With my second second scene planned, I went out this morning again for a dictation walk, but I’m still struggling with it. I should have reviewed my notes before I left.
I started the scene with my hero in the wrong mood and ended up repeating some of the end of the previous chapter. But I only discovered that when I got back to my computer and started to try to clean up the text. So, I ended up wasting nearly all of my time fixing that and trying to get the story back into place. In the end, I got less than 400 words into the story, which was highly disappointing.
Days like this, part of me wants to give up on the whole dictation idea and go back to writing by hand, where I can refer to my notes as I go. But on the other hand. . . this is just like my writing career in general. I need to take a long view. I’m not going to figure out dictation magically all at once. Just like I am not going to become a bestseller with my first novel. It’s about the long term goals. If I can get as good with my voice as I am with my fingertips, it will serve me with faster writing in the future.
In the meantime, I have to deal with frustrations like today, when I lose time and words, when things don’t go according to plan. I hate that today ended up with little more than a few words of description and setting up my hero’s mood for the scene without any substance. But I have to accept it.