Beginning and AI

We begin… with an interview I watched last night. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote and starred in the wonderful musical, Hamilton, spoke about his writing:

“I feel really lucky. We have no control over our lives – what you can control is what you make. I set a deadline, and that’s when luck met hard work.”

He also likened the writing process to simply putting one foot after the other. How to write first, then learn from that, then write the next thing. In other words, get to work.

He mused that it’s amazing just how quickly memory becomes myth. So whatever you’re writing, don’t let anything hold you back.

When I was writing Darrell’s memoir, I began just asking him about his life, what memories he cherished, some funny things that happened, even naughty kid stories! He loved digging into the past and one memory led to another, and then another, and that’s often how it happens.

Just one of the reasons that we set up a Word Document that you can download and save first, is that we want you to feel comfortable just getting the text down first. Then edit and shape later.

Don’t worry about anything except the stories themselves. Just begin – somewhere, anywhere, and take it from there.

So often the story itself will unfold in front of you as you place, with one foot after the other. Here’s a brief excerpt from a story – a memoir – of my cooking life:

“We first met Gerda and Pauli when they were staying at a guest house around the corner from The Beach Café, and Gerda had noticed our sign advertising ‘Fresh Lobsters, cooked to order, $15.’ Gerda rushed in, shepherding Pauli on his walking frame, and behind thick glasses with fine blonde curly hair and a tiny sparrow body, Gerda beamed like a sunrise…”

Gerda loved ‘hummer’ or lobster, and we became friends, later staying with them in Münster, Northern Germany. And that beginning led to another story, and then another…

Happy writing, just get those stories down, and if you want to use a transcription service, remember that Word now has a microphone icon at the top which you can use to transcribe your speech, and so does Microsoft’s Pages App.

Or you could try SemblyAI. Sembly is great for a business book – as you can invite it to your Zoom, talk your ideas, and it will send you a video recording, a full transcript, and a summary of key points/take-aways.

And then, there’s Transcribe – a new app which I use on my phone, and it allows you to set up different ‘Notebooks” which you can use to record your different topics (which I call chapters or buckets), and the transcription is pretty good.

Remember that AI is, and will always be, limited, but can save you time and that’s a blessing.

See you soon with more tips!