Voice Writing

I'm going to take you on a walk and talk to explore a new writing style (and experience a brief encounter with 5000 guinea pigs)

Look. It’s lovely where I live.

I’m writing with my voice directly into Google Docs on my phone - which also transcribes what I’m saying. Relatively effectively. For free! I’m doing it as is an exercise, to build a new muscle for creative writing.

It’s not meant to replace anything. It won’t be the only way that I write from now on. It’s just that every time I add a skill my writing life gets better and more interesting.

I learned how to touch type as an adult so I could crank out plot on the story table for a TV soap. It’s made a big difference ever since. I’m trying to improve my handwriting, which I use daily for my journal and character work. Soon I’d like to send out a story in the form of handwritten letters that come at regular intervals. So if I ask you for your address, that’s why.

Note: take a picture of that cool book I bought.

Done.

I’ve never had a problem coming up with ideas. My problem has been getting them down in ways that make it easier for me to tinker with them.

Writing is rewriting

Let’s talk it out

I heard about some contemporary writers who dictate the all-important first draft - that mess of blah that the final thing looks nothing like, but without which there can’t be a final thing at all.

The spunk that makes the baby.

(Sorry.)

So I bought a book on voice-writing by two of them called How to be a Dictator.

I mean, On Being a Dictator

Sometimes, as a writer, you have to choose the cute title over the search engine optimisation.

I read it, then started training. I use some of my morning walk time to compose first drafts of emails that I send to friends. This is the first time that I’ve used it for a Substack. I’m trying to get myself into a zone where I can write first draft dialogue with my voice. After all…

Voice writing was the original writing.

Plato, St. Augustine, my mum. Lots of people whose words wind up on the page originally composed out loud for someone to transcribe.

How timely. I’m reading about the life of the Sackler family - and playboy Mortimer Sackler’s on holiday overlooking the mediterranean at Cap D’Antibes where

He mingled with a cohort of jet-set expatriates like the novelist and screenwriter Paul Gallico, who was married to a baroness (his fourth wife) and lived in a nearby villa, where he composed his books by dictating, with long pauses, to an American secretary.

Empire of Pain, by Patrick Raddeh Keefe, p.109

I’m combining voice writing with walking

Which I don’t think St. Augustine’s scribes could have done. Here I’m following in the footsteps of Norfolk’s finest: W.G. Sebald’s (captured by my auto-transcriber as WGC Bowden).

He’s a German national who spent the most fruitful part of his career in Norfolk. Much of his work was done near me, inspired and mentally shaped on long walks across this countyside: Norfolk and Suffolk. Unfortunately, he fell out of contention for ‘world’s greatest living writer’ when he died in 2001.

If you don’t know his work, and you’re interested, start here.

I don’t know why I’m telling you that. Or if it’s on topic. But I’ll leave it in.

I’m walking past my neighbour’s guinea pig farm.

Do you know that a male guinea pig is a boar, and a female is a sow? Just like pigs. But the offspring are called pups. Strange world.

He’s often mucking out his guinea pig troughs when I go by, but not today. I can hear the sound of a radio he plays to keep them calm. It’s surprisingly upbeat music. Not dancehall bangers, but definitely some heart-rending ballads. I hope they can’t understand the news bulletins.

I like to talk to him. He has a pure, Norfolk accent, which the Friends of Norfolk Dialect (FOND) were formed in 1999 to conserve and record. If you want to know what it (and he sounds like)…

See you next week.