Tag: writing

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Typing as Fast as You Can Speak

A typical computer uses a standard keyboard with more than 100 buttons. Many of these will have a secondary function, activated by modifiers such as Shift and Ctrl modifiers. This is more than enough to encode the entire alphabet in upper- and lowercase, numbers 0 to 9, a selection of everyday symbols, and common functions that interact with the operating system.

On the other hand, a stenotype machine has less than 25 buttons, which is not enough for all the letters of the English alphabet, never mind the numbers and punctuation marks. This is because the operator is more interested in the sound of a word than the spelling, and it allows a speed of more than 200 words per minute while moving the hands as little as possible.

Incidentally, the one punctuation mark on the device is an asterisk, used to mark corrections. In some messaging applications, where messages can’t be recalled, users will typically type an asterisk underneath, followed by the corrected word underneath.

However, the stenotype is now decades old and technology has now moved beyond that. Below is a video about live subtitling for proceedings in Parliament.

A video hosted on YouTube with an overview of how subtitles are produced for Parliamentary sessions.

In this application, voice recognition is used. However, it’s far easier to program a computer to understand just one voice instead of many, so an operator listens through headphones to the words spoken on TV and repeats them.

You’ll notice from the video that the operator speaks in something of a monotone regardless of how passionate the MPs are feeling, and this helps the software to provide a consistent result. Punctuation also needs to be added manually, not to mention switching between different people; colour codes are often used to help viewers work out which person said what.

Such software is also available for home users. For a period when I had RSI, I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking to give my fingers a rest. It worked to a high standard, I found, even straight out of the box and with a Scottish accent. However, it produces its best results when connected to the Internet, as it can benefit from deep learning techniques. If it can’t, the audio is processed locally and there’s a noticeable decrease in quality.

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Rewriting the Handbook

As mentioned in the last entry, our open-mic night for writers – Hotchpotch – held its first event in four months.

The bottom line is that the evening went well: we attracted a sizeable crowd, the event ran on schedule, and people embraced the new donations system. While there were a lot of variables outside our control, it helped to have a robust plan to remove as much guesswork as possible.

When I brought an assistant on board earlier this year, I composed a document to show her the structure of our events, as I’d previously done it from memory.

This is not an exhaustive textbook, but rather a handbook to give an overview of how the event is run, plus best practice gained from years of experience. For example, it reminds the host to recap the introductory speech after the first break for the benefit of those who arrive later.

Because our format evolved on the pub circuit, where we could finish later in the evening. I rewrote the handbook to include a stricter end time and added in revised best practice advice.

As the handbook is a living document, it will likely be updated every month or two with new tweaks, but it really did help with our event last week.

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Helping Novelists Through November

National Novel Writing Month is a not-for-profit initiative that encourages people to draft a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. In 2023, NaNoWriMo – as it’s affectionately known – celebrates its 25th anniversary. 

As the organisation operates globally, it relies on hundreds of volunteer co-ordinators around the world to welcome members, arrange meet-ups and raise donations. After joining the Dundee & Angus region as a punter in 2010, I’ve been running it since 2015.

During my time in charge, we’ve started additional weekly meetings during the rest of the year. As such, I like to have a co-organiser to help with tasks such as sending out bulletins, reorganising our Discord server, and covering for each other if we’re busy on a given week.

Even with this, November still remains our busiest month ahead of the novel-writing. By tradition, we organise a launch party in October, a Thank Goodness It’s Over party in December, and an additional weekly meeting on each Saturdays in November.

From our members’ point of view, NaNoWriMo will start on Wednesday 1 November. For us, those conversations need to start right now, and that’s what we’ll be doing over the next four weeks.

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Fragments of a Whole

If you’re a fan of the 1996 film Trainspotting, you’ll be familiar with the opening Choose Life voiceover.

Here, the phrase is repeatedly used to describe aspirations such as owning a large television and having fixed-rate mortgage repayments. It almost tells a story, but not one with a linear narrative. We as listeners have to mentally join the dots.

Later on, the film also features the dance track Born Slippy .NUXX by Underworld, and that takes a similar approach. In an interview from 2010, the lyricist Karl Hyde reported struggling with alcoholism while recording the vocals, so they were presented almost as snapshots rather than a complete image.

I’ve recently been experimenting with similar stream-of-consciousness work. A few months ago, on the way home from an event, I thought up a couple of lines of poetry that I quickly noted down. Over the following month, I added and added to it, one fragment at a time, creating a non-linear piece that straddles the line between prose and poetry.

When I’m performing it, I would normally omit any explanation, instead allowing the audience to interpret it.

When I submitted the piece to my poetry circle, however, I included some further details to aid their analysis. I wasn’t deliberately emulating the style of the Beat Generation, who actively fought against convention in poetry, yet it ended up taking that path.

The difference between my piece and the examples from Trainspotting is that mine doesn’t have music behind it. The Choose Life segment likely wouldn’t work as well without Iggy Pop in the background, while Born Slippy .NUXX would be markedly different if spoken at an open-mic night.

In fact, as I was writing that, I considered I might try it. If I do, I’ll let you know what happens.

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Writing Clear Instructions

Back in May, I started running a new writing class called Placing Your Mark.

Unlike the other events I run, where the members bring their existing projects, this one is actively geared towards creating new work. The format has now settled down to include regular features such as writing a passage containing five given words, starting with a line taken from a novel, or inspired by picking a card at random.

When I’m writing these prompts, I do it by myself and it’s difficult to tell how well they’ll be understood.

For example, there is always a break halfway through, during which I produce an object and ask the members to muse upon it and write a piece inspired by it. I initially thought I was making the intention clear: a ten-minute break, followed by five minutes of writing. After trialling the feature and finding members were confused, I rewrote the instructions to make it clearer.

Other prompts don’t fly as well as I’d hoped. A few of these have involved an office setting, which frequently has a power structure and is ripe for conflict. However, some members have had difficulty relating to this because they haven’t worked in that type of environment.

Based on this feedback, I’ve had less of a problem with prompts that don’t work. It’s just as well because we’re now into the third block of four sessions, with possibly enough interest for a future block, and that means I need to write even more of them.

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Writing Yourself Out of a Corner

If you were a fan of Friends back in 1998, you’ll remember the hype and speculation around what would happen during Ross and Emily’s wedding.

Coming at the end of Season 4, this had to be a climactic scene. These days, it’s hardly a spoiler to mention that Ross accidentally says Rachel’s name, which feeds into the entirety of Season 5. However, I’ve only learnt in the last week that the writers struggled to think of a proper ending until the actor who played Ross – David Schwimmer – accidentally switched the names during another scene.

This serves as a good example of how even professional writers are rarely bestowed with fully-formed ideas. A story often needs to be written out and figured out along the way, and that process can take years.

Larry Cohen pitched the idea for the film Phone Booth to Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s, but neither of them could think of a reason to keep the main character in the booth. By the late 1990s, the public was becoming increasingly vigilant to the threat of terrorism, and Cohen played into that as he realised a sniper with a weapon could be a good reason. It was even a plot point that the main character was one of the few people still using a payphone by that point.

I even have a few examples of my own. One particular example was a three-line fragment of poetry I wrote at school before I ever routinely wrote poetry. In 2013, more than ten years after I left school, I finally found a way to work it into a fuller piece. It gained a sequel in 2018, taking a very different tone from the original, chiefly in recognition of how I’d changed in those five years.

But even professional writers miss the mark sometimes. The final episode of The Prisoner was broadcast in 1968. Although its writer Patrick McGoohan was pleased with the result, he was under pressure to deliver it quickly and many viewers were unhappy that it raised more questions than it answered.

And we must mention the ninth season of Dallas, which was entirely written off as a dream to bring back the character of Bobby Ewing.

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The Poetry of JavaScript

Despite our social media presence, a sizeable chunk of our Hotchpotch open-mic members still rely on our email bulletin. Almost exactly a year ago, I started the task of building up a new distribution list after the collapse of the old system. Here’s the story of what’s happened since.

After emailing everyone on the list individually, many people wanted to stay on it, a lot wished to stop receiving bulletins, and several never responded at all. The initial technical hiccups have long been ironed out and the number of subscribers almost doubled from 34 to 63 over the past 12 months.

The old list was not compliant with GDPR regulations, so it was important to ensure the new one was up to scratch, and that includes the ability to unsubscribe at any time. The easiest way is to have a public Web page with this functionality.

As we now had a basic website, there was an opportunity to publish more information there, such as our meeting times and standards of behaviour.

When I started this endeavour, I would copy open-source templates and simply strip out any unnecessary sections. One principle I like to follow is what YouTube creator Tom Scott calls the art of the bodge: cobbling together just enough code to do what you need it to, making refinements as you go along.

After a while of doing this, I slowly began to refresh and update my knowledge of HTML. Alongside that, I learned when and how to deploy CSS and JavaScript. The last time I dabbled in coding was many years ago before such elements were commonplace.

Perhaps I’ve been influenced by writing verse for so many years, but I can see a correlation between writing poetry and writing computer code. Every word has to be precisely the right one, each section is demarcated by curly brackets into its own ‘stanza’, and a detail as small as an incorrect line break can change how it’s interpreted.

But unless something in this current system breaks and has to be recoded, I”m leaving it alone, however poetic it reads.

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Pen at Work

Two weeks ago, I spoke about seeing a one-woman monologue at the Edinburgh Fringe. It particularly appealed to me because I’d previously written my own play with a similar theme and presentation.

With the festivals now over for another year, my attention has turned to giving my own work its first major rewrite for some time, including a new snappier title.

In particular, the main character has always been an English literature student who keeps a video diary I changed the subject to a music and video production course, giving her more reason to use a camcorder. I’ve also restructured the narrative to include self-interruptions where she looks back at her student days from 15 years in the future.

If I really give the piece my attention, it should be roughly redrafted by next week, and then I need to start reshaping it neatly into its new form.

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An Element of Emulation

For an upcoming project, my poetry group has decided to look at forgotten poets from Dundee and bring them back to the forefront once more.

As part of our research, we were invited up to the central library to look at archived copies of The People’s Journal. This was in print from 1858 to 1986, and the editions we looked at were all issued towards to the beginning of that period.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t inspired by any of the poets. I was much more interested in reading the articles and creating poetry from those, but that wasn’t the intention of the exercise.

I eventually found one I could work with, although from a book rather than a newspaper. Someone called David Tasker had written a poetic account of a sawmill fire in 1863 titled A Conflagration in the City. I was able to find just one reference to the poet online. The piece reminded me of a furniture store that burned down last November.

I took the approach of using as many of the original words as possible but including more up-to-date imagery. We would have limited space in our publication so I made this poem significantly shorter than the source material. My favourite part was discovering a wordy quote from a witness of the 2022 fire that sounded like it could have been written by a Victorian poet. I was sure to cut this down slightly and squeeze it in:

“I am on the other side of the Tay so quite far away, but can comfortably say I have not seen a fire of its scale in all my time here.”

The last 150 years have marked a shift in how poetry is presented on the page. Before the 20th century, new lines were universally started with a capital letter, whereas that only happens today when a new sentence begins. One of the poetry group pointed out that this distracted from the enjambment. Although I agreed with this sentiment, I felt it important to retain the style of the original for greater effect.

Based on feedback from the rest of the group, my piece is not quite finalised yet, but I’m making good progress.

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Next Story, Please

In yesterweek’s entry, I talked about reaching the end of a series I’m currently writing. I’m pleased to report I’m making good progress with this, and my thoughts now turn to the next long-form project.

Of all the options, the current frontrunner is a piece of memoir. Part of me wants to announce the subject right now to create some accountability for the project. The downside is that I might start to write it and find there isn’t much mileage in the idea. As such, I’m keeping it under wraps for the moment.

As I write, I’m reminded of a time – maybe ten years ago – when I attended a series of university evening classes all about life writing. This encompassed types of writing such as memoir and biography, and discussed the subtle but important differences between them, plus the ethics of naming people in such writing.

While it’s unlikely I would personally attend another series of life writing classes, aside from a one-off refresher, I recommend the genre to anyone interested in learning to express yourself. It was a good grounding for moving into the poetry scene, where there is more of a convention to figuratively bleed onto the page or stage.

Indeed, it happens that the life writing class in question no longer exists in its current form because of restructuring at the university. After that change was made, a few of the members did form our own poetry group, which survives to this day.