It has been a good Screnzy so far, and now that we are over halfway through the month, I'm two thirds the way towards finishing Script Frenzy. (Yay!) However, the past week has seen me going on holiday without Celtx (the scriptwriting software I'm using), so I've been forced to write by hand on sheets of low-quality lined paper. This has also forced me to estimate how many pages I've written on paper, which totals approximately 20. And now I need to transcribe those 20 pages from the paper onto the computer. Lovely.
Transcribing is simple, but incredibly irritating. I simply keep my sheets beside me and type what I read. Unfortunately, it's very time consuming and not all that satisfying. It feels counter-productive - stealing away precious time I could be using doing other things, namely writing more new pages on the computer.
However, just like anything else, it has its benefits. Reading it through and transcribing it is, in a way, multi-task proof-reading. I can locate and edit out typos and suchlike as I go, and modify speech to flow more smoothly. On top of this, it means I can mentally edit everything, working out which parts will make the second draft and what won't survive the extensive editing I have planned.
As well as the obvious editing taking place here, it seems that I may have underestimated just how many pages I've written. At present, I'm calculating that each handwritten page is equal to 1.25 Celtx pages - which is good, as it means that I'm not actually losing as much time as I might think. I'm actually increasing the page count (marginally) as I go. Yip-dee-doo-dah to me, I guess.
So, to recap: I hate transcribing, but it's reasonably productive and is helping with the editing process. (I should really leave editing until after Screnzy, but what the heck! I'm ahead. I deserve to be allowed to deviate slightly.)
And now I'm off to do some more transcribing, and maybe write a guitar solo after that...
Regards,
A Reasonably Happy Transcriber
No comments:
Post a Comment