{"id":3631,"date":"2007-01-06T22:53:12","date_gmt":"2007-01-06T22:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/how-to-speak-a-book.html"},"modified":"2007-01-06T22:53:12","modified_gmt":"2007-01-06T22:53:12","slug":"how-to-speak-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/how-to-speak-a-book.html","title":{"rendered":"How to Speak a Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Powers on his process:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Except for brief moments of duress, I haven\u2019t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words \u2014 or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I\u2019ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn\u2019t even have keys.<\/p>\n

I write these words from bed, under the covers with my knees up, my head propped and my three-pound tablet<\/span><\/a> PC \u2014 just a shade heavier than a hardcover \u2014 resting in my lap, almost forgettable. I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate\u2019s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace. I hear every sentence as it\u2019s made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind\u2019s ear.<\/p>\n

Like all good Jetson futures, speech recognition is really a memory. Speak the thing into being: as dreams go, that\u2019s as old as they get. Once, all stories existed only in speech, and no technology caused more upheaval than the written word. In the \u201cPhaedrus,\u201d Socrates \u2014 who talked a whole lot but never, apparently, wrote a word \u2014 uncorks at length about how writing damages memory, obscures authority and even alters meaning. But we have his warning only through Plato\u2019s suspect transcript.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Powers on his process: Except for brief moments of duress, I haven\u2019t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words \u2014 or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I\u2019ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn\u2019t even have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Speak a Book - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/how-to-speak-a-book.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to Speak a Book - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Richard Powers on his process: Except for brief moments of duress, I haven\u2019t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words \u2014 or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I\u2019ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn\u2019t even have…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/how-to-speak-a-book.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-01-06T22:53:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"How to Speak a Book - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/how-to-speak-a-book.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"How to Speak a Book - Via Media","og_description":"Richard Powers on his process: Except for brief moments of duress, I haven\u2019t touched a keyboard for years. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}