Or, at least, trying. My hero and her best friend are trying to escape discovery after nearly being spotted by a group of soldiers that they didn’t recognize. On their way out of the castle remains, they also need to encounter and pick up my jester character, completing the cast for the next step of the journey.
But while I had the structure of this scene clearly in my head, I’m really struggling to get it onto the page through dictation. It’s so much faster when I type. I can picture the scene better if I can see the words, and the flow sticks better in my thoughts. If I’m trying to walk, talk, and picture the scene, it still just doesn’t connect as well.
I know that this is just a matter of skill and time and that I can overcome it with practice, but it’s like when I tried to snowboard. I have a hard time continuing to justify to myself why I’m trying to do this new thing, when skiing was so easy and it feels much better. (I gave up on snowboarding, and I’m not sad about it one bit).
But I don’t want to give up on dictation like I did with snowboarding. I think this is a valuable skill. But in addition to dictating my story, I really need to work in some deliberate practice – and that can be what I do in my free time. I was talking yesterday about just that problem. For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about basically reading a book out loud to practice dictation. Maybe getting used to dictating something that already has a strong story structure will help.