Talking to Myself

It's been about twelve years since I gave up the keyboard and took up a microcassette recorder for writing my first drafts. Since that time, I've dictated nearly fifty novels on an innumerable number of microcassettes, speaking the words aloud, rather than typing them fresh into my word processor.

While this might not seem to be a writer's traditional technique, remember that the storyteller's art has always been a spoken one. Revered shamans would tell tales around the campfire, legends of monsters in the darkness or heroes who killed the biggest mammoth. Homer did not write his epics down.

What could be more natural than speaking your novel aloud before committing the words to a computer hard drive or an editor's red pencil?

To me, one of the primary advantages of writing with a tape recorder is that I can be outside in a spectacular area, bombarded with inspiration. There, the details of nature or history itself can provide story fodder.

Years ago, under a tight deadline for one of my Star Wars novels, DARK APPRENTICE, I went to Sequoia National Park, where I planned to isolate myself and get a lot of writing done. After I had settled into my cabin, a mountain snowstorm hit and made the roads impassable. The next day, I trudged out into the new-fallen snow, breaking trail among the pine trees and winding along cross-country ski paths to see frozen waterfalls and beautiful ice shelves on granite outcroppings.

While I walked, smelling the frosty air, seeing my breath in front of me and listening to the wind in the Sierra Nevada mountains, I wrote about Han Solo on the polar icecaps of an alien world. Since I am not able to visit arctic zones on other planets, this was the perfect place to draw inspiration.

Other times I have hiked through the arid canyons of Death Valley, along dried ocean beds and over powdery sand dunes. While feeling the heat and the dry crackling air, I have written many DUNE chapters. The same goes for the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. What could be a better place?

Even if I'm not in a place precisely comparable to the subject matter at hand, I can still experience sounds and smells and sensations that add vivid details to my prose -- details I might not remember while sitting numbed in my cluttered office at home.

Another advantage of dictating while out walking is the solitude and the peace-of-mind I encounter. While hiking, I can let my mind sink into the universe of your story, blessedly without interruptions. Out on the trail with the tape recorder, I can avoid telephone calls, faxes, the temptation to log on and read my email, do the dishes, scrub the toilets, clean the attic. . . .

Let's face it, writing is a sedentary profession. Full-time authors spend their days seated firmly in the chair, fingers the keyboard, without a great deal of invigorating exercise. Personally, I hate being cooped up in the office and would rather be hiking, or even just walking along bike paths in an urban area.

Once I learned how to dictate, no longer did I have to choose between a day of hiking or a day of writing. I can do both at the same time. It keeps me fit and active.

On the more serious side, some writers are medically forced to give up the keyboard and must choose between giving up writing altogether or finding a different method. My wife Rebecca suffered from severe carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and cubital tunnel nerve entrapment in both elbows, which in the end cost her four surgeries and a draconian reduction of her keyboard time.

Rebecca had always considered my technique of dictating to be somewhat eccentric, but now she found herself forced to get a headset and tape recorder of her own.

When I'm out dictating I manage to produce far more pages in less time than if I'm chained to my desk. I've even learned how to fool myself into writing more than I originally intended to do. In a trick I call the "round-trip deception," I will keep hiking outbound until I have completed one entire chapter . . . at which point I should have just enough time on the way back to dictate another full chapter. Since I have to walk back anyway, I might as well be writing.

During a week I spent in southern Utah last year, I hiked a total of fifty miles and wrote 168 pages in The Saga of Seven Suns, as well as this article. (Hmmm, that's about three-and-a-half pages per mile!) It would have been impossible for me to do that much at home with numerous distractions.

Yes, the most obvious drawback with dictation is that all those tapes have to be transcribed. If you look in the Acknowledgments of every one of my books in the past decade, you'll see our assistant Catherine Sidor listed, who works furiously to keep up with the tapes I give her. I just went out for a long walk this morning and handed her a full tape with three new SANDWORMS chapters. I think her fingers are shorter now than they were when she started working for me.

Previously, when Catherine was also having trouble with her wrists, I turned to a commercial transcriber from the Yellow Pages. I burned her out with a single DUNE tape (from HOUSE CORRINO, I think); she simply couldn't handle all the strange science fiction words!

Some people try the recorder once and give up, claiming that it feels too ³unnatural.² By comparison, writers are accustomed to thinking up sentences, breaking them down into words, spelling those words, then moving their fingers across a scrambled keyboard to put down the prose one letter at a time. (Remember, the QWERTY keyboard was intentionally designed to SLOW DOWN typists.) Just talking out loud doesn't seem any less natural to me!

And I get to be outside hiking in my beautiful state . . . and I tell myself I'm WORKING.

--KJA

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