It might be that weekly posts are all I can manage until the first draft of Fallen Warriors Season Two is complete. I met my target of 10,000 words today and did manage to hit 2,000 words each day this week.
That feels good. An accomplishment.
I haven’t managed much else, publishing wise.
I kept a record of time spent writing and word count achieved. It’s interesting looking at the numbers:
Three out of five days I took over four hours, the longest time being four hours, twenty five minutes. Then two days, today and yesterday almost half an hour faster on average.
My words per minute has really jumped around, with really slow points and then one half hour when I blitzed almost 500 words at a pace of 16 words each minute.
I’m only averaging around 8 words per minute though. That seems really slooow to me. It makes me more inclined to look at dictation.
Admittedly, the fact is I spend a lot of time just staring into space, thinking. So if you actually measured my typing speed when I was typing, it would likely be much faster. So dictation isn’t going to stop me needing to think and work through plot and character development.
But how much faster could it be?
Next week and the week after I’m not going to be able to write as much. I’m helping my parents move house and that needs to be my main priority. My word target for next week is just 7,000 words.
But I’m going to give Dragon dictation a go. Nuance offer a free one week trial of Dragon Anywhere and I’ve signed up this afternoon! This is an app you can install on Android or Apple phones and as long as you’ve an internet connection you can transcribe what you say.
Last week I bought The Writer’s Guide to Training Your Dragon: Using Speech Recognition Software to Dictate Your Book and Supercharge Your Writing Workflow by Scott Baker. I’m going to work through this while I get used to dictating and will let you know how I get on.
It might be too much to hope that I’ll exceed 7,000 words next week by starting to use dictation, but I’m hopeful. Even if I could reduce the time it takes to write the same amount of words, that would be a huge help and allow me to focus on other tasks I have waiting.
What helps you to write faster?