Overcoming Writer´s Block

This article is originally published by Descript.

If you’re a writer — of books, essays, scripts, blog posts, whatever — 

you’re familiar with the phenomenon: the blank screen, a looming deadline,

and a sinking feeling in your gut that pairs poorly with the jug of coffee you drank earlier.

If you know that rumble all too well: this post is for you.
Maybe it’ll help you get out of a rut; at the very least, it’s good for a few minutes of
procrastination.

Here’s the core idea: thinking out loud is often less arduous than writing.
And it’s now easier than ever to combine the two,
thanks to recent advances in speech recognition technology.

Of course, dictation is nothing new — and plenty of writers have taken advantage of it.
Carl Sagan’s voluminous output was facilitated by his process of speaking
into an audio recorder, to be transcribed later by an assistant
(you can listen to some of his dictations in the Library of Congress!)
And software like Dragon’s Naturally Speaking has offered automated transcription
for people with the patience and budget to pursue it.

But it’s only in the last couple of years that automated transcription has reached a sweet spot
 — of convenience, affordability and accuracy—that makes it practical to use it more casually.
And I’ve found it increasingly useful for generating a sort of proto-first draft:
an alternative approach to the painful process of converting the nebulous wisps inside
your head into something you can actually work with.

I call this process idea extraction (though these ideas may be more accurately
dubbed brain droppings).

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