How I Am Using Dictation to Write My Next Novel
Listen to this episode of The First Draft Club:
Last fall as I was writing my first draft of my latest novel, I found myself curious about dictating. I was dictation-curious, you might say.
And this was because of a topic that I talked about in the previous episode, which is how to find time to write without sacrificing the other priorities in my life. I was juggling work and parenting and novel-writing, and I also wanted to make sure to continue to move my body every day…which is how I landed on dictation.
Why I Became "Dictation Curious"
I love taking walks around my neighborhood, and often when I'm doing that I will use the time to listen to a podcast or to audio message my friends. I have friends with whom I exchange 15-minute audio messages back-and-forth on the regular.
By last fall, I had developed a groove where, after school drop-off, I would go on an hour or even a two-hour walk every day, listening and sending audio messages, and it was time that I really valued. But then by the time I got home it would be 10:30 and I would need to do work-related stuff. And I don’t write at night; that doesn’t work for me. It’s morning or not at all.
So dictation weaseled its way into my mind.
Because I know from exchanging audio messages with my friends that walking is really good for my thinking and I feel like I say smarter things when I'm on the move. Maybe, I thought, I could translate that into fiction writing. I also was curious about dictation from the perspective of a writing teacher because it’s the one mode of writing that I had never personally tried.
So long story short, I gave it a go. In this episode, I'll cover:
Why I became "dictation curious" and decided to try this method
The apps and tools I used for dictation
How I integrated dictation with my daily walking routine
The results: whether dictated writing differs from typed writing
Tools and Apps for Dictation
I asked around for the best apps, did some research, tried the paid ones, and what I found is good news for you if you're interested in trying this, because the best app for me turned out to be free: the native Notes app on my iphone.
It was the most accurate for transcription, and so while some of the paid apps had extra features, those just didn’t matter if the app itself wasn’t accurate at transcribing my voice or if it glitched out too much.
There are a couple of downsides to using the iPhone Notes app.
Unlike some of the paid dictation apps, there is no way currently in the Notes app to save particular vocabulary or train your phone on things like your characters' quirky name or terms of art that aren’t already in its dictionary. Maybe one day Apple will get better at this, but today is not that day.
So for instance, I have a character named Hera—H, E, R, A—and every single time I said her name, it would be transcribed as Cara or as Hair. Fine, no big deal. I did not go into dictating assuming that it would churn out a flawless product. I knew that it would require some cleaning up, and I was fine with that.
The next arguable downside is punctuation. I turned off the “auto punctuate” feature, which is doable on iPhone, because I found that I like to take a lot of pauses to think. Being able to pause turned out to be one of my favorite parts of being able to dictate—the freedom to let silence pass while I walk and imagine, and so I didn’t want every pause to be translated into a “period” as if I had completed a sentence.
This means that when I dictate, I have to actually speak aloud the punctuation I want to use—so if I want a comma, I say "comma," and if I want a period I say "period." You might think that this would be cumbersome, but honestly, it becomes so habitual and routine that after a week or so it was as automatic as typing punctuation. I don't even think about it anymore. So I don’t actually see this as much of a downside.
There is one exception though, which is quotation marks. When I was transcribing a conversation, it was way too cumbersome to say “quotation mark” every time someone began or ended a bit of dialogue. And so I just didn’t use quotation marks at all in the dictation, and I had AI add them later. I will talk more about that later.
Let’s talk about my process and the learning curve now.
My Dictation Process
Adjusting to Silence
One of the clumsy aspects of starting to dictate was that I came into it conditioned not to let silences pass because, of course, when we're in a conversation or sending an audio message to a friend, we are trained to fill silence. We don't want to make people sit there and wait while we think. It's just a normative social grace we’re so accustomed to, we don’t think twice about it.
But when you're dictating, you don't have to do that.
You can let a whole two minutes pass in between thoughts or sentences, and doing so is good, because that’s time you get to spend imagining while you walk (if you’re like me and doing it on the go).
So extended silence is a freedom that I had to practice in order to really take advantage of dictation. I had to keep reminding myself that I was allowed to take pauses and just think about what was going to come next.
Productivity Results
Even with the silences, I was extremely surprised how productive dictating turned out to be for me in terms of wordcount. I found on average I could dictate about 1,100 words in an hour, which is more than I write, on average. It did not feel like this as I was walking and talking, so that was interesting.
The question was if it was any good.
Like if I'm sitting in front of my computer typing, I've reached a point in my career as a novelist where I feel like, you know, there's a pretty good chance that I've written a usable scene. I've written four novels, I have been doing this a long time, and I'm not saying that I'm not going to cut stuff from my first draft. Of course I am. I just mean the writing itself isn't going to be unusable on its face for the most part. I know how to pace a scene, how to balance dialogue and context, and how to incorporate internality…all of which I teach in The Book Incubator, shameless plug.
But I wasn't sure if I could do these things while dictating. We don’t speak the same way we type.
Were my dictated scenes going to come out stilted and staccato, or rambling? Were they going to have a weird pacing? I had no idea.
There seemed to be a real risk that I could generate tens of thousands of words that would ultimately not even be usable, and that was a risk I was willing to take.
It was worth it to me because of the “lifestyle gain,” we’ll call it—I could keep up my walking routine and still get my novel draft written, and the potential upside was very high.
If dictating DID work, it would mean I had unlocked something very, very cool for myself and for the writers I work with.
The Results: Did Dictation Work for Novel Writing?
So what happened? Did it work?
When I finished my first draft, set it aside, then came back two months later to read it, I was pleasantly surprised that, for the most part, I could not tell which parts I had dictated and which parts I had typed.
Crazy, right!?
Sometimes I could mostly because the grammar was off or the names were wrong. But those were superficial indicators and easy fixes. I generally didn’t notice a meaningful difference in tone, voice, or pacing. In the end, I had dictated almost half the draft... around 50,000 words, and the manuscript came in at just under 100,000.
Did I need to revise heavily? Of course.
But all first drafts need revision, and mine would have whether I’d handwritten, typed, or dictated it. That I know.
Next week, in my episode on how I’m ethically using AI as a novelist, I’ll get more granular about what I did with the transcripts on my phone once I had them, because this is one area where I’ve found AI to be super helpful.
But in sum, I highly recommend giving dictation a try if you’re curious.
You don’t need any fancy software or even a mic. You just need your phone and some comfortable shoes.
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