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How to Write 300% Faster Using Dictation · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: What if I told you there was a simple way to not only increase your writing speed, but do it by 300% using technology that's already in your pocket?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Would you believe it?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I hope so because writers everywhere, including me, are using this process to get more writing done in a way that is natural and fun.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Smart Business Writing Podcast.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Kent Sanders, and I'm a ghostwriter and professor of communications.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is the show that helps you write amazing content so you can save time, stand out from the competition, and get more leads that turn into customers or clients.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when you saw the title of this episode, which was How to Write 300% Faster Using Dictation, did that seem like clickbait or maybe copywriting that was stretching the truth a little bit?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: If so, I can understand your resistance because I would have felt the same way up until recently.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm part of a weekly writer's mastermind, and all three of us guys in the group have been working on writing projects.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I have a book that's been way too long in the works, and I needed an incentive to get the draft written really fast.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: I had about 20% of the book already drafted from other content that I was repurposing for this book, but most of it really just needed to be new material.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I made kind of a crazy wager.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: I bet the other guys$100 each that I could get the complete 20,000-word draft finished in just one week.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it was Monday, whenever I made that wager, because that's when our mastermind group meets, and I had until the following Monday at midnight to get it done.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: So if I lost, I would have to pay each of the guys$100.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew my wife would not be too happy about that, to say the least.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now keep in mind, I was also starting a client book that week, and I had two chapters of that book to draft, which was about 7,000 words in addition to this project.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I was really desperate to say the least.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought that I would experiment with dictation because that was the only way I could see forward.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was a way that I knew I could get the writing done fast.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, hey, I've used this before to take notes and to write blog posts and some podcast content.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give it a shot and let me try to write a draft of this book by using dictation.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a short book that I'm working on.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's only 52 chapters with four to five hundred words in each chapter.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I already had content, as I mentioned, for about a dozen of those chapters.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the closer that I looked at it, I knew that I have to create it from scratch because the existing material, the more that I looked at it, didn't really fit the direction of the book.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's ever happened to you where you had some material from something else and you thought, oh, I can reuse it for this other thing.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you start to look at it, it either is not so great or it doesn't really fit the way that it doesn't, it's not really transferable from project A to project B because maybe it's two different things or it's a different format or whatever it is.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally you just give up and go, well, I'm just gonna write it from scratch.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, that was what happened with this book.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I discovered I'm gonna have to pretty much write it from scratch.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I knew the topic of each chapter of the book, but that was pretty much it.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So for several nights that week, I went out walking for about an hour with the goal of drafting 10 chapters per night.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I had the chapters ready to go in Scrivener on my iPhone.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So all I had to do was open the chapter in Scrivener, hit the microphone button on my keyboard, and start dictating.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: My iPhone automatically transcribes it, and I can see the word count there in Scrivener.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: So literally, as I'm talking, I can see the word count there.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And my goal was about 400 words per chapter, four to five hundred words or so.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, functionally, the chapters ended up being anywhere from 350 to around 500 words each.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So here's how I actually did this.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Before I started dictating each chapter, I would brainstorm an outline.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, I'd be out walking and I knew, okay, here's a chapter on this topic or this subject.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I had a template for how I was writing each chapter.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I would brainstorm what I was gonna put in that template or that outline.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think templates are great.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Outlines are fantastic because it just gives you a framework for how you're gonna be creating that content.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: You're not creating the structure or the framework from scratch.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: You already have a predetermined way that you're structuring the material.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So when you work from something like that, it becomes a lot easier and a lot faster to write content.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So for this specific book, each chapter had three components.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Each chapter had an introduction, the main body, and a takeaway.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: For the introduction, I used an interesting story or a compelling question.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then in the body, I explained the concept, why it was important, and I also countered reader objections, which is a really important part of writing anything, is you have to anticipate the objections the reader's going to have to what you're saying and basically address those objections before they raise them.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's basically a sales process.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, whenever you're writing to persuade someone, which by the way, all writing exists to persuade someone of something, otherwise, you wouldn't be writing.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's really just a sales process.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So make sure and counter those reader objections uh in your writing.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's kind of a side point.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: But uh so I had the the introduction, the body, and then in the takeaway of each chapter, I wanted to give some kind of action that they could apply so that they could live out the content and just apply it.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So that's pretty much it.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: I had those three parts to each chapter.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew that I would have to come up with something to go in each of those slots to fit the framework for each chapter.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's literally how I did it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I would just go out walking for an hour, sometimes a little bit more, and I would finish one chapter and I would look at the topic of the next chapter and think, okay, what's what's a quick story or a quote or a question?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what I want to what do I want to say about the topic and what are the reader objections?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: How do they put it into practice?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then what's the takeaway or the application?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: What's an action step they could take to put it into practice?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's basically how I got through it.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now I need to be really, really clear with you.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was not trying to produce a clean draft of this book.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was not my goal.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: My goal was to produce a messy, ugly first draft that was complete.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: For me, whenever I can get a complete draft really fast, I feel like that's a psychological rung on the ladder that lets me know I've achieved an important goal in the book writing process.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you can write a great clean draft quickly, that's even better.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that was not my goal.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to get something down on paper, as it were, for each chapter of this book, something I can kind of hang my head on.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: By using this method, I was able to get a draft of the whole book done in just seven days.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: I just looked in Scrivener and the total word count for what I wrote in that week was 25,485 words total.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not including my client work and my day job and other stuff that I had going on.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I do want to emphasize again, this was not a clean draft.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: This was a rough draft.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of writers stop there, they get partway into something they're trying to make perfect, and they lose steam and they never finish it.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, in my opinion, it's better to have a sloppy complete draft of something.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: That way you can hang your hat on it and then you can go back and write a second draft and third and all that stuff.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I think uh with a book like this that's not research-based, this dictation approach works well.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think this would work well with something that is heavily research or something where you've really got to think through the details, or you know, maybe you're trying to tell someone's story when you're ghostwriting a book that's more of a narrative thing.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there are types of books I don't think dictations would necessarily work well with.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: But for something where it's just kind of based on your ideas and maybe you're telling stories and so forth, I think it does work super well.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in the the title of this episode, I said how to write 300% faster using dictation.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, where does that 300% come into play here?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, where that comes into play is that I can draft a thousand words an hour if I have an outline and I'm focused.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm dictating, I can do 3,000 words an hour.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I said, it's not clean, it's a draft, but it's way faster than just typing.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the things along with this, it's not just about dictation.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it's about dictation and walking.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the reason that dictation while walking is so effective is that walking stimulates a creative part of your brain.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's lots of studies that show the impact of physical health and walking and exercise on your creativity.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Also, talking is more natural than typing.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as a human race, as a species, we learn to speak much sooner than we learn to type on a keyboard, or for that matter, before we learn to, you know, before we created alphabets and letters and uh all that stuff.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: So dictation is a more natural and I dare say a more creative mode of writing than just staring at a computer screen.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I encourage you to give dictation a try.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I often use Scrivener on my iPhone, which is great because it syncs with Scrivener on my Mac.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it flawlessly syncs.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes I also use Evernote or even the Notes app on my iPhone to dictate, depending on what I'm writing and where that's going to be stored.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: I do all my podcast material in Evernote, uh, but I do my book stuff in Scrivener.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So do whatever works for you, but I would encourage you to use dictation.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I also want to add that a few weeks ago I got a set of Apple AirPods, which make this process even more effective because they have a great microphone and they're just really a marvel of technology.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like that's a little bit over the top, but I really, really love these AirPods.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're kind of expensive, but man, for me they were worth every single penny because they're they're just really, really great.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: I also am training for a half marathon and running, so I was really excited to have a pair of earphones that are wireless, but that also do all the stuff that I need to do with Siri on my iPhone.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I make a lot of notes whenever I run, and I'm listening to podcasts and constantly spewing ideas out there uh that Siri so graciously records for me.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I do want to want to add that AirPods take this up even to another level.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: When I drafted this book a few weeks ago, I didn't have the AirPods yet.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was walking, I would literally just hold the phone up to my mouth and speak.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously my phone could hear it well.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: But the AirPods make it that much better.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So give this a try.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think you'll find that dictation is a fun and a fast way to create content.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if you walk while you're dictating, it's also going to enhance your creativity.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: So lots of great reasons to give it a try.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know what this does for you.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know if you like dictation and if you gave it a shot.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my friend, that brings us to the end of this episode.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, remember that you can find lots more resources for writers at KentSanders.net.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, remember that your writing has the power to change people's lives.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you in the next episode.