Why bother writing?

When I attended The Writer’s Studio nearly a decade ago, I was working full-time on my writing.  For the next couple of years I contin­ued to write almost daily, until I began to get severe cramps — first in my elbow, and then my shoul­der. When the pain got so severe that I could no longer raise my right arm, I went to the doctor who sent me to a special­ist who suggested that I have a condi­tion known as Frozen Shoul­der. This disor­der is common to diabet­ics and he recom­mended corti­sone treat­ments to reduce the pain. He also suggested that  my elbow pain was likely tennis elbow and that the corti­sone injec­tions would help them as well.

Surpris­ingly, the treat­ments worked almost immedi­ately and I went back to my usual pace of 8 to 10 hours a day of typing on my computer keyboard. In less than a month the pain returned, worse than before. A few months later, I went back for a 2nd treat­ment, and once again my symptoms disap­peared. When they soon returned again, I did some further research and found out the corti­sone doesn’t solve the problem, merely masks the symptoms and that it’s quite possi­ble to do more severe damage while the  drug is in the system. Unfor­tu­nately, by this point, I had so severely strained my arm that the only course of action was to stop writing for nearly a year.

During that time I began to explore voice-recognition software as an alter­na­tive way of inputting text into the computer. In the old days, when I still used PCs, I had had some success with the program called Dragon Dictate, but once I switched to the Mac I needed to find a similar program. Fortu­nately Dragon had released a Mac version of their program, and I began to exper­i­ment using it on my laptop to some success. One thing that had changed dramat­i­cally in a few years was the speed at which dicta­tion could be trans­lated into computer text.  I found that I could now speak in at normal speed, and as long as I remem­bered to speak correct punctu­a­tion (COMMA), the program could capture 95% of what I said without mistakes (PERIOD).

I’m not sure why I stopped using the program; perhaps it was because I quit writing soon after I completed my 2nd go round at The Writer Studio’s in 2009.  I had spent close to 2 years editing and redraft­ing my memoir, had gone through sessions at Banff, did some online UBC Booming Ground sessions with Cather­ine Bush and Gail Anderson-Dargatz, a manuscript inten­sive with Betsy Warland, then spent another year as an adjunct writer at SFU with Wayde Compton.  I had finally gotten to the point where I had submit­ted a draft of my manuscript to a couple of publish­ers. After close to a year I received my first rejec­tions and decided it was time to give the manuscript a rest for a while. Seems like I’m still giving it a rest, but lately the manuis­cript has begun to intrude on my conscious­ness and I find myself ready to go and attack it once more.

Last week I got an offer from the Dragon Dictate people for a new version so I placed an order and the software arrived yester­day. I installed it, did the five-minute train­ing exercise, donned the headset that came with the package, and here I am sitting at the computer dictat­ing this post. I’ve had to make about 10 correc­tions since I started, but my words are flowing into my blog like magic. Ah, writing at last — the easier way.