“Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall between the story in the mind and what hits the page.”
That’s novelist Richard Powers, essaying a defense of his method: he dictates all his work directly into a tablet PC via voice recognition software that transcribes his words (or most of them) directly onto the screen before him as he speaks. His magnificent, complex, challenging novels are defense enough, in my view. Powers is a National Book Award winner. His Echo Maker and Galatea 2.0 are on my short list of all-time favorites.
It sounds seductive: “The faster I speak, the better my tablet PC transcribes. It won’t choke, even at bursts over 200 wpm… I can write lying down. I can forget the machine is even there. I can live above the level of the phrase, thinking in full paragraphs and capturing the rhythmic arcs before they fade.”
I mention Powers and his dictating ways this morning because yesterday I installed “Dragon Naturally Speaking” on my own tablet PC, and am dreaming of the possibilities. Unlike Powers I won’t stop pounding the keyboard, but I do intend to compose some first drafts on my pocket recorder before letting the software do its magic. I like to walk. I often talk (to my Olympus) while walking already. With a little help from Dragon, maybe I can turn my vocal perambulations into prose that moves on page and screen as fluidly as on street and trail. Stay tuned.
P.S. Thank you, Ray Kurzweil. You may not live forever, but I think you deserve many more years for your labors in creating this technology.
Tags: Dragon Naturally Speaking, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Powers, speech recognition software, walking, writing
Up@dawn 
May 4, 2009 at 7:13 pm |
Isn’t that kinda what Woody Allen was getting at in that great scene in “Manhattan”? What make live worth living . . .? I like it.
May 4, 2009 at 7:37 pm |
Yes indeed. Woody was lounging on his couch while dictating into his unwieldy analog recorder, which wouldn’t have held many more than ten “things that make [life] worthwhile”… while my Olympus is so small that I constantly misplace it, yet so capacious that I am physically incapable of speaking enough words in a month to fill it up. And it plugs right into the USB port, no muss no fuss. But yes, the idea is to capture words worth sharing while engaged in the business of “real life.” Economy and global politics aside, this is a good time to be alive.