The Maths Of Dictation
Practicing The Write Stuff Issue #59
Back in Issue 19 - Brandon Sanderson And The Maths Of Writing - I riffed on a video from fantasy author Brandon Sanderon where he talked about how to produce 100,000 first draft words a year. Or approximately one novel a year.
It’s worth checking out that post. But, assuming you wanted to write 100K words a year, here’s a quote breaking down how that correlates to writing hours per week depending on your typing speed:
If you write 250 words an hour, you need to find 8 hours of writing time a week.
If you write 500 words an hour, you need to find 4 hours of writing time a week.
If you write 750 words an hour, you need to find just over 2.5 hours of writing time a week.
If you write 1000 words an hour, you need to find just two hours of writing time a week.
One caveat before we dive into what we’re going to cover in this Issue: you have to set targets and goals that are unique to you. 50,000 words might work for you in a year. Or 200,000 words. You’ve got to be honest about what you want to achieve before thinking about ways to increase word counts and/or writing time.
So you know…to achieve what I want to achieve I think I need to average around 1000 words a day. Maybe as much as Stephen King’s fabled 1500 words a day.
While that serves as a background to this issue, it’s not the primary focus. But the maths of dictation can play a part.
Before we dive in, it’s also worth referencing Issue 29 - How To Write In Your Dead Time. That issue talked about how I started using dictation to help create more first draft, non-fiction words.
Issue 29 was published on May 12. I’ve been using dictation on and off since then. And want to share some observations.
#1 You Can Dictate 250 Words In 5 Minutes
Normal talking speed is 100 to 150 words a minute. Reading text alound can be as much as 250 words a minute. My dictation process involves me sounding out all punctuation - full stop, comma, new paragraph, etc. - and it feels super slow. I much prefer typing conventionally…however, the whole point of dictating is it allows me to get ‘first draft’ words on paper while doing activities where I can’t be writing. E.g. walking the dog. Waiting in the car to pick someone up.
Note: I put ‘first draft’ words in single quotes because dictated words need editing before they reach ‘first draft’ leve. While the quality of interpretation of voice to text has increased dramatically in the last 10 years, there are still words that aren’t transcribed correctly. And some problems with homophones too. (E.g. to or too or two. Or you’re/your.)
So you can picture 500 words…three or four chunky paragraphs will do it. This sub-section of this issue is currently at 166 words. So 5 minutes and 250 words gives you a healthy chunk that can be a sub-section of a larger work, or short form content of some form. Maybe a thread. Or a short form essay. My non-fiction book writing - note, not my music book writing - is composed of shorter sections that build to a whole Those sections are typically 400 to 700 words long. Sometimes 1000 words.
So 5 minutes of dictation creates a reasonable chunk of text that’s worth having.
That was 249 words before this sentence.
So…
#2…If You Double That to 10 Minutes Of Dictation, Then…
…you’ll double the amount of words dictated from 250 to approximately 500.
Again, that’s just 10 minutes. And it’s words that are created while doing an activity where it’s nto possible to be sat at the typewriter writing conventionally.
Just so we’re all clear on the maths of this:
500 words a day…
…for a year…
is approximately 180,000 first draft words.
If you only wrote 180,000 words a year, you’d be considered prolific. To put that into some context, that would be 5 or 6 books the length of say Stephen Pressfield’s Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t. Or 3 or 4 books of the length of Atomic Habits (by James Clear).
But here’s the surprising thing that I’ve found:
#3 The Dictation Related Productivity Boost
Since I started using dictation, not only have my first draft word counts gone significantly up. But dictation doesn’t create an isolated productivity boost - as a direct result of dictating, my words written conventionally (computer and keyboard) have also gone up.
Some writing days I just sit down and start writing conventionally. But some writing days, I use the following process:
During my early morning journal session, I outline what I’m going to dictate. Or part of a longer form piece and get ready to dictate 500 words.
Those 500 words are dictated during my dog walk.
When I’m ready to write, I email those words to one of my email accounts. Then copy and paste those words into my writing software. (For me, that’s Scrivener. But can be whatever you use….Google Docs, Pages, even Word - but really? Word? Does anyone still use that?)
I set my writing music going.
And I spend 5 to 10 minutes going through those dictated words, making corrections, formatting them better, and so on.
At some point I’ll transition without conscious thought from editing those dictated words to getting fresh words on paper.
And I continue writing.
It’s not uncommon to end up with 1500 words or more from one of these hybrid sessions. I think this a version on steroids of the same kind of idea that’s at play in Hemingway’s advice to finish a day’s writing on an incomplete sentence. So that the first writing task of the day is to finish that incomplete sentence.
Here’s why I think this works so well:
Because editing is not ‘writing’ per se…there’s little resistance to doing it.
By the time I’ve edited 500 words or so…my writing brain is warmed up. Plus my writing music has triggered the writing habit.
It seems no effort to continue on from where I left off…and note that while I don’t finish on an incomplete sentence, I always finish knowing what’s coming next. Whether that’s a ‘note to self’ as to what that is, or whether that’s a sub-headline that acts as a guide to what’s coming next.
Because - for me at least - there’s a gap between when I dictate the first 250 or 500 words, and when I start editing them and continue writing…my subconscious has had a period of time for ‘the boys in the basement’ to get to work.
So dictation works to jump start my writing brain.
There’s already words on the page - with a guide to where those words are going - so there’s no blank page, no thinking about what to write. That works all done.
But note, as the old cliche goes:
#4 Failing To Prepare is Preparing To Fail
The hard work in this process isn’t the writing….it’s organizing the writing BEFORE it’s written.
Sometimes I can sit down at a keyboard with a vague idea in my head, use my writing music to trigger flow, and produce a piece of writing. (E.g. this issue of Practicing The Write Stuff.)
That’s because I’ve written enough non-fiction down the years that I can be the non-fiction version of what fiction writers refer to as a ‘pantser’ or a discovery writer. I can’t do that with dictation though….from a writing perspective I find the process of dictating clumsy and convoluted. There’s no flow…it feels stilted and a little unnatural.
However.
Once the words are exported to Scrivener and given a light edit, and once I use that as a springboard to create more words, a week later I struggle to locate the ‘join’ where dictation finished and conventional writing started.
So having some kind of outline in place is - for me - crucial to the process.
Sidebar: I started writing a music book at the end of September, got about 25% of the way in, and put the book aside on October 11th while my brain dealt with a structural issue. I fully intended to pick that up again within a couple of weeks….forgot about it and only picked it up again last Monday. I already can’t ‘see’ the join. I’m not saying it will be the same for you…but that was something I noticed this week, and thought I should record that observation somewhere. Because that book is outlined….once the structural issue was resolved…it was simple to rejig that outline and move forwards.
#5 How 250 Or 500 Dictated Words Compounds Over Time
Here’s why 250 words (or better, 500 words) every day is so important:
If you dictate 250 or 500 words every day, you start to build a body of writing that can support books, newsletters, and more.
As noted above, the dictated words work to jump start conventional writing. So they double or triple or quadruple in number.
If you prepare correctly, you can even dictate 250 words on a short 5 minute errand while driving.
Remember 500 words a day is approx. 180,000 words in a year. If you use 500 words a day as a kickstarter and only double them, that’s 360,000 words in the next year.
That’s a decent amount of words. And long form content - from newsletters to mini books to longer books - doesn’t have to be written sequentially…it can be written out of sequence and assembled.
Here’s a truism: your loyal readers - and every writer should be working to building up a following of loyal readers - won’t care how you put words on paper, only that you have. So use whatever tools you have in your toolbox to get those words down.
The Ride Out
I’m hoping that this process - using dictation to kick start longer conventional writing sessions - will pan out for fiction as well. One of my longer term goals is to get back into writing fiction. So when I do - at least six months away I think - then I’ll try this out.
PTWS Issue #60
There’s a reason I wrote about this topic today….maybe I’ll reveal it next week.