This morning I woke up earlier as part of my NaNoWriMo kickoff. But not too much earlier. Just 30 minutes. Then I had a cup of tea to fortify myself, laced up my Kangaroo sneakers and off I went to start my great American novel.
I mean, I was armed with my iPhone 6 and the standard earbuds Apple ships with the phone. I turned on Siri and started dictating the opening scene into the Bywords app. I would hit “done” periodically and then start dictating again. It was brilliant and it was FREE. Most importantly, I had emailed everything to myself (Bywords has an export feature) so I had a backup too.
You do have to look at your phone on occasion to make sure the dictation is actually on, as it will shut off after long pauses, or after you hit done.
20 minutes later, I had to return to make breakfast and wake the children. But I had 600 words done on my word count and was back on my normal workday schedule.
Happy Writing!
Stinson Beach, After Sunset
PS – if you find that the phone method is too harrowing, the other method is to actually use a dictaphone recorder which will save everything to a .wav file or similar and then you can feed back to a transcription service.
