanent adjustment to my process or just something that helps me re-discover my voice. But it was a really nice experiment. If you’re struggling to find your voice, you might want to give it a try!
What tips can you share with me about your writing process?