I Dictated This Article In Twelve Minutes. Writing It Would Have Taken An Hour.

I'm going to tell you something that sounds like cheating but isn't.

Most of my first drafts don't start at a keyboard. They start on a walk around my neighbourhood, talking into my phone like someone having an unusually structured conversation with nobody, or with my headphones connected to my laptop.  

Twelve minutes of speaking produces roughly 1,500 words of raw material. And then thirty minutes of editing on my laptop turns that material into a publishable article.

Total time: forty-five minutes. If I'd typed from scratch, sitting at the desk, composing each sentence in real time while my brain simultaneously tried to edit it, that would take ninety minutes, minimum.

I resisted dictation for years. It felt wrong (and strange talking to myself), unprofessional and like I was taking a shortcut that would produce shortcut-quality work. Real writers type, I thought, and they sit at desks and craft sentences with their fingers. 

Then I tried it during a period when my ADHD was making keyboard writing nearly impossible, and everything I thought I knew about my own process turned out to be wrong.

The Problem Dictation Solved

My writing process at the keyboard has always been contaminated by a specific habit: I edit while I draft. I write a sentence, read it back, judge it, delete half of it, rewrite it, read it again, adjust a word, and then finally move on. 

Every sentence passes through an evaluation filter before the next one can begin.

This habit feels like a craft, and likely a hangover from doing essays under exam conditions. But now, as a grown-up, I recognise it's a productivity disaster. 

Because the drafting brain and the editing brain are different systems, and running them simultaneously is like trying to accelerate and brake at the same time. You move, but slowly, and with enormous friction.

I've known this for years, and every craft book says separate the drafting from the editing. I've written about it myself recently. 

And I've never been able to do it at a keyboard, because the keyboard shows me the words as I produce them, and seeing the words activates the editor, and the editor won't stay quiet while I can see its material sitting right there on the screen.

Dictation solved this by removing the screen entirely. When I'm walking and talking, I can't see what I've said. I can't go back and fix it. I can't delete the weak sentence and replace it with a stronger one. The words leave my mouth and disappear into the phone's transcription, and my only option is to keep talking.

Even when using a laptop, I often stare into space as I dictate. 

The editor brain has nothing to edit, so it stays quiet. And the drafter brain, finally having its moment, produces at the speed of thought rather than the speed of judgment.

How It Actually Works

The process is unglamorous. I open the voice typing on my phone, I start walking (or start staring at the roof in my makeshift office in my spare bedroom), and I talk through the article as if I'm explaining the idea to someone who's asked me about it. 

I just talk. 

The talking is messy because I often repeat myself and revisit points I've already made. I use filler words and half-formed thoughts and sentences that start in one direction and finish in another. 

The transcription captures all of it, including the false starts, the tangents, and the moments where I say "no, that's not what I mean" and try again.

But twelve to fifteen minutes later, I've said everything I need to say. The phone has produced a wall of text that honestly looks terrible. Sometimes it looks like a toddler wrote it, and there is no way I would be proud enough to say a writer dictated this piece. 

Then I sit at my laptop and edit, and everything changes, almost like magic. This is where the keyboard work happens, and it's the part of the process my brain is actually good at. 

The editing takes twenty to thirty minutes and produces a piece that reads as though it were carefully composed at a desk. No one would know the difference. 

Why It Works For My Brain

My ADHD brain has two speeds: hyperfocus and scattered. 

At the keyboard, the scattered days produce almost nothing because the constant self-editing creates a friction loop that my attention can't push through. I write a sentence, judge it, lose momentum, check my phone, return to the sentence, judge it again, and twenty minutes later, I have forty words and no will to continue.

Dictation bypasses the friction loop entirely. Walking provides the physical stimulation my ADHD brain needs to stay engaged. Speaking uses a different cognitive pathway than typing, a pathway that's automatic rather than effortful, because I've been speaking for over 30 years. And the mechanics require zero conscious attention. 

It's wonderful when all of my mental energy goes to the ideas, and none of it goes to the physical production.

On the scattered days, the days when keyboard writing produces almost nothing, dictation produces a full draft. 

The ideas aren't better on those days, but the delivery mechanism matches the brain I actually have rather than the brain I wish I had.

What It's Not Good For

I don't dictate everything. The method has real limitations that I've learned to respect.

Fiction is harder to dictate than nonfiction. Articles have a conversational quality that maps naturally onto speech. Novel scenes require a different kind of attention - to rhythm, to word choice, to the specific texture of a character's interiority - that I can't achieve while walking and talking. 

There are often plot points and character development that need to be carefully addressed, points I have mapped out on paper and need to have in front of me as I write. 

Editing can't be dictated. The refinement stage requires seeing the words, moving them, cutting them, and replacing them. This is keyboard work by nature. 

Dictation produces raw material, and the laptop produces finished work.

Quiet environments make it impossible. I can't dictate in a library, in a shared office, or in my house when my partner is sleeping. 

The method requires a place where talking to yourself for fifteen minutes is socially acceptable, which limits it to walks, the car, and after my partner leaves for work. 

And the transcription is imperfect. Don't expect your dictation to capture everything you say perfectly. I can confirm names get mangled, homophones appear where they shouldn't, and the punctuation is random.

 The raw text requires more editing than a typed draft would, which partially offsets the speed advantage. The net gain is still significant, but it's not as dramatic as "twelve minutes versus an hour" makes it sound, because the editing can absorb the difference.

However, if you can master the use of AI to help you make some initial culls (like getting it to change all mispelled names to the right spelling), you can speed up this process, too. 

The Real Benefit

The speed matters, but the real benefit is subtler than speed.

Dictation changed my relationship with first drafts. I used to dread them because every first draft involved hours of self-judgment at the keyboard. Now the first draft is a walk: it's fifteen minutes of talking about something I care about, in the fresh air, with no screen, no editor, and no opportunity to judge what I'm producing in real time.

The dread is gone. The draft will be ready by the time I sit down. And the sitting-down part, the editing, is the part I enjoy, because improving existing text is satisfying in a way that generating text from nothing isn't. 

If writing feels slow and grinding, if you spend more time deleting than producing, if your editor brain won't shut up while you're trying to draft, try talking instead of typing. 

Just once. 

Take your phone for a walk and talk about whatever you'd planned to write.

The result will be messy, but it's supposed to be messy.

But it'll exist. And existing is the only thing a first draft needs to do.

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I write about the emotional and practical reality of being a writer - drafting, doubt, discipline, and publishing while still figuring it out.

Mostly for people who write because they have to, need to, want to | linktr.ee/ellenfranceswrites