How I Wrote 10,000 Words in a Day by Talking

I've been a writer for eleven years. I've hit 2,000-word days with some regularity, 3,000 on a good stretch. Five thousand felt like a ceiling I'd bump against and slide back down from. Ten thousand was the kind of number I associated with people who had no jobs and no children, neither of which described me.

Then I tried dictating.

The Setup

I cleared a Saturday. I set up VoiceInk on my Mac, plugged in a decent USB microphone, and opened a blank document. My plan was simple: speak for as many hours as I could, eat lunch, speak some more. No editing until the day was done. No rereading. Just forward motion.

I felt slightly ridiculous. I always feel ridiculous talking to myself. That passed after about four minutes.

The First Two Hours

The first thing I noticed was speed. I'm a 70-words-per-minute typist, which is faster than most people. Even so, by 10am I had 2,400 words and my coffee was still warm. That had never happened before.

The second thing I noticed was that I wasn't stopping to fix things. When you type and make an error, you backspace. It's automatic, almost compulsive. When you're talking, there's no backspace. You keep going. You say "scratch that" if something's wrong and move on. The draft stays ugly, but it stays growing.

The Wall

Around noon I hit 5,200 words and ran out of steam on my main topic. This is where I would normally quit, or spend an hour rearranging sentences I'd already written.

Instead, I went for a walk. Twenty minutes, no phone. When I came back, I started talking through a different section. Not writing it, just explaining it to myself out loud, like I was describing it to a friend. Halfway through that explanation I realized I was already writing. The transcript had another 400 words in it.

This is something dictation teaches you quickly: the line between thinking and writing is thinner than you thought.

The Afternoon

By 3pm I had 7,800 words. My voice was slightly tired but my hands felt fine, which is not a sentence I've ever written about a long writing day. Usually by this point my wrists ache and my shoulders are locked up from hunching.

I kept going. The last section came out fast because by then I'd been living inside the material for six hours and I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I just had to say it.

The Final Count

At 5:40pm I stopped. The document had 10,340 words. I made a cup of tea and read through it, which took 45 minutes. It was rough. It was a first draft in the truest sense. But it was all there, the structure, the arguments, the examples. Every major thing I'd wanted to say was on the page.

I spent the following week editing it down to 7,200 polished words. That's actually a normal ratio for my drafts. I just produced the raw material five times faster than usual.

What I Learned

Dictation doesn't make you a better writer. It makes you a faster one, which gives you more material to work with, which tends to make the final product better because you're not rationing words.

It also changes your relationship with the first draft. When typing, a blank page feels like a commitment. When speaking, it feels more like a conversation. You're allowed to be wrong. You're allowed to wander and come back.

I don't dictate everything now. But for first drafts, I almost always talk it out. The keyboard comes in later, for the careful work.

If you've been stuck on something, try speaking it instead of typing it. Even for ten minutes. You might find the words were there all along.