I haven’t been posting all that much lately, but it’s not because I haven’t been writing. I have been writing plenty. I was thinking the other day about just how much I’ve been writing, and about how many different ways I’ve been writing.
The predominant, most common way in which I’ve been writing is dictating into my little portable voice recorder. Not infrequently, I loop it around one of my two wedding rings—the one I wear on a necklace around my neck—and I just talk to myself as I walk down the street, or lie on my couch, or do whatever. Periodically, I upload the recordings from my little recorder to a file in Google Drive dedicated to the transcription of such messages, and then I end up with an emailed transcript of whatever I spoke.
I have a couple of different permutations of this. Different folders lead to slightly different processing. For example, I have a journal in the form of a secret, password-protected blog. Audio files uploaded to the Google Drive folder called “journal” result in new entries in my journal. Audio files uploaded to the folder called “just to transcribe” result in an email with a simple transcription sent to me. Emails uploaded into a folder called “MDL” result in transcriptions sent to a different email address that is dedicated to this blog. Transcriptions uploaded to a folder called “process” get subjected to a fairly comprehensive script which leads to their being processed into outlines and summaries and a variety of other useful steps.
Anyway, here’s the point: While OpenAI has relaxed their censorship somewhat in recent months, blog posts of the sort that I like to write for this blog often feature words or topics which OpenAI struggles to handle faithfully. Sometimes it simply refuses. Sometimes it sanitizes or substitutes. Whatever the case, it’s not a reliable way of transcribing sexually explicit voice recordings, which sucks, because this is the primary way that I’ve been writing.
There are, of course, other ways. There’s typing on my computer, or swiping on my phone. There’s writing by hand, which requires subsequent retyping or transcription in some form. All the different mediums produce different forms of self-censorship and expression.
Handwriting, I’ve always found tiring. So when I write things by hand, I tend to write less. Add to that the fact that I think fast and write slow, but type faster. So when I’m writing by hand, my writing tends to be more deliberate, less stream-of-consciousness. For some types of writing, this is good. For others, less so.
But the main point here is that at the current moment, I have 37,000 draft posts languishing in fifteen different venues. I’ve asked Cee to help a little with this—something she did briefly, and then stopped—and then I asked again, and then she forgot. But who knows? I expect she’ll engage once again. But I’ve only got her engaged with one of the venues in which my drafts are currently languishing, and it’s the venue in which the oldest drafts languish, not the more recent ones. So once she engages with that, maybe I’ll slide her engagement forward and have her look at some of the more recent drafts.
There’s a second problem with my dictation strategy, which has to do with editing. Editing is an important part of writing—I’ve been told. I’ve read that many places. I know it instinctively to be true. But as I’ve written before, this blog is not a place where I’ve done an enormous amount of editing.
When I began writing in 2010, it really was almost exclusively stream-of-consciousness. I was focused on getting my ideas out, not on expressing myself clearly or well, let alone beautifully. I’ve never considered myself a particularly good writer. I think I’m an effective writer. I think I have interesting thoughts and communicate them clearly, but I don’t think my writing is beautiful. I don’t think it has an interesting or compelling structure. I think I’m a mediocre storyteller, and I think I’m shit at description.
What I’m good at is translating my thoughts into words and communicating. The art of communicating in writing—which I think I do excel at—is very different from the art of communicating in spoken text, at which I think I also excel. But something gets lost in translation.
Just for shits and giggles, I’m going to post this post unedited. That’s to say, what you are reading is the words I spoke into my voice recorder. There’s one exception to this, which is that, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, some of my transcript processing manages to insert paragraph breaks nicely, and some of it doesn’t. Anything I do for this blog seems not to get paragraph formatted. [Ed. note: this post, miraculously, got separated into paragraphs, so I haven’t had to fix that particular problem.]
So then I have the option of either spending time deciding where to put paragraph breaks, or feeding you a simple wall of text—which I just don’t have the heart to do. Add to that, I like to include internal links in my posts, and external links where appropriate. While I’m sure there are ways this could be automated, I am not among the sliver of our general population capable of that task. So, internal and external linking is an editorial step.
Never mind all that. This is going to show you just how raw and unexpurgated my dictated musings can be, and how important editing is.