How to write faster without sacrificing quality using dictation

A guide to getting out of the weeds and into your flow faster to get through your first draft and closer to publication.

Hi,

I never really resonated with dictation until recently. In the past, you had to speak too many specialty marks to get anything usable, and I don’t like saying the word “period” a billion times. Plus, I always spoke too fast for it to understand me, and I wasn’t willing to train it.

However, recently I started transcribing a lot of my previous work and realized that dictation is leaps and bounds better than where it was even a year ago, and it’s probably even better now than it was at the beginning of the year.

Being able to transcribe my random ramblings into something easier to manipulate has been a huge revelation to me.

How to Write Irresistible Books that Readers Devour was mainly written this way, and I have a book coming out next year that’s based on much of the work I did on

The Six Figure Author Experiment

, among other sources.

I’ve even written several articles based on courses like this one that were inaccessible until recently. Even though 2,000+ people went through my Write a Great Novel course, that article was viewed over 20,000 times, which is a scale that I never imagined for that content before I figured out how to mold dictation, transcription, and AI into my workflow.

So, when

Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer

messaged me about writing about dictation, I jumped on the opportunity.

Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer is the author of 19 books (and counting), most of them written through dictation. She teaches fiction authors how to build sustainable writing habits and live their best creative lifestyles through her training programs and podcast, The Confident Fiction Author. Learn more about her work at www.fictioncourses.com.

She just happens to have a live Dictation Bootcamp kicking off October 14, 2025, for $37, so if you resonate with any of this, then maybe check it out.

“If I try to write faster, won’t the quality of my work go down?”

That’s one of the most common concerns I hear from writers when I bring up dictation.

Maybe you’ve felt the same way. You love the idea of writing more, but not if it means producing a messy, rushed draft that feels like a poor imitation of your author voice.

I get it.

As fiction authors, we care deeply about craft. We want our sentences to sing, our characters to breathe, and our stories to matter. And it’s easy to assume that writing fast and writing well are incompatible.

But after dictating more than a dozen books and teaching hundreds of authors how to do the same, I’ve learned something that might surprise you.

You can write faster without sacrificing quality if you understand how to work with your brain instead of against it.

And that’s exactly what dictation makes possible. Let’s break down how it works, and how you can get started.

The real problem with writing slowly

There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing slowly...

…unless it’s leaving you stuck.

Writers often wear “slow” like a badge of honor, as if carefully polishing every word as it’s typed is the only way to produce high-quality prose.

What they don’t understand is that for many that slow pace isn’t about intentionality, it’s about perfectionism. It’s about fear of the blank page and listening to your inner critic that refuses to let a first draft be what it’s meant to be: imperfect, exploratory, and alive.

When you write slowly out of anxiety or habit, it can:

• Stall your momentum

• Kill your excitement for the story

• Keep you endlessly rewriting chapter one

• Drain your confidence

And that’s where dictation offers a different path forward as a tool for getting your creativity back in motion.

What dictation actually does

Dictation is not about cheating the writing process. It’s about changing how you move through it.

Most authors are used to blending creation and editing into a single step. You type a sentence, backspace, rephrase it, tweak the punctuation, second-guess the tone, and never get a chance to move on to the next one.

Dictation forces you to break that habit.

When you dictate, you speak a scene aloud in your natural storytelling voice. There’s no backspace key. No fiddling with commas mid-sentence. You’re moving forward, telling the story, sentence by sentence.

This naturally separates your creative mode from your editorial mode—a separation that almost always results in faster progress and, paradoxically, better writing. When you stop interrupting yourself, you give your creativity space to stretch and breathe.

Before I started dictating, I typed about 1,500 words per hour. That’s a respectable pace, but I found myself constantly reworking what I’d just written, getting stuck in loops of self-editing that slowed me down and drained my mental energy.

After I trained myself to dictate, I doubled my speed to 3,000 words per hour. But more importantly, I enjoyed writing again, even the “muddy middle” of a first draft that used to make me feel like quitting.

The dictated drafts weren’t perfect, but neither were the typed ones.

What changed was how I approached revision. I developed a cleanup process that gets my dictated scenes into the same shape I’d expect from a first-draft typed scenes, but I get there much faster and with far less mental resistance.

The real payoff of dictation is a more joyful, sustainable process that still produces high-quality fiction.

Too often, writers evaluate their work at the sentence level as they’re writing, but that’s not the time for micro-edits. In a first draft, what really matters is:

• Is the story moving forward?

• Are the characters making decisions?

• Are there emotional beats and rising tension?

A good first draft, typed or dictated, gives you the material you need to revise. Dictation helps you get that material down faster, and often in a way that’s more emotionally resonant, because you’re not interrupting your natural voice.

We think of writing as a one step process, but it’s really two.

• Creation Mode: This is where you draft. You tell the story, explore the characters, get the ideas out of your head. It’s fast, loose, and imperfect.

• Revision Mode: This is where you refine. You shape sentences, trim scenes, clarify motivation, adjust pacing.

Most writers blur these steps, trying to perfect while creating. Dictation helps you stop doing that because when you’re speaking, it’s much harder to interrupt yourself to edit.

When you embrace this two-phase process, everything changes. You don’t feel like every sentence has to be perfect. Instead, you just get to tell the story.

Some writers think they have to choose between writing fast and writing well. But in my experience, writing faster can lead to better writing because it gets you past the part where you usually quit.

Dictation pushes you to get the bones of the story onto the page. It gives you something real to work with that you can shape, strengthen, and polish.

If you’re willing to trust the process, even just a little, you might be surprised at what your voice can do.

Are You Ready to Learn Dictation?

If you’re intrigued by dictation but nervous about the learning curve, you’re not alone. It took me multiple failed attempts before I found my flow. That’s why I’ve made it my mission to help other authors skip the frustration and get straight to what works.

This October, I’m teaching my Dictation Bootcamp for Authors—a live, 4-day training experience designed specifically for fiction writers who want to take their first steps in dictating their fiction.

Whether you’ve tried dictation before or are just curious, the Dictation Bootcamp gives you step-by-step instructions, live support, and a community of writers learning alongside you.

I won’t promise that dictation will magically solve every writing struggle. But I will say this: it’s helped me write with more joy, more freedom, and more consistency than I ever thought possible.

And it might just do the same for you.

What do you think?

• Have you ever dictated before? If so, what did you use?

• Do you find yourself getting lost in a draft? Could you see using dictation to break that block?

Let us know in the comments.

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