Why I Started Dictating My Novels (and Why It Was a Disaster at First)

I first started thinking about dictation after seeing an author on TikTok talking about trying it because she was having problems with her wrists from typing all the time.

Around the same time, I listened to a podcast with an author who dictated his novels and said he could write around 4,000 words an hour.

At the time, my writing speed was about 1,600 words an hour.

So, from both a health and productivity point of view, dictation seemed like something I needed to try. I already have issues with my neck, which are made worse by sitting at a desk for too long, and the idea of being able to write while walking really appealed to me.

I love walking anyway, and the school run is about a one-hour round trip on foot. If I could spend that hour writing at the same time, it seemed like a no-brainer.

So I tried it.

It was a disaster.

I dictated while I walked, then came home and looked at what the app had produced. It was absolute nonsense. Not slightly messy prose that needed editing. Nonsense. I couldn't even work out what I'd originally been trying to say well enough to fix it.

That put an end to my dreams of wandering around writing entire novels while getting my steps in.

But I hadn't completely given up on dictation.

Instead, I tried doing it at my desk. That was better, although at first it felt incredibly awkward. I was very aware that I was sitting alone in a room talking to myself, and it wasn't actually much faster than typing.

I stuck with it anyway.

It only took a few more attempts before it started to feel normal, and then something clicked. Within a few days, I went from writing around 600 words in a 25-minute sprint to regularly getting more than 1,000.

More importantly, the transcription was actually usable.

It still isn't perfect. I don't worry too much about things like quotation marks while I'm dictating because those are easy to fix later. What matters is that it gets the actual words right, and most of the time it does.

Now, I love dictating.

Unfortunately, I still haven't cracked the writing-while-walking part, so my school run remains disappointingly unproductive. But when I'm at my desk, dictation has pretty much doubled the amount I can get down in a writing sprint.

Dictating so fast is mostly possible because by the time I begin dictating the manuscript, I already know the story in quite a lot of detail.

But that's probably a whole other blog post.