How I Wrote My Novel's First Draft by Talking Out Loud

For eight months I wrote my novel the way most people do: at a desk, fingers on keys, grinding out sentences one at a time. On a good day I got 300 words. On a bad day I got a blinking cursor and a mild sense of dread. Then a friend offhandedly mentioned she had been dictating her nonfiction book on walks. I thought it sounded absurd. I tried it anyway.

That week I wrote 4,000 words.

What I Was Actually Afraid Of

I had convinced myself that typing was part of the writing process, that the slowness was where the craft lived. If I slowed down to type, I was also slowing down to think. There is something to that idea, but I had taken it too far. I was not using the slowness to think. I was using it to stall.

Speaking out loud felt exposed in a way typing did not. There is nowhere to hide when you are saying the words. You cannot linger on a comma. You have to commit to the sentence and move forward.

That discomfort turned out to be useful.

The Actual Workflow

Mornings became dictation time. I would sit with a coffee, open my draft in the app I had always used, and press the key to activate VoiceInk. Then I would just talk through the scene. Not performing it, not reading from notes. Talking it out the way you would tell a story to someone sitting across from you.

The first few sessions were rough. I said "um" a lot. I doubled back and contradicted myself mid-sentence. But none of that mattered because it was a first draft, and first drafts are supposed to be ugly. What surprised me was how quickly the scenes started moving. Characters said things I had not planned. Dialogue came naturally because speaking dialogue is, obviously, closer to the real thing than typing it.

What the Numbers Actually Looked Like

After a month of dictating, my average daily word count had gone from around 250 to just over 1,100. I was not working longer hours. I was working about the same amount of time with dramatically less resistance at the start of each session. The blank page problem almost disappeared, because starting to talk is easier than starting to type.

By the time the first draft was finished, it was 87,000 words and it had taken four months. The same project, by my previous pace, would have taken closer to three years.

What Did Not Change

Editing still happened at the keyboard. Revision is precision work, and typing is better for that. I also kept a notebook for structural thinking, for chapter outlines, for the questions I needed to answer before the next session. Dictation did not replace every part of the process. It replaced the part that had been strangling me.

The prose voice also stayed mine. I had worried that dictated writing would sound loose or casual, too close to how I talk. Some of it did, and I cleaned that up in revision. But a lot of it was sharper than my typed drafts, because I had not had time to second-guess every word before it existed.

What I Would Tell Someone Considering It

Do not wait until you have a perfect setup. You do not need a studio microphone or a soundproof room. A quiet corner and a decent mic are enough to start. The technology has gotten good enough that accuracy is rarely the bottleneck.

The real adjustment is psychological. You are going to feel silly at first. You are going to say things out loud that seem worse than what you would have typed. Say them anyway. They are probably not worse. They are just faster, and that is the point.

If your draft has been stuck for months, try talking it out for a week. You might surprise yourself.