Unwritten Novels

“We think of writing as an author’s cognitive output, but it has a corporeal dimension—writing is an embodied practice.” The Smart Set on the loss of novelists’ female transcriptionists. “Milton, Dostoevsky and James all outsourced aesthetic production because of human frailty, limitations on their bodies. Today, the process has been mechanized and writers turn to voice recognition for different reasons. Some choose it because of repetitive stress but others cite the ease and convenience. Perhaps the new medium will again transform artistic production. … Contemporary writers can dispense with typists and even keyboards and speak their books into being. The Dragon Dictation iPhone application is free. And although you can dictate for only 20 seconds at a time, for a generation of twitterers, it may be that writing a novel is one long string of verbal tweets.”