Thinking about Dictating your Book? Here are a Few Things to Consider

by Carla Douglas
@CarlaJDouglas

Image by Beverly & Pack (CC BY 2.0)

If you’d like to bypass your keyboard and dictate or record your book instead, you have more options than ever. Improved speech recognition software – programs you purchase, like Dragon, or those that come with your Mac or PC – make it relatively easy to get your words on the page without lifting a finger. Livescribe makes a smart pen that allows you to both write and record, and, of course, smartphones have a number of sophisticated features for recording notes and text messages and sending them to other formats.

In his netminds.com post, When You Should Talk Your Next Book Instead of Typing It, Tim Sanders presents a convincing list of reasons – from “typer’s” block to time constraints – to give dictation a try. Sanders says that particularly for nonfiction, recording your ideas is a faster and more efficient writing method than the pen or keyboard because, for one thing, you’re not tempted to start editing and revising as you write.

I was reminded of Sanders’s piece recently when I talked with a writer who had just self-published his third business book on Amazon. We struck up a conversation at Starbucks. While I was trying to pry from him details about whether and how he had handled things like revisions, editing and formatting, he gave me an earful about all the businesses he has started, his business philosophy, and his next project – a series of three trilogies (yes, nine books, already outlined) to be published on Amazon.

And in the midst of this, he told me that he’d dictated the first draft of all three books into his iPhone. “It’s so much faster,” he said. “I am way more productive doing it this way. Think about it – just in this conversation with you, I’ll bet I’ve spoken about 20,000 words.” Whoa, no argument here. This guy is a talker and a salesman, and he made me think of the famous Flannery O’Connor quote: “Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.”

If you are thinking about trading your keyboard for a voice recorder, here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. This writing method probably works best for nonfiction. Why? There’s a world of difference between covering your topics in a book of nonfiction and the slower and often more intuitive process of crafting fiction. I don’t mean it’s impossible – just that it’s a lot more difficult. Certainly a recorder would work well in the pre-writing stages of making notes and exploring ideas.

There are notable literary exceptions: Henry James is a well-known example. He dictated to a secretary and revised the typewritten drafts. Richard Powers is an award-winning contemporary writer who writes exclusively into his tablet computer. In his (sometimes rambling) NY Times essay, How to Speak a Book, he describes his writing process and argues that his is the superior writing method.

   

I’ve no doubt the process works for him, but I think that this kind of expression must take practice. I haven’t seriously tried it – I dictate text messages if they’re long or detailed, but I also have to admit that I engage in magical thinking and believe that in my writing process, the words actually come out through my fingertips.

2. Working from a detailed outline will help you stay focused. Draft a table of contents that includes chapter titles and headings. Use them as writing prompts as you talk your book. The planning phase is also a good time to ask a developmental editor for advice about your book’s structure. Honestly, beginning with a sound structure will save you time, money and grief later on.

Another benefit to working from an outline is that it can help prevent your manuscript from becoming too bulky. A risk of speaking rather than writing is that you can just go on and on and not see on the page how much you’ve written. My hunch is that dictating a book is well-suited to people who already have superior verbal skills. If you get carried away and your writing becomes verbose, it will have to be weeded and pruned eventually, and this process can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive.

Find out how long the average book in your genre is and try to stay within that ballpark. An indispensable source of information is at Smashwords.com, where Mark Coker has generously shared all kinds of sales data on indie ebook publishing. View recently released survey data here. And try to keep abreast of what’s on the horizon. Right now, Kindle singles, at 5,000 – 30,000 words, are growing in popularity. Doing this research and planning before you hit the record button will pay off in the long run.

Still not convinced that you should try to control the length of your book? Check out Jakob Nielson’s work, especially his article How Users Read on the Web. Readers prefer shorter texts, and they’re doing less reading and more scanning. Plan your writing with this in mind. 

     

3. Consider hiring a ghostwriter. If dictating or recording instead of writing really appeals to you, think about why this might be. Perhaps you have a great idea for a book or series of books, or a compelling personal story. You have a clear picture of the finished product but you aren’t confident your writing skills are up to the task. Here is where recording your story, thoughts and ideas, and working collaboratively with someone who’s trained to put it all together could be the perfect solution.

    

4. Watch your tone and your volume. No preaching and no shouting – that goes without saying. Playing back and listening to what you've written is an important part of this process. Should you write the way you talk or should you be more formal? Most advice says to aim for a conversational tone, but again this will depend on your genre and your subject matter. Sanders describes his own experience, in which by talking his book he was able to capture his voice, including its natural rhythms and humour, much better than a keyboard could.

I couldn’t agree more. We’re currently working with an author whose voice – when it breaks through some of the technical content – is charming, engaging, warm and funny. We’re trying to get more of that onto the page, and there’s no proofreaders’ mark for <insert personality here>. Getting our author to talk and record some of these sections might be the answer.

In spite of these caveats, I plan to give this writing method a try. We can so easily become shackled to old habits, thinking there's only one way to approach a project. And with so many tools available (watch for a future post about these) there's really no excuse not to exercise a different muscle.

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