People with severe MECFS who manage to write, how do you do it?

[V.R.T.]

I'm wondering what people write on - laptop, tablet, phone etc; how they manage to pace with writing; how much they generally get done.

And just general advice. I can never finish longer projects now. I start shorter stuff and do it in one go and crash or abandon it. I'd like to do some creative and some advocacy type writing if at all possible.

Edit: this is probably in the wrong subforum sorry.

 

[fst]

I'm wondering what people write on - laptop, tablet, phone etc; how they manage to pace with writing; how much they generally get done.

And just general advice. I can never finish longer projects now. I start shorter stuff and do it in one go and crash or abandon it. I'd like to do some creative and some advocacy type writing if at all possible.

Edit: this is probably in the wrong subforum sorry.

Recently been working on my PhD thesis. Technical writing may work differently, never did much creative writing myself.

I have a notebook laying next to my bed all time. I start by laying out the structure of a chapter or section on a piece of paper. Then I handwrite a draft and use speech-to-text to digitalize it. Then paste it into AI to fix the awful mess of words that speech-to-text produced. Usually it can fix those mistakes quite well.

I think for longer projects, the most important part is first making a good plan of the structure that you can follow through. Then you can pace it and write paragraph by paragraph.

 

[hotblack]

It’s a mix.

Some is just a flurry of blind frustration tbh. So probably not ideal. But after a while of not having got something sometimes it just happens.

But I make a lot of notes on my phone/ipad. Some I don’t get back to others I do when up to. The editing is the hard bit.

For longer pieces like writing to an MP or maybe a longer post on an idea a few things that help.

Trying to break stuff up into smaller chunks is good. Capturing a snippet here or there. As is iteration over days weeks of months. But I can’t really come up with a plan up front, it evolves.

Using text to speech to listen to what I’ve written and then go back and make the changes I need or for errors I spot. Again, doing so repeatedly over time.

I find LLMs useful for brainstorming but terrible for actually writing. They rarely capture the way I write. AI tools like text to speech and dictation though are hugely beneficial.

Time. It really is often an iterative process of bits if thoughts or ideas that have been going around my head captured and tweaked or returned to.

Luck. When I can write I do and when I can’t I can’t. Not a lot you can do about that.

Also sometimes saying, this will do. A shorter piece that captures the essence of what you want to say can always be followed up on if needed. You don’t have to write an essay for everything.

 

[V.R.T.]

Both comments full of helpful advice, thank you. The speech to text on my phone isn't so great but the built in one with word is decent.

I do struggle to write on my phone, and if I write on paper it never gets typed up.

 

[fst]

Both comments full of helpful advice, thank you. The speech to text on my phone isn't so great but the built in one with word is decent.

I do struggle to write on my phone, and if I write on paper it never gets typed up.

On Android, you can install different keyboards on your phone which may come with different speech-to-text functions. I use Gboard which has a somewhat decent speech-to-text but unfortunately it still gets words wrong quite often.

Gboard is by Google, I had to give up on data privacy and go for maximum usability for obvious reasons.

Depending on your phone, this may already be the default, though.