We spend way too much time in front of screens in the modern era.
So I’m here to give you a really cool way to get away from the persistent need to sit in front of your keyboard or hunch over your phone. It’s called StorySpeak and it’s an extremely powerful solution to turn your spoken words into written prose.
✨🎙️ Here’s the TL;DR of this page: if you’re interested in trying out dictation for fiction or other purposes, you can get 20% off your first three months of StorySpeak by using code AUGUST20. 🎙️✨
You’ve probably used dictation before. iPhones have a pretty good built-in engine to let you write and edit text messages. Windows machines, with the Windows + H shortcut, lets you dictate into almost any text box with your PC microphone.
But StorySpeak offers a different kind of freedom. Write anywhere. Edit less. Create more.
Personally, I grab my handheld recorder, my dog, and my notes, and I go for walks. It’s been an absolute game-changer for me, and I truly believe it can be the same for you.
Dictation unlocked faster, lower-friction writing for me. Though I’m as quick to self-judge when I’m speaking as when I’m typing, the recorder doesn’t pick up my skeptical facial expression (whereas it’s all too easy, with a keyboard, to hit backspace and force myself to start again). I seem to do my best dictation when I’m walking, maybe because all of my extremities are engaged and I forget to think about anything but the story I’m telling and how it sounds. Did I mention my vastly increased word count with dictated drafts? (I did, in a past newsletter.) Walking turned me into a bit of a word count beast.
Even when I don’t have my recorder on me, movement stimulates ideas, so I almost always finish a walk with more bouncing around in my head than when I started. Getting the blood flowing in the fresh air seems to directly correlate with my ability to apply the ol’ grey matter to problems, whether they be story challenges or life’s big questions.
In that past post I mentioned, I wrote about about how dictation changed my ability to write, capture my thoughts, and get things done, even as my creative time has been squeezed into smaller pockets by life’s responsibilities. (That’s remained true even and especially as I’ve had to try out a bunch of AI tools for my day job; I’ve found that a transcript of my unshaped ideas is one of the best raw materials I can feed a large language model, if I want it to legitimately save me time.)
As I’ve started integrating in-office time for the day job back into my routine, I’ve found myself on the road with an hour or two to kill on commute days. Sometimes I’ve got an idea that I can’t stop my car to write down. And that’s when I pick up my handy portable recorder.
If you’d like to try this out for yourself, whether for fiction or business, grab yourself a 20% discount for your first three months of StorySpeak with my code, AUGUST20! Maybe it’ll change your life, too.