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| Volume 46, Number 3, Winter 1998-99 |
By Tabitha M. Powledge
We all know that freelances are now a significant proportion of NASW members, but we don’t know much about the kinds of work they do and the kinds of help they need from a professional organization. So a census of freelance NASW members, long-discussed, is actually in the works. We plan to begin shortly with a small sampling because we’re trying to refine our questions so that they’re clear and precise. This is not a sales pitch wearing a survey costume or any other scam. Yes, it will take a little time to fill out the form. But, the information we’re gathering will benefit you directly.
The workshop report below was written with the help (and, truth to tell, the hindrance) of a computer program called Naturally Speaking, a voice-recognition system. At their best, dictation programs like Naturally Speaking are supposed to “automagically” translate your spoken words into written words on your monitor. The idea is to write by talking; an enchanting prospect for which many of us seem congenitally suited.
I’ve been flirting with trying out voice recognition for a couple of years, keeping an eye on the increasingly enthusiastic reviews.
he reviewers invariably prefer Naturally Speaking to the handful of other voice-recognition systems. Produced by a small company called Dragon Systems, the program has been judged upwards of 90 percent accurate. So last fall I bought a new PC and succumbed.
It has changed my life.
True, voice recognition has not provided quite the epiphany I experienced some 15 years ago when I cabled the tiny green-screened Kaypro to the gigantic, rackety, tractor-fed printer and realized—O joy! O swelling heart! O liberty!—that I would never, ever, have to retype another manuscript. (Only those of us who banged away at Royal Standards early in our writing lives can truly appreciate the difference between a typewriter and a computer.) But my transports over voice recognition are a close second to that earlier technology rapture.
First, the bad news. It involves two things in short supply for freelances: time and money.
Still, the plain truth is that Naturally Speaking is picky, picky, picky. In fact, damned irritating. Why, then, have I persisted?
Because it changed my life.
I tape and transcribe most of my interviews. But I no longer do it at the keyboard. I dictate the transcription. Naturally Speaking cannot, of course, transcribe the tapes by itself because it responds to my voice only. But I can play the tape over the transcribing machine speaker and then, wearing my approved mike, dictate what the interviewee said. Guys, it works pretty well.
I haven’t timed it, so I can’t prove that this method of transcribing is faster than the keyboard. But I’m pretty sure the program has now trained me to the point where the method is at least no longer slower. Furthermore—this was a surprise—transcribing-by-talking is easier. More important, it’s significantly less tiring. If you’re mouse-loused or neck-wrecked or, God forbid, carpal tunneled from hours at the computer, or even if you just fear those afflictions, voice recognition is for you. (On the other hand, the brochure does warn against damaging your voice through intensive dictation.)
Dictating interview transcripts has been more efficient too. When I have to repeat my subject’s nattering, as opposed to sending it directly from an earphone to my fingers in my former transcribing trance, I seem to be better at recognizing a useless chunk that can safely be skipped, or a discursive interval that’s highly paraphrasable—but also those precious passages that are truly salient and likely to be usable. I hope passionately that this new ease with transcribing is not just a product of novelty, because I plan not to return to the old way.
I didn’t expect the program to help me much with writing itself, because I’m a compulsive rewriter. But I may have to modify that belief. The workshop report below was my first real experiment in writing-by-talking, and it went okay. Dictation seems to work pretty well when you’re “writing” from notes and must keep to an obvious structure. Each first attempt at a sentence was embarrassing, but it usually is. At least it gave me something to rewrite. Somewhat to my surprise, I expect to try it again.
Long ago I had a book-writing boss who disdained to type (i.e., typing was women’s work, so he didn’t know how). He dictated all his first drafts just to get started. They were quite awful. But he had a full-time secretary to retype his many rewrites, and the published result was respectable and sometimes even sold well. So it can be done. Dictation might also be a big help on those occasions (rare, one hopes) when you are just stuck, and the only way you can proceed is to get something, anything, on that screen.
But for this section of the column, written from inside my head with no notes to speak of, I didn’t want to use the program. I can’t explain why exactly. Partly I didn’t want to be hounded by feeling that Naturally Speaking was sitting there blinking and tapping its foot. Imagining that the software is impatient is useful for scutwork like transcribing, where the point is to get on with it and get it done. But when the work involves actual thinking, some of us don’t react well to hassling, even imaginary hassling.
Perhaps you won’t have this hallucination unless you’re an anthropomorphizer of technology. But—Doctoral Candidate Alert! Dissertation Topics Sighted!—my hunch is that the psychology of using a dictation program is different from the psychology of our usual ways of writing. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that brain pathways are different too.
Maybe the strangeness will wear off with experience. I just read a piece by a writer who began dictating a couple of years ago. A brave soul she was, because the programs were significantly clunkier than they are today. She now dictates everything, and insists it’s much, much faster than the Old Way. A toothsome carrot to dangle before freelances, n’est-ce pas?
That’s enough speculation. Now to practical matters. Some things I wish someone had told me before I began using Naturally Speaking (some of which people actually did tell me, but I didn’t listen hard enough.)
Nonfiction writers used to be generalists, even science writers. Not now, not for a long time. To get an assignment today, you specialize. Editors are looking for a particular approach to a subject, a certain tone or, occasionally, deep knowledge. For science writers in particular, showing that you have written on a topic before can confer on you instant expertise and create confidence that you understand its complexities.
Specializing should also help you make more money. It saves you time because you don’t have to start your research from scratch. You already know the technical stuff, the issues, and the sources. You may even be able to run a piece through your computer more than once, turning it into different strokes for different folks. When it happens, that last trick yields one of freelancing’s few opportunities for something approaching found money. But it is rarer than we would like.
Seeking to make it more frequent for all of us, freelance Kathryn S. Brown organized a session on just that topic as part of the 1999 NASW science writing workshops in Anaheim. Her panel of experts comprised four freelances (with specialities in): Beryl Benderly (mostly articles and books), Deborah Blum (mostly books and a journalism prof), Jim Kling (mostly articles), and Jane Stevens (mostly multimedia).
As a by-product, the panel provided anecdotal evidence for a stereotypical sex difference. The man said his success was due to planning, and the women said theirs was due to luck. Blum began, “I’m an unplanned career person.” Kling advised, “make a plan and stick to it.” Said Benderly, “I make plans and they never work out; I’m not sure what happens after the middle of February.” So should you plan or not? Got me. But keep in mind that even those who say they don’t plan have developed that essential tool, the specialty.
Deborah Blum’s subjects—the animal rights movement, animal behavior, and sex differences—may seem diverse, but she insists they are all a product of her curiosity about behavior, and that she hasn’t yet run out of questions about that very broad topic. She is adept at digging through one subject for the seedling of another. A recent piece on neglected children, for example, has led to one on bullies.
Jane Stevens attributes her ability to (as she calls it) slice-and-dice one topic into different chunks for different audiences—newspapers, magazines, nonprofits—and to a California house with a big California mortgage. “I always regarded freelancing as a business first,” she says. One example: After selling articles on the epidemiology of violence to magazines and newspapers, she got a grant to write a book for journalists on how to report violence.
Her most notable triumph, a continuing series of trips to Antarctica, began with a little bit of luck—plus her astute recognition that the continent was literally terra incognita, a great story that hadn’t yet been told. She has sold that story to, among others, the New York Times, the Discovery Channel and—despite their obvious skepticism and an assignment bestowed only at the cliff-hanging last minute—National Geographic. The Discovery Channel owns long-term rights to her story for them, so she has not been able to resell it. But with Web sites it is possible, she says, to build the kind of story that will need additional updates—for additional money.
Jim Kling’s background is in chemistry, and he went directly into freelancing, with no intermediate stops in salaried writing jobs to amass contacts. He hasn’t yet decided whether that makes him brave or foolish. The key, he says, is to make a plan before you start, because it is too easy to flounder around and lose your way. Because of his background, he has pitched mostly to trade magazines, and always aims for writing the same thing for two different audiences. Any topic can be handled that way, he contends, and you can even use the same interviews. The secret is to have good relationships with editors at different magazines that have different audiences.
Beryl Benderly began her writing career on what she calls “an unemployment fellowship.” She thinks the best way to spin a specialty is to write a book because you end up with a mountain of material, much of which you haven’t even used. Her “fellowship” became a chance to write a book on deafness, which led not just to articles, but also to scripts and annual reports. Her advice echoes Deborah Blum’s—be deep in a subject that interests you. “I think research is why you’re a freelance,” she says. Even if you haven’t written about a subject for a while, you can catch up pretty quickly if you knew it well to begin with.
Blum’s advice is stay in a niche. It saves you time because it saves you research effort. And you’ll get more work because you will be a recognized voice, the voice of an authority. On the other hand, being an authority worries her too. Scientists are sometimes annoyed when she is presented as an expert. An interesting problem for science journalists, she notes, and a wonderful ethical question. Both Benderly and Stevens say they often dodge that bullet by referring people with questions to real experts.
How do you find places to resell your articles? Consult the usual sources, like Writer’s Market. Kling likes Bacon’s, which describes many technical magazines, but it’s not easy to find. In a follow-up e-mail, he writes, “People can also try the Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media: An Annual Guide to Publications and Broadcasting Stations Including Newspapers, Magazines, and Journals. From my recollection, it’s also complete and has much of the same information.” Brown advises looking at magazines to see if they use freelances. Benderly points out that every magazine has an angle and a particular readership; look at the ads, figure out what it is, and tailor your story idea accordingly. Stevens urges networking so that you can exchange editors’ names with other writers.
Can you reuse interviews? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Benderly’s caveat is don’t reuse quotes. The others were not so sure.
A biggie: do you tell your editors you are slicing and dicing? Kling says he always does, but since he is writing for different audiences, his editors don’t care. The others have no firm rule. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. I would be very cautious about this touchy question, particularly if you are writing for publications whose audiences editors may see as overlapping, even when they’ve probably aren’t. A freelance’s worst nightmare is antagonizing two editors at once.
Tabitha M. Powledge can be reached via e-mail at tam@nasw.org.