For Christmas my husband gave me the Mac Version of Dictate. Dictate is a program that allows you to type on your computer through voice activation.
In short, you speak into the receiver and the computer types what you say. He tells me that the program has to become familiar with our voice, which requires little, if any time.
I have yet to open and explore using, play with, the program, but am very excited at the prospect of being able to speak and have my words typed. It’s kind of speaking into a dictaphone.
I was once in a writing workshop, facilitated by author and teacher Chris Abani. As part of our introduction to the class, Chris asked each of us after telling our names to deliver a story orally.
It was quite interesting speaking a story from the top of my thoughts.
What was more awe inspiring was when then went back after we would orate our story and point out the various shifts and turns that took place in our narrative, the transition from beginning to middle and then the crisis followed by climax and the denouement into resolution and ultimately the end.
We tell stories much better than we write them. Then of course, while there are audio versions of stories, recordings of a person or author reading a book aloud, very few, if anyone orally narrates a 500 page novel.
But what if I could speak the rough draft of my story instead of writing it.
Or what if I could speak the difficult parts of a story, orally narrate those parts of my novel that are just too hard to write?
What would it be like to by-pass the step of writing and go directly from brain to mouth? Think aloud so-to-speak?
I don’t know. But I’m eager to find out.
And maybe I just might write the entire rough draft of a story through dictation, speaking it.
Thank God for loving husbands and new technology.