#WritersCoffeeClub 30: How much would writing by another means (by hand, digitally, audio transcription) change your prose?
Significantly!
I started out writing on a manual typewriter, then an electric one, before graduating to a word processor. Each change lowered the barrier to composition, at word/sentence level then structural level.
Audio transcription is impossible for prose fiction—it's entirely incompatible with the way I compose text, and suffers from a highly restricted vocabulary.
@cstross You have the opposite problem when writing down something you're planning to read in front of people. Suddenly you realize you sound like a book. (Could be fine, or not, depending on the context--in my case it's intro'ing silly old movies and people do not want a lecture!)
@cstross Richard Powers has said that he uses speech recognition software (Dragon, I believe).
https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/id/16685/
@IzzyChambers I dare you to write fiction using it. With complex punctuation (brackets—even em-dashes!) and "quoted" dialog. And a vocabulary that is both squamous AND rugose!
(Novelists are an unprofitable edge-case of the market for writing tools. A few niche products such as @scrivenerapp exist to serve us, but most tools are inappropriate: eg. using Microsoft Word is like driving a fork-lift truck for your daily office commute.)
@cstross I wasn't trying to argue with you. I agree with your fundamental point, but I wanted to point out that there is at least one very accomplished author who uses speech recognition software.
I used Dragon every day for years as a lawyer. Because I was a very specialized lawyer working primarily in federal securities laws (mostly mutual funds and investment advisers), I didn't use the legal version of the software, but instead used the general purpose version. These days, I rarely use Dragon because I am mostly using Linux and the only way to use Dragon on my PC is to run it on Windows in a virtual machine.
I don't have your talents to write fiction, and I think that my years as a lawyer have largely made me incapable of writing anything resembling fiction. Having said that, if I were trying to feed myself by writing fiction, I would start with Dragon, and use its customization tools.
@cstross I would start with using Dragon's tools to make its vocabulary and word usage as much like what I intended to write as possible. If I were an established author such as you, I would feed it my most recent work. I would add as many specialized words as I needed. (I had to do these things in my niche legal practice.)
Then, I would think about ways to use either custom commands or vocabulary entries to simplify particular types of complex punctuation (brackets and even — are already part of Dragon's vocabulary, but I'm sure that it would not be too difficult to think of things that could be simplified in dictation. I was pretty good at writing custom commands and a friend of mine even encouraged me to write a handbook on the topic, but I never got around to drafting much of anything.
@cstross in Agatha Christie’s bio, she describes how when she first got a secretary and starting recording the stories for the secretary to type up, it didn’t immediately go well, as she found she made the noises her characters were making, rather than the more useful descriptions of what they were doing (but iirc she figured it out 😊 )
@cstross
In principle, audio #transcription includes #dictating to a person, and offers the real intelligence feature of watching the #human react.
Jubal Harshaw is running through my mind.
Including "oh I finished that one boss and sent it off"
@cstross "Audio transcription is impossible for prose fiction".
Tell Lionel Fanthorpe that!
@klepsydra His audio transcription toolchain had artificial intelligence in it, though! (I mean, it had intelligences, and he and his wife made them ...)
(contd.) Speech transcription software is not designed for prose fiction, it's designed for business correspondence. Can't recognize dialog tags, is bad at punctuation, and caters only to the most frequently used words.
Imagine trying to dictate a paragraph like this (see alt-text):
@cstross this is what I got from Transcribro (https://github.com/soupslurpr/Transcribro): permanence was a thing of whispers and rumour, routinely abnulliated by those who might otherwise record it clearly, because if an ascendant house felt themselves, produced, they might demonstrate their displeasure with the gossip-mongers by plucking out tongues and administering hydrofluoric acid enemies.
@cstross I am absolutely not uptodate with the latest speech recognition tech, but:
- would there be a way to refine the model by further training it on you past books (and un-released manuscripts) and on audiobook readings of ypur books? So it gets more used to the vocabulary and style you use in your writings.
@cstross Hydrofluoric, that's the real nasty one, isn't it? The one that causes a chain reaction crystallisation in human blood.
@cstross
Difference between a writer and a normal person prone to unusual word choices: if I used the magnificent word "obnubilated" in a sentence, it would attract lots of negative attention. A lot of "how dare you use words I haven't heard before, who do you think you are?" The reasoning of which has always escaped me.
@cstross
The story of prolonged interruption of its development when the Mafia got involved was interesting.
Via Voice via vice.
@cstross Ah. I thought I was somehow doing it wrong. So many run-on sentences to fix. I tried to say “period” at the ends of sentences. Sometimes it was just another word to fix.
