I always want to share my personal experiences with you. I want to be as real as possible with you. I want you to connect with me on a real level. I don't need you to wonder if I'm giving advice about something that I don't do.
Finding the right rhythm will take time and experimentation. We are on this journey together; that's why I'm dictating this book. I'm going way outside my comfort zone, but I will share every challenge I run into with you.
The problem at the restaurant yesterday with people distracting me or struggling with the blazing heat today and trying to keep my sweat from getting into my microphone, these are real challenges that you deserve to know.
These little struggles are part of the process, and I'm hoping that seeing me go outside my comfort zone will make you feel more comfortable with going outside of your comfort zone too.
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Growing Pains
Dragon Dictate can switch between apps, open a new tab in your browser, and head straight to your favorite website. You can completely control your computer using your voice.
But just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. Please don't unplug your keyboard today. I care about effective change more than I care about fast change. If you toss out your keyboard today, you will be digging through the dumpster by midnight. We want to learn dictation one little piece at a time.
Start with smaller projects like blog posts or emails and slowly build up. If you prefer, start with voice commands, and after you master those, start writing. Dictating is a different skill, and we want to slowly learn each different aspect of transcription.
Your first foray into dictation might be very, very frustrating; mine sure was. Trying to do everything on your computer with your voice will drive you crazy. It’s faster, but the learning curve is steep at first.
You have spent years, or maybe even decades like me, learning to master the keyboard. You can’t learn a comparative skill in an afternoon and replace all that hard work. Don’t expect the change to be instant and the transition will go a lot smoother. There are a lot of great things about dictation, but the growing pains, the frustration period, can be overwhelming. If you try to change too much too quickly, it will be too hard, and you will quit.
As long as you take it slowly and have the ability to switch back to your keyboard anytime you feel frustrated, you can be very, very successful.
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Dictation is Optional
You don't have to dictate to write fast. The majority of the techniques and processes in this book will work without using your voice. You can hit twenty thousand words a day using your keyboard. Don’t worry; I do it all the time.
When you outline correctly and properly structured, and when you get into your writing zone, you can write three thousand words an hour by hand.
When I talk about writing twenty thousand words a day, I never think about writing for ten hours straight. That's not fun. Writing should be awesome. Writing should be a pleasure. It should be something you enjoy.
I look forward to my writing sessions. I love my job. If I didn't enjoy writing, I wouldn't do it.
With my current level of career success, I don’t have to write another word to pay the bills. I write because I love it. I could work on many aspects of building a business online, but I choose to write because it’s a pleasure for me. I want you to enjoy writing as much as I do.
Any aspect of writing that diminishes your joy is a problem. Writing fast doesn’t have to be hard, painful, or unpleasant. If you don’t enjoy writing a book, how will someone else enjoy reading it?
As you master the skill of writing fast, focus on mastering one skill at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself.
If you dabble with dictation and it annoys you, take a breather. You don’t have to put a bunch of pressure on yourself. You can work on the other techniques and strategies from this book and try again later. There is no way I could write a book about writing fast and not have a big section on dictation. If it’s not working for you, then you can focus on the training drills and exercises from the first eighty percent of this book.
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Frustrations
I get frustrated about things all the time. The restaurant fiasco annoyed me, even though in the great scheme of life it’s not a big deal. In that moment I was frustrated. It messed up my entire day.
Only when I was able to record my night session did I start to feel good again. I hate when things interrupt my workflow, but it happens. It’s reality; we have to grow and adapt.
I'm not perfect. I have many flaws, and one of them is that when people interrupt my work, especially when I'm in the zone, it frustrates me. It's something that I'm working on improving. I always try to find a solution. I certainly don't want to be angry for days and days.
I was upset for about twenty minutes until we found a solution. My wife talked to the restaurant staff, and now that problem is gone forever. But it did hurt my workflow, and you're going to have those moments where you're trying to dictate and just hit a wall.
Suddenly everything you say appears as the wrong word on the screen. You see misspelling after misspelling. And it's frustrating. That's why I like dictating without seeing the words in front of me. I don't know the mistakes that are being made, and I don't have to deal with them until later.
During the editing process, I can deal with all that. I'd much rather be purely creative right now. I have several options for converting these dictation recordings into text files, so I don’t even have to think about that just yet.
Don't let yourself become frustrated. As soon as you've hit that moment where you lose your flow and the effort to dictate is more stressful than writing by hand, switch back. The journey is just as important as the destination.
You can always come back to dictation tomorrow when you are feeling refreshed.
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Action Steps
Transition to dictation slowly.
Start experimenting with dictation sprints.
Make a plan for switching back to typing when you start to feel frustration mounting.
Find a workflow that works for your rhythm and master it.
Alternate between typing and dictation sprints.
Part XXV
Jumping into Dictation
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
- Ray Bradbury
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Start Small
Our initial goal with dictation is not to replace your entire workflow, change the way you operate, limit you, or increase your frustration. Our goal is to increase how quickly you can generate the same number of words as you do when typing by hand.
Most of the processes in the 20K system are for writing by hand. You research by hand. You will create outlines, take notes and build mind maps with your keyboard.
I can't envision a way to dictate a mind map, but I'm sure that someone out there will prove me wrong. Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I use a keyboard for my entire pre-writing phase, everything from research to outlining.
Most of your creative process will still stay the same. I will not be editing this book by dictation. That's crazy. I can already see myself going crazy fighting with the computer over a misspelled word that I keep repeating, and the computer keeps misinterpreting. No thanks! That’s far too stressful and frustrating for my fragile psyche.
There is a scene that appears in some television shows and commercials. The actor keeps saying the same word over and over again, but the software hears the wrong word. That's happened to me before with dictation software, and it's annoying. It happens because computers are not perfect. Dictation software is very advanced, but you're going to run into a word here and there that your computer or smartphone just can't get right. For that reason, editing by hand is much quicker.
Most of your processes, from your entire pre-writing and research process, to your post-writing editing and rewriting process, will be done by hand. Keep that in mind as you transition
and use dictation more. Dictation is simply about helping you to generate words faster. Instead of working five or six hours a day you can just work one or two and produce the same number of words.
If you skip sections of the 20K system or blow off the exercises, dictation cannot make up for that. It cannot compensate for a bad process. If you prefer to write without an outline and “see where the page takes you,” then you will run into just as many speed bumps when you dictate as when you type. If you have to research on the fly, that inadequate preparation will not be cured by dictation. If you have no idea what your characters are going to do in the next scene or how your story will end, you will get the same writer's block no matter how you are writing. It's even harder to go back and forth between decision-making and dictating.
The same things that can hold you back when you're typing will hold you back when you're dictating. Do not slack off in those other areas and think dictation will make up for it. Having no plan for your scene means you have no plan for your scene no matter how you're going to write it.
234
Create Your Own Workflow
Choose the best workflow for you. You don’t need to replicate your favorite author to become a master of your craft. Everyone has a unique way of thinking, learning, and creating. Rather than fight against your programming, we want to maximize your natural potential.
The workflow for this book is to record each section of this book sitting out on my dock and to shoot each file to my computer using Dropbox. I then run each section through a batch transcription. That’s the process for this book, and it’s a new system for me.
I have since discovered that although I enjoy the writing process much more, I don’t like editing a book written this way. After several challenges with getting the audio converted into usable text, I find that editing this book is something I dread. This book is taking far longer to birth than any book I’ve worked on in the past.
I now know that I need to find a very specific type of editor to handle the first rough edit from my recordings and clean the book up a great deal. If I can find a human to take over that step in my workflow, then I will be able to dictate and release books much faster. This is a learning experience for me, and writing fast will be a learning experience for you as well.
If you have the patience to train your computer, sitting in front of the computer may be the best workflow for you. The only way to discover the best path for you is through experimentation. That’s exactly how I am approaching this process. I love the dictation part of the process, so now I simply need to test and refine the first round of editing. And then I will be off to the races.
You may find that you like seeing the words appear on the page as you dictate, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great workflow. You can easily crank out twenty thousand words a day using this method in just a few hours.
I can understand why seeing the words appear on the screen is very valuable, especially if you're writing a scene with dialogue. There is a lot of value to being able to see what the words look like as you're saying them because otherwise you may get lost in the conversation. You can't see the flow. I completely understand that, and when writing fiction scenes the structure of the words is critical.
Your workflow will be different than mine, and as you design your workflow, find what works exactly for you. You only need three pieces of technology. You need the microphone, the software or person that turns audio into text, and you need your word processor.
Experiment with your process. You can try different microphones and different recording locations. You can try different software options or use a human transcriptionist. For my workflow, the content I write is so massive that I prefer that human touch. This book is nearly one hundred thousand words. That’s a lot for a piece of software to process and adding in all that punctuation afterward can be a little overwhelming. But for cranking out an article or blog post in twenty minutes, dictation and a quick edit can’t be beaten.
There are plenty of services, and even some new apps, where you dictate and the software sends it to a person for transcription and then emails your file back to you. The only reason I’m not pushing everyone to hire transcriptionists is cost. Most places charge one to five dollars a minute, and that cost can add up. I researched a lot to find someone affordable for this project. After going through several initial editors and transcriptionists, I ended up paying around twenty cents per minute.
If each book I write is a five-hour dictation, that transcription will cost three hundred bucks at a dollar a minute. I certainly don’t want to spend fifteen hundred dollars a week turning my words into text. That's a huge expense, and it can eat into all of your business' profits.
Technology is far cheaper. Buy the software once for two hundred dollars, and with each book you write, you save more money. Depending on project length, you may decide to use different dictation methods. Right now that is my plan for the future.
I thought for a while that I could use Dragon to transcribe these recordings and then send them to an editor to clean up. They all ended up quitting. It turns out that process is way too hard. Part of my mistake with jumping in with both feet on this book was overenthusiasm. I dictated the book so quickly and sent it off to the first editor without engaging with the content directly. I need to spend more time training the software. I slacked off on that part of the process and paid the price.
You can run an audio file through the software and manually edit the transcription. This will teach the software what it got right and what it got wrong. Each time you do this, the software will improve. I have to be honest with you; I didn’t do that at all. I probably spent thirty seconds on that part of the process. I need to sit down with Dragon for an hour or two and teach it my voice. That one-time task will make a huge difference and is the next phase in my personal workflow experiment. This book is not the end of my journey to write faster; it is merely one step on the path of continual improvement.
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Test Your Workflow Phases
Once you've decided the workflow that you want to experiment with, you will move into further phases of experimentation. Your current workflow is merely a baseline, and you should always be looking for ways to improve each part of your process. Once you have a baseline, break down your writing process into discrete phases and experiment with replacing each one with dictation.
My writing process goes through several phases for each book or course I create. I start off with my idea phase. I experiment with a load of ideas that I think will be brilliant. I have around fifteen ideas for books that I will write in the Serve No Master series. Before I started writing this book, I very nearly wrote a book about reading fast. I read a book every single day, and that is a foundation that helps me to write faster. I also considered a book about the power of email marketing.
Using email correctly can be very lucrative for entrepreneurs and small businesses. It usually accounts for at least ninety percent of my profits. I also thought about a book on blogging. My blog is the cornerstone of my business, and I’m a big believer in that market. I have a massive course that I sell on my site to help people launch and make a living from blogs.
I had all of these ideas swirling in my head, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew that my next book had to be about writing fast. It’s a critical skill and a popular topic. It’s a very natural follow-up to the last book I wrote, Breaking Orbit, and I think it's very useful.
My first phase is coming up with ideas and making notes about the pros and cons of each idea. I use a keyboard for this process, but perhaps dictation works better for you. You can make little notes to yourself throughout the day as ideas inspire you. Lots of people do this.
The second phase is research and outlining. As you create the framework, you work your way forward through your different mind map layers. You continue to flesh out the outline with more details and grow your entire structure until you get to your deep sketch.
; There are many ways to handle this initial phase. I loved the computer scenes in the movie Minority Report. They are giant see-through iPads, and I want a computer just like that. From that inspiration, I outlined ten of my previous books using my iPad and a simple mind mapping app.
For this book, I used a keyboard to research and outline. I am also editing and rewriting using a keyboard. Only for my creative "pure writing" phase am I dictating from my beautiful dock.
You don’t need to replicate me or my process. My process isn’t finalized. I am going to experiment with a few new ideas for the next book and the one after that. Writing is a process of continual improvement and refinement.
For each of these different phases, you can choose whether to use a keyboard or your mouth. The only phase where I dictate is the creation phase. But you may find that you dictate better during your research phase. You record all your ideas in order, and then copy them into a document. And those dictations become the skeleton of your next masterpiece.
You could even use dictation in your editing process. I don't recommend that because it's twice as hard, but it’s a choice you have the option of making. I'm not going to force you to do everything the way I do. Decide where you're going to use dictation in your process, but don't use it everywhere.
Learning to dictate can be a little overwhelming at first, so please don’t throw away your keyboard on the first day. There is no need to upload an epic video of you smashing, burning, or destroying your keyboard to YouTube. I love the movie Office Space as much as the next person, but we don’t want to jump into destroying office equipment until we don’t need it anymore.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 26