SBW 191: How to Write 300% Faster Using Dictation
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When you saw the title of this episode—“How to Write 300% Faster Using Dictation”—did that seem like clickbait, or maybe copywriting that was stretching the truth? If so, I can understand your resistance because I would have felt the same way up until recently.
I’m part of a weekly writes’ mastermind, and all three of us in the group have been working on writing projects. I have a book that has been way too long in the works, and I needed an incentive to get a draft written quickly. I had about 20% of the book already drafted from other content I was repurposing, but most of it needed to be new material.
So I made a crazy wager: I bet the other guys $100 each that I could get the complete 20,000-word draft finished in one week. It was Monday when I made the get, and I had until the following Monday at midnight to get it done. If I lost, I would have to pay each of them $100, and I knew my wife would not be too happy about that.
Keep in mind, I was also starting a client book that week, and I had two chapters of THAT book to draft—about 7,000 words in addition to my own book. I was desperate, so I thought I would experiment with dictation, which I had used many times before to make notes and write blog posts and podcast content. However, I had never used it to write a book before.
This is a short book—52 chapters, with 400-500 words in each chapter. I already had content for about a dozen of the chapters, but the closer I looked at it, I knew I’d have to create it from scratch because the existing material didn’t really fit the direction of the book.
I knew the topic of each chapter, but that’s pretty much it. So for several nights that week, I went out walking for about an hour, with the goal of drafting ten chapters per night. I had the chapters all ready in Scrivener on my iPhone, so all I had to do was open the chapter, hit the microphone button on the keyboard, and start dictating. My iPhone automatically transcribes it, and I can see the word count in Scrivener. My goal was about 400 words per chapter. Functionally, they ended up being anywhere from 350-500 words each.
Before I started dictating each chapter, I would brainstorm an outline. This is where it’s very valuable to have a template for writing a book. For this specific book, each chapter had 3 components: an introduction, main body, and takeaway. For the introduction, I used an interesting story or compelling question. Then in the body, I explained the concept, why it was important, and countered reader objections. Then in the takeaway, I gave some kind of action they could take to apply the content. That’s pretty much it.
I need to be clear: this was not a clean draft. But that was not my goal. My goal was to produce a messy, ugly draft that was complete. The faster I can get to a complete draft, the better. It’s psychology rung on the ladder that lets you know you’ve achieved an important goal in the book-writing process.
By using this method, I was able to get a sloppy draft of the whole book done in just 7 days. I draft 25,485 words to total in just a week. But I emphasize again: this was not a clean draft. It was a rough draft. But I firmly believe it’s better to have a rough complete draft of something than a partial clean draft that might never get finished. Of course, it all depends on the project, but for this kind of book that is not research-based, I think it works well.
So where does the 300% come into play here? I can draft 1,000 words an hour if I have an outline and I’m focused. When I’m dictating, I can do 3,000 words an hour. As I said, it’s not clean, it’s a draft. But it’s a lot faster than typing.
The reason dictation, while walking is so effective, is that walking stimulates the creative part of your brain. Talking is also more natural than typing. We learned to speak much earlier than we learned to type. So dictation is a more natural, and I dare say, creative mode of writing than staring at a computer screen.
So I encourage you to give dictation a try. I often use Scrivener on my phone, which is great because it syncs with the version of my Mac. But sometimes I also use Evernote or the Notes app on my phone to dictate, depending on what I’m writing and where it will be stored.
When I dictated the book a few weeks ago, I just held the phone up to my mouth and spoke. But I just bought a set of Apple AirPods, which will make it even more effective since they are great for dictation.
So give it a try. I think you’ll find that dictation is a fun and fast way to create content.
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