I am standing on my doorstep waiting for a Deliveroo. Talking to myself. People are walking past and I am not concerned with what they make to the chubby guy speaking in to his phone because this is how I write now. I have been trying voice journalling for a while. The idea is simple: instead of sitting down and typing, you just speak. You record whatever is in your head and save it to a folder. Raw, unedited, a bit chaotic. No stopping to fix a word. No deleting a sentence because it sounds wrong. Just thoughts, as they come out.
The reason I started doing it is that typing gets in the way. There is always a bottleneck between my brain and the screen. My fingers slow things down. By the time I have typed a thought, I have already censored half of it without meaning to. Voice gets around that. The thought lands before I have had the chance to talk myself out of it.
Where Kerouac comes in
On the Road has been in my head for as long as I can remember. I love the Beat writers – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. Not because I think I am particularly literary, but because the whole thing about being present, moving, letting life come at you, it is a way of looking at the world that I find hard to shake.
The story goes that Kerouac taped sheets of paper together into one long roll, sat at his typewriter, and just went. No stopping. The road was not the destination. The writing was.
Voice journalling is not quite that. I am not on anything stronger than coffee, and my typewriter is a Mac Mini. But the principle is similar. You stop waiting until conditions are right. You start before you are ready. You let the stream run.
I know this because I once did something similar physically. After reading On the Road, I travelled from China down to the south of Thailand. Not by air. Overland, through Laos, stopping along the way. It took months. The point was the journey, not the arrival. I still think about that trip when I feel like I am rushing something that should not be rushed.
What ends up in the folder
The recordings are not polished. Some of them are a bit incoherent. That is the point. I am not trying to produce anything when I make them. I am just building up a pool of raw material – thoughts about my work, ideas I have not quite formed yet, things I noticed, questions I am sitting with.
Then, when I need to write something, I go back through them. Sometimes a whole blog post is already there, just waiting to be tidied up. Sometimes it is half a sentence that turns into something bigger.
This post is a good example. The idea came from a voice note I recorded while waiting for a delivery, talking to myself on the doorstep while my wife Kathryn could not hear me. A few weeks later, here it is.
Why this matters if you write a blog
Most people I know who write – whether for a work blog, a newsletter, or anything else – hit the same problem. They sit down to write and nothing comes. The blank page is too heavy. They need an idea before they can start, and they cannot find one.
The voice journalling habit shifts that. You stop trying to produce on demand. You collect thoughts when they happen – on the doorstep, on a walk, wherever – and you have something to work from when you sit down to write.
You do not need to be a Beat poet. You do not need to go overland through Laos. You just need your phone and five minutes while the food is on its way.
The written word is the destination. You just have to start moving.
