A few years ago, a friend on Facebook, Colette, ran a little group.
This was a little before AI got stuffed down our throats.
There was a tiny group of people who got together, who wanted to learn how to write faster and at the time she was banging out books left and right, which is an insane feat anyways.
Now I can generally type about 100-120 words per minute on a good day, especially when my wrists aren’t killing me, because, hey, back when I was younger, I nearly killed myself doing stupid shit like downhill mountain biking and playing hockey and all of that.
Colette ran this group and she was like, “Why don’t you just dictate?”
So the idea was to use a note app, talk using your phone and let whatever microphone magic was available unfold.
Even my boy Ben Settle spoke about a transcription service called Rev which I would later go on to use.
And so I went down that rabbit hole for a little while.
Looking back at Ben and his stuff.
Essentially, all he does is he goes for a walk and he talks to himself, and before you know it BAM. Emails written. Books written and ideas just there, ready to be transcribed, edited and sent out into the world.
And if anyone knows me in person. I’m very good at talking to myself, so I thought, “You know what? I’ll give it a go.” and the results were pretty damn crazy, even if I do say so myself.
When I was still ghostwriting and banging out short stories. I would just talk them into existence and clients were surprised that I could hand off high quality writing that quickly.
And while nowadays there seems to be a bunch of bullshit littered across the internet cause everyone just drops a silly little prompt into the theft machine of choice. The output is so boring and bland and lacks any sort of character.
So we’re getting massive quantities of ass content and there’s not really much we can do about it.
So over the last few days I just thought to myself. Maybe I should just do my regular rants and emails but start by speaking it.
And so here we are. (This here email was spoken into existence btw)
It sounds more like I talk because when you sit down and just write.
Your brain does this weird thing where it puts it’s little professional writer pants on and structures it a little more. It’s not bad and it’s definitely 300% better than fapgpt, so you can’t go wrong either way but the point is. If we want to fight the slop producers. We better optimise how quickly we can get our thoughts out into the world.
Turbo tangent: As much as I don’t mind the mechanical process of typing, I’ve always said that typing is not writing.
Writing is the act of sitting your ass on a chair, notepad, pencil, pen, and and doing the deed of writing.
That’s what I still do to this day. I sit down and I write, scratch away on the paper, noodle around the words, cross them out, underline them etc, all internet and distraction free.
The other boring part is me sitting my ass back down, behind my desk on my computer and then I type and type and type and re write and edit until I want to jump into the nearest pond. It does come out alright though and it feels good when you’ve tidied it all up and thrown it out into the world.
There’s also this other cool side effect called “The Law of State Transference” which in a nutshell and applied to writing is…
Whatever state you’re in. Happy, sad, angry etc. You are actually getting your own cadence into it, like the flow of words and feelings and and some how it just sandwiches together nicely.
And so if you feel you writing has lost a bit of its soul. Maybe you should give it a little go.
Talk your words and then fix ’em up.
Anyways. This email is starting to have no rhyme or reason and turning into a scatter brained mess.
So I’ll leave you with this.
If you’re stuck and can’t feel the “muse” and want to get something out there…
Talk about things. Just go off on a rant. Record it and transcribe it. Give it a bash and tell me what you think.
You’d be surprised how fun “writing” become again.
On that note. Now I need some water cause talking is hard.
Stephen Walker.