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

I'd been stuck on the same chapter for eleven days. Not stuck like I had no ideas. Stuck like every time I sat down to type, the ideas arrived and then immediately felt too big or too clumsy to get down before they dissolved. I had a lot of opening sentences and nothing else.

A friend suggested I stop typing it and just talk it out. I thought that sounded like something people say when they don't write for a living. I tried it anyway.

The First Hour Was Awkward

I set up VoiceInk, opened a blank document, and started speaking. It felt strange immediately. My voice sounded uncertain in the room. I kept stopping to listen to myself, which is exactly what you're not supposed to do.

But I kept going. I talked through the scene I was trying to write. Not performing prose, just describing what I wanted to happen. Who was in the room. What the light looked like. What the character was afraid to say.

The words appeared on the screen as I spoke. I didn't touch the keyboard once.

By the end of that first hour, I had 1,800 words. On a normal day I'd have had maybe 600, and I would have hated most of them.

What Changed Around Hour Three

Something loosened. I stopped thinking about the words as text I was producing and started thinking about them as something I was telling. The chapter stopped being a writing problem and became a story problem, which is a much easier problem to have.

I took a twenty-minute break, walked around the block, came back, and kept going. The dictation picked up exactly where I left it. No warm-up required.

By noon I had just over 5,000 words. I'd never written 5,000 words in a morning in my life.

What the Draft Actually Looked Like

Not perfect. Obviously. There were places where I repeated myself, where a transition was missing, where I said "kind of" four times in one paragraph. Dictated prose has a different texture than typed prose. It's looser. More digressive.

But it was alive in a way my typed drafts often aren't. The characters sounded like people. The scenes had momentum. When I read it back, I could feel where I'd been excited while talking, because the sentences got faster and more specific in those sections.

Editing it took about two hours the next morning. That's fast for 10,000 words.

The Practical Parts Nobody Mentions

A few things I learned the hard way. First, drink water. Your voice gets tired before your brain does. Second, move around. I paced while I dictated and produced noticeably better material than when I sat still. Third, don't watch the words appear on screen while you're speaking. Look out the window, at the wall, anywhere else. The moment you start reading your own output mid-sentence, you start editing instead of generating.

VoiceInk's transcription was fast enough that I only had to glance at the screen occasionally to confirm it was keeping up. It was. The lag was short enough that it never broke my train of thought.

Would I Do It Again

I've now written the last four chapters of my draft this way. Not because typing is bad, but because dictating is better for first drafts, at least for me. The editing process is the same. The drafting process is completely different.

The day I wrote 10,000 words wasn't a trick or a hack. I just finally stopped making my hands responsible for something my voice was always better at.

If you've got a piece of writing that's been sitting, try talking it out. Set a timer for thirty minutes and just describe what you want to say. You might surprise yourself with how much is already there.