I can get very distracted, very easily. Join the club, right?
It’s a huge challenge for me to write sometimes—especially online, like here—because every time I get near the intrawebz, I instantly find myself looking at a hundred different things other than what I’m supposed to be doing at the moment. I wish I had a dollar for every time that I needed to look up a name or a word, open up my browser and then see there’s a message in my email … then I’ll see see a headline … which may lead me to Twitter or Facebook … which leads to how many subsequent sites … and then I realized that I’ve wasted a lot of time and it’s time for me to get back to what I was originally writing, so I go to close my browser and—
D’OH! I *never* got to the original thing I was looking for.
A few months ago I got to interview David Pogue, technology blogger for the New York Times, and one of the things he talked about was that he thought the Next Big Tech Thing is going to be whoever creates a decent digital-curation system, i.e., a way to sort the mountains and mountains of electronic information coming at you from the intrawebz, news sources, social media, smartphones, etc. As he put it, right now trying to process information can be a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. I certainly feel like that some, if not most, days.
Sometimes I look back at my writing from years ago and I think it was dramatically better and generally more entertaining. That was back before YouTube, Fark, College Humor, Awkward Family Photos, Funny or Die, Cracked, Reddit, The Jets Blog or any of the other ten bajillion sites out there that suck me into their web and away from doing anything that actually might be useful ….
Then again, you’re here reading this … oh, the irony.
Anyway, it doesn’t help that I’m a very slow writer start with. I know what the most of how I express myself looks fairly effortless and somewhat conversational but it actually it takes a lot of work to make it like that. I don’t write as much as I write and rewrite and rewrite, going back over each sentence over and over again. I’m jealous of writers who can generate first drafts that are coherent and brilliant, and then only need to tweak from there.
Let’s put it this way: My process is that I sort of throw up a jumbled lump of clay, and then work it over and over and over until I get something that seems kinda passable, and then with a bit of polishing (sprinkle in those shiny adjectives and metaphors), and eventually it resembles something that can be called “writing.”
I think that it’s because my approach is so labor intensive that I always refer to myself as “a guy who writes” as opposed to “a writer.” Even simple emails take me a long time to bang out because I go back over each word and sentence trying to hone then something that seems intelligible, interesting and, most importantly, comprehensible. A typical blog post, like this one, that you can read in five minutes, if not less, usually takes me about five hours to write. No joke.
Actually, there’s an old joke among writers: “I would have written less except I didn’t have enough time.” I soooo appreciate this! I don’t seem to have enough time in my life to start with, and then to struggle to to get a message across as concisely as possible (which takes even more time), all while trying to avoid the ever-growing minefield of distractions … it can get a little dizzying at times.
Well for this post that you’re reading I decided to try a new approach: voice recognition software.
Yes, I guess you can say I cheated. Although, if I didn’t tell you that I used voice recorder to create the majority of this post you wouldn’t have noticed it. Of course, I still had to go back and edit it quite heavily—for example, earlier I mentioned “ten bajillion” websites, but it was recorded as “Tenba Jillian,” which sounds to me like a reggae band. And for most of the process, I have felt akin to Stephen Hawking, trying to communicate in an odd, stilted way as the app I downloaded for my iPhone only can record/transcribe in short, sentence-or-two bursts. But I was able to get the majority of this post out in a quarter of the time I have in the past, so that’s a good thing.
Too good a thing, though?
Okay, it does seem like I’m sort of cheating here, but is it really any different than using dictation? Milton, Dostoevsky and Henry James all dictated works that have become classics of literature, so I guess that puts me in good company. Well, at least in terms of process, if not actual results. Hopefully, one leads to the other, right? Work smarter, not harder, as my friend Patti likes to say.
But in the world where there’s lots of distractions, sitting in a room by myself without a computer—or more importantly, without the internet staring me in the fact—seems like a good way to write faster, and ultimately, better—without actually having to write anything.
So to speak.
I appreciate your patience as I test this process. I hope that going forward being able to do incorporate this time-saver will actually give me an opportunity to share more than I would normally. Lucky you!