I Dictated My First Novel Draft. Here's What Actually Happened.

I had been stuck on chapter four for eleven days. The cursor blinked. I typed a sentence, deleted it, typed it again with different words, deleted that too. I was not blocked on the story. I knew what happened next. Something between my brain and the keyboard was eating the words before they landed.

A friend suggested I try dictating. I was skeptical in the way that people are skeptical of things that sound too simple. But eleven days is a long time to stare at the same paragraph.

The First Session Was Terrible

I sat down, opened VoiceInk, pressed the key, and started talking. What came out was not a chapter. It was closer to a transcript of someone narrating their own confusion. Sentences ran into each other. I repeated myself. I said "like" fourteen times in two minutes. When I read back what I had, I wanted to close the laptop and go for a walk.

But the word count was 600 words in nine minutes. That was more than I had written in the previous three days combined.

The Learning Curve Is Real but Short

By the third session, something shifted. I stopped trying to compose in my head before speaking and started just telling the story. This is the actual skill unlock with dictation: you stop writing and start narrating.

The novelist Kevin J. Anderson has dictated all his books this way for years, walking outdoors and speaking into a recorder. He talks about the story like he is telling it to someone sitting across from him. I started doing the same thing at my desk, and the prose loosened up in a way it rarely does when I type.

I was producing 1,500 to 2,000 words per hour. My previous typing sessions averaged around 600.

What the Drafts Actually Look Like

Honestly? Rough. Dictated first drafts are rougher than typed first drafts. There are more filler phrases, more redundant sentences, more moments where you can see the brain searching for the word and settling for a placeholder.

But here is the thing about first drafts: rough is fine. Rough is the job. The job of a first draft is to exist, so you have something to rewrite. Dictated drafts exist faster, and they have a quality of momentum that typed drafts sometimes lack. The scenes move. Characters talk. Things happen.

The Unexpected Benefit

I expected to go faster. I did not expect to go deeper.

When I type, I edit as I go. I cannot help it. I read the sentence I just wrote and tinker with it before writing the next one. Dictation breaks this habit because there is no comfortable way to scroll back and revise mid-session. You just keep talking.

This forced forward momentum turned out to be exactly what my stuck chapter needed. I talked through the scene without stopping. I found things in it I had not planned, including a piece of dialogue that became important three chapters later.

The Numbers at the End

I finished the first draft in six weeks. My previous two novels, both typed, took four to five months each to first draft. The manuscript came in at 87,000 words. The revision process was not significantly longer than usual.

I am not saying dictation is better than typing for every writer. But for drafting, for getting the story down before your inner critic can strangle it, speaking has something that typing does not: it keeps you in the story instead of in the sentence.

If You Are Considering It

Start with a scene you already know well. Somewhere you have been meaning to write but have not been able to make yourself sit down and type. Give yourself twenty minutes. Talk it out.

You might be surprised what shows up when your hands are not in the way.