Day 20

Writing is a skill. In here I send notes of my writing from the 50 days of writing course by David Perell, to reflect, develop and build my writing style.

Day 20
Photo by Soundtrap / Unsplash

In the 20th email from the 50 days of writing course by David Perell, He mentions that transcribing ideas to your phone by hitting the record button will push you from the writer's block.

This is what he mentions -

Talking to myself can be generative, but most of my new ideas come from conversations with friends. I’ve written numerous articles with Nik Sharma and whenever we see each other, we record our conversations. Pressing the record button is like a challenge to come up with new ideas. With instant transcription, our comments become the raw material for articles. When we’re done talking, we copy-and-paste the transcript into a Word Document, think of a thesis, and rearrange the ideas until we have an outline.

David mentions, if we are unable to churn ideas while sitting on the computer, transcribe whatever we are saying until we have enough ideas to write.

My thoughts:

Talking to the microphone is not a regular activity to lot of people. This will cause a hindrance in their writing as it requires you to learn about this new activity of talking into the microphone.

I understand how talking to the microphone can challenge us to bring out ideas but I don't agree with the idea of Transcribing your voice to get the ideas out. If you are in a writers block where you don't get out the ideas into a canvas, I would recommend doing something else or taking a walk, both mentioned by David in the previous emails. Transcribing will be useful in situations where you are looking to release podcast type content and mostly you need to be with people who are okay to have the recordings transcribed. I know here two additional things to learn has come up but it is a choice.

personally, I would take a walk or jump on the next thing I wanted to do and get back to writing later - which I understand will never be until you start getting ideas. It's a personal choice and I choose to do something else like, watching YouTube or taking a walk or reading.

key takeaways:

  1. You choose what to do, when you are in a writer's block.
  2. Transcribing our voice to bring in ideas - feels an easy task to do, just like writing but instead will take months to get the right rhythm.  
  3. Do something different for a while i.e. take up that old book you thought you would read but didn't or start practicing your guitar strums in between.

It is completely okay to not pick a point into your framework if it isn't suitable to you. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a podcast of my own someday but recording ourselves to get out ideas isn't the way, I would like to do it.

For more of Perell's work, you can signup for the 50 Days of Writing Course by clicking and signing up to receive one mail every day with amazing take on writing.

50 Days of Writing
Writing