I dictated a little over 1000 words of finished prose for my manuscript today.
But it wasn't easy.
Was dictation worth it? (30 secs)
Can AI Dictation Actually Write your novel? (6 mins)
Cleaned up Transcript:
Hey there, it's Keith Hayden, the digital novelist here for the Novel Revealed podcast.
I wanted to talk a little bit about dictation and starting at a point in your novel where you're not used to starting.
Additionally, I want to talk about just some of the reflections that I had from this morning's writing session.
Writing the text
This morning just finished working on a very long sequence. It's about a little over 2,000 words, which is very long for a single sequence.
But this was a pacing chapter since we're about to move into a pretty much dead sprint to it's going to be very action-oriented for the next scene.
So I wanted to kind of set the scene, allow the protagonist time to recover physically in world.
Furthermore, I wanted to have him go through and interact with locals and actually flesh out their resistance to this island occupation because this takes place in Okinawa.
It's a fictional occupation of the island and our protagonist is trapped on one of the islands at this point in the story. It's called Ie Island, (Iejima). That was the task.
I did about half of the writing yesterday, but I wasn't satisfied with the scene. It just wasn't it wasn't long enough. It wasn't detailed enough. I didn't really get there.
Therefore today, I knew I wanted to add a lot more to flesh it out. But I decided to do something that I haven't done in a long time, which is dictate the story.
Now in the past my problem with dictation is that you had to just say and he did this period and then there was a shot fired comma blah blah blah.
It was very prescriptive and very stiff. I don't like working that way. I'm a very more organic type of writer. So I used ChatGPT to dictate it.
I got a good outline of the scenes that I wanted to add to this particular chapter. And then I went back and had it give me story beats. Not just what happens, I wanted it to help me expand on my thoughts as I dictated so it had more to work with.
Questions like what was he feeling at that time? What did he observe? And that allowed it to be a little bit more organic.
Lessons from dictation
I think the lesson learned from this is that even with dictation, especially when you're using AI, I still wanted to go back and correct what the AI wrote.
Not because what it wrote was wrong, but because usually it's not as interesting as what I would write. It typically writes very standard status quo sentences. That's boring. Dictation through AI got my ideas on the screen faster, but I had to take extra time to adjust the tone, style, and sentence quality.
Was it worth it to do the dictation because I ended up writing most of it over again?
It's a different way to work and I'm glad it's an option that AI can expand upon what I say and what I dictate.
I'm glad that exists, but at the end of the day, the process still needed hours of revision before it was ready for the final manuscript.
Dictation with AI wasn't faster, easier, or more accurate than just writing on my own. It wasn't easier. It wasn't more accurate. But with modern text-to-speech technology so advanced, it is a viable option for organizing your thoughts around your story.
What do you think of dictation? Have you ever tried it? Have you used it? Do you want to use it?
Let me know in the comments.
Subscribe to this channel. Head to my website, keithhhatden.net, to check out more of my writing, working on this military sci-fi horror novel.
Getting closer and closer every day to being done.
Exhibit 063 - AI Analysis (37 mins)
