Excerpt
Introduction: Walking and Talking
Kevin J. Anderson
Some people get their ideas in the shower. I do my best thinking when I'm out walking.
Strolling through a forest surrounded by beautiful scenery primes the pump in my imagination. Physical activity, walking along a trail or a bike path, frees me from distractions and lets the sentences flow. (Of course, there's also a literal separation from distractions if I'm on a long walk far from my office, because there's no ringing phone or doorbell, no obnoxious email alerts, no attention-hungry cats who do not understand writing deadlines.)
Very early in my career I discovered the effectiveness of taking a walk when I needed to mull over a storyline, brainstorm ideas with myself, get to know my characters as best friends instead of mere acquaintances. Wandering the streets around my home, strolling down the local bike path, or hiking on a nice trail always gave me inspiration.
Recent studies have pointed out what I've always known—that walking unlocks creativity, oils the wheels in your brain, and removes roadblocks to letting your ideas flow. Instead of including footnotes and a long list of academic-style references, I'll just ask you to Google "creativity and walking" and you'll find TED talks, Stanford University studies, Psychology Today articles, and more.
Taking a walk while trying to solve a plot problem or work out a character issue presented a serious problem, though: I'd often get so many ideas that I couldn't remember them all by the time I got back to my office. In one instance, I worked out the intricacies of a complicated climactic battle scene with multiple characters, each one having a requisite moment of glory or moment of tragedy, and I raced back home, trying to hold it all in my head. Alas, I forgot most of it by the time I got home.
After that disaster, I started carrying a small notebook in my pocket so that as the ideas came to me I could jot them down. But writing on a little spiral notebook while walking—especially if it's drizzling or snowing—is not the most convenient or efficient activity. I would often think up complete sentences, the perfect opening line or a full-fledged description of a character or place … and I could never scribble it down quickly enough.
Finally, I tried taking a handheld microcassette recorder along on my walks. Whenever I thought of something good, I'd hit the Record button and say the words in my head, complete sentences, even complete paragraphs. I could preserve my thoughts as quickly as they came to me. Sometimes I would have a blizzard of ideas, and I'd talk in a breathless rush just to get them all down. And I did. I wrote character biographies; I outlined plot details; I blocked out massive scenes, beat by beat.
As my outlines grew more detailed, I added texture, snippets of dialog, even drafted entire scenes or conversations that were clear in my head. It didn't take long for that work to evolve into dictating a full-blown draft.
I decided I liked to do my chapters that way.
Writers usually do their work with butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard, staring at the screen for hours on end. That doesn't work for me—at all. I am an avid hiker, and my recorder allowed me to write my day's word count while hiking in a national park. Also, by going far enough away from everybody else, I could get in a "zone"—walking alone inside my fictional world with my imaginary friends—and get lost in the story.
Sometimes too lost. Yes, I'll tell an embarrassing anecdote.
My microcassette recorder used ninety-minute cassettes, forty-five minutes on a side. I'd walk along dictating my story until I reached the end of the tape, at which point I'd pop out the tape and flip it over. A bothersome interruption, yes, but not a terrible one.
One time, I was hiking in the canyons of southern Utah, writing an action-packed technothriller, part of the novel Artifact. I walked along, fully into the story as events built to a head. I dictated forty-five minutes, at which point I flipped the cassette over and kept going. The story was really exciting, heading toward the climax! All of the plot threads were reaching a grand finale. I kept walking, kept dictating.
I filled up the second forty-five minutes and reached the end of the tape. I was so deep in the story I didn't want to be interrupted. I popped open the recorder, flipped the tape over, slipped it back in, and dictated another twenty minutes before I came to an abrupt halt and realized that I had just recorded over my first twenty minutes of dictation.
My cry of dismay echoed up and down the canyons. I inserted a fresh cassette and tried to recapture the part that I had recorded over, but I was so furious at myself I had a hard time concentrating on the words.
Fortunately, with a digital recorder I never run out of space.
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Dictation is my primary method of writing. If I'm stuck typing a chapter in my chair in front of a screen, I feel trapped and restless. I want to be walking, talking to myself.
In this book my fellow dictators, Martin L. Shoemaker, Greg Vose, and I lay out some of our strategies in how to use dictation as a writing tool, how to learn, what equipment to use, what pitfalls to avoid.
Try the technique, it really works! Dictation has increased my productivity by an order of magnitude, and after constantly advocating the process for years, I am seeing more and more writers, especially ambitious indie authors, turn to dictation. Once you figure it out, you'll be walking around and talking to yourself, too.
