Things have been pretty great this week. I went to Wales, got a tan (can you believe it?!), visited the Doctor Who Experience and unleashed my inner raving fangirl for the day. I also managed to give myself a writing injury.
Probably had something to do with the three-hour typing sprint I did on the Monday night.
I’d planned on entering the HG Wells competition for a while, but in typical style neglected to do very much until I was practically sitting on the deadline. So I brought my laptop along and bashed it out from some rough handwritten drafts, without leaving the kitchen table. Next day, I started to notice aches and pains in both my little fingers, running down my arms to my elbows. They seemed to worsen when typing on my phone and typing was painful. Even worse, a week went by and it didn’t seem much better.
Turns out I could have early cubital tunnel syndrome. So I’m kinda bummed about that.
It’s an expected hazard with what I do. Plus it’s a wake-up call; I lean forward when I type, my typing posture is lousy, I play video games more than is probably good for me and I sleep like a hamster. It’s taught me a lesson in writing sensibly.
Since I am trying to rest my arms a bit, I looked into using some dictation software. Better write something super slowly than not at all. There are quite a few floating around: ListNote was pretty decent for my phone but the punctuation commands didn’t work, and there wasn’t one for quotation marks for some reason. I found Google Voice in my settings and that has been by far the best at text-to-speech. But I can only use it for messaging since there are no commands for punctuation whatsoever!
I’ve tried out several free dictators online but most take ages and transcribe badly. Infuriatingly, one even had commands for inserting smileys but no quotation marks! After some experimenting I have found that my laptop’s ease of access is the easiest to use, if not quite as good as Google Voice. The commands are good and I found I could teach it new words (very valuable for a fantasy writer using names such as Tain, Jenelyn and Cass).
The advantage? I can type without using my hands. It’s a valuable tool for any writer to have, for when you fancy some freewriting or you’re trying to multitask. But I’m not sure I could write a novel with it. It’s pretty slow and if you want to rattle out a draft be prepared for plenty of mistakes. It can get frustrating, and I’ll admit I feel a tad self-conscious about shouting “the, delete that, the the THE FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE” (and other more colourful expressions that the dictator is reluctant to pick up).
I will say it’s worth experimenting with. And I will also say, I wrote this whole blog post without lifting a finger. It’s annoying at times, but I remember Brandon Sanderson saying in one of his lectures that the average writer manages five hundred words an hour. I managed about 533 just now. It’s not as fun as hitting keys at 2 AM but it gets the job done to an extent – and it’s great for writing like this, when you don’t need a tonne of punctuation. As with writing first drafts, you can always expect mistakes to creep in.
Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. I’m taking a break: my voice is tired.