About ten days ago I subscribed to a blog about writing, and then began receiving emails from the blogger, Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer. The emails highlighted her mission to convince writers to dictate their novels, rather than compose them by fingers on a keyboard.

(By Holger.Ellgaard – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5706078)

I never considered trying this, and it was not something I could imagine doing, since I’m accustomed to staring at a screen, writing a few paragraphs, reading them, making changes, reading them again, making more changes, and setting the words aside until the next day when I reread and make more changes.

Dictation frightened me. How could I ever spit out a paragraph without writing it first and then reading it aloud? And, why would I want to try?

I did have one reason to make a change. It’s called aging. A younger friend and I are writing a mystery. We started in 2023. My goal is finish our mystery, which is a cross between a cozy and a whodunnit and a comedy. It’s embarrassing to admit how long the process is taking. I just had a birthday and would like to finish before I’m too old and drifting into my own twilight zone.

This pressure led me to sign up for a free lecture on the process of dictation. Sawyer’s key argument was that dictation is fast. While the speed angle is a good one, I’m skeptical I can dictate intelligible scenes quickly, but still curious to learn how dictation works. Her thirty-minute presentation was followed by a fifteen-minute sales pitch, after which I decided to sign up for her package. How could I not? It was going for half price!

While signing up for this program was indeed impulsive, it wasn’t the same as responding to unwanted texts asking me to take care of my unpaid toll bills or postal service complaints that they don’t have my correct address. Hmm. The toll bills were from the east coast, where we don’t live. And we’ve been at the same address for nearly fifty years and the postal service has no problem delivering the junk mail.

My point is I can distinguish between scams and come-ons, though it’s obvious that I can be easily persuaded by a come-on.

After paying my money, the next few steps I took made me question my involvement with this program. The first lesson covered recording tools and transcription services. My research on these left me in a complete muddle and scared that I would have to spend more money than I expected.

A few days later I had a one-on-one session with Sawyer who showed me that I could easily record on my laptop and phone and watch as my spoken words printed immediately into a Word document.

My current assignment is to write Morning Pages* for five consecutive days. This involves getting up early and dictating three pages of whatever comes to mind. They don’t have to make sense. You just have to keep writing, or in my case, talking. A writer friend has been writing Morning Pages for years. It’s a habit she developed many years ago to which she is still committed. I read another testimonial saying “Morning Pages changed my life.” I wonder how many days of getting up early and rambling into my computer are required before this can happen.

I’ve been dictating Morning Pages the past four days. The only change in my life so far is that I’m sleepy by mid-afternoon, but I am getting comfortable with dictation even if much of what I dictate makes no sense. And talking to a machine before my day gets going has been a positive experience, especially considering the alternative is reading the day’s news.

The next assignments in the course are supposed to change your brain. Not sure what that means, but I look forward to finding out.

• Based on the book, “The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. https://www.chriswinfield.com/morning-pages/