Dictaphone Writing Drill 2: Fiction Writing

For today’s writing drill, we’re going to talk about fiction dictation writing.

As you probably already know, writing fiction is quite different from working from an outline writing nonfiction.

There’s a lot more free play involved in writing this type of material. You basically are just tapping into your own personal creativity and, possibly, your memory. You have a lot more room to work with than if you were producing nonfiction work (like a blog post, article, or book) from an outline.

With that said, it’s very easy to hit a wall when you’re writing fiction.

It’s as if you are going at a fairly decent speed, and then the ideas dry up immediately. That is the big challenge.

And with this drill, you’ll learn how to use three techniques that can help you keep the ideas flowing as you try to speak at a very fast rate.

We’re going to use the “who,” “five senses,” and “memory” methods in dictating a scene for a fiction novel.

Please understand that there is really no right or wrong answer. While you can dictate at a very high rate of speed for works of fiction, the actual throughput really depends on how much editing the material needs.

Since you have a lot more room to work with, a lot of the stuff that you’ll be saying will probably get cut out. That’s the price you pay for the higher volume of output.

So with that out of the way, let’s set up our timer for one minute and start.

Transcription:

Assassin.

I don’t really like that term. I would like to imagine my work description as “adjuster” or “justice bringer.” Perhaps even “agent of karma.”

Well, there are many ways you can describe my work, depending on which end of a laser pistol you find yourself in.

I do take money for the untimely deaths of the people my clients assign me to take care of. That much is true. But there’s a lot loss in translation.

In many cases, you have to also factor in the context of what I do and where it happens.

So we have that out of the way!

And the technique that I used is the “who” method (for fiction writing), as well as a little bit of the “memory” method.

I didn’t get into the five senses where I describe how a typical space assassin’s day goes by. Maybe we will talk about what he sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels with all his senses.

But, for the most part, we got a lot of the heavy stuff down, and the key is to just dive in and explore those ideas one at a time.

The whole point of speed voice writing drills is to get as much of that content out of your mind and onto audio.

See you at the next drill.

If you have any suggestions, comments, or you would like to recommend some fixes for areas of improvement, I’m all ears.

Just leave it in the comments section of this video.

See you next time!