Can you dictate a novel?

Yes. Novelists have dictated books for centuries, and speech software can make the method practical. The software is rarely what limits a novel. The limits are the outline, the dialogue and invented names, and the edit that turns a rough transcript into prose. Each of those needs a method of its own.

Novelists have dictated whole books, from Milton to Pratchett

John Milton wrote Paradise Lost entirely through dictation after he went blind in 1652, with the help of amanuenses and friends ¹. In the modern era, Salon reported in 2015 that Terry Pratchett finished his 40th Discworld book through dictation and speech recognition software ². The report does not say how fast he worked or which software he used, so it shows the method was possible, not how it was done.

Henry James's method, as his typist recorded it, puts planning before dictation. The typist wrote that he worked out the scenes of a book until he could begin dictating it ³. The planning came first, and the speaking came after.

A novel is mostly planning, so the outline comes first

Planning is most of composing. In an IBM study of letter writing, about two-thirds of composing time went to planning, whether the letter was written, dictated or spoken ⁴. A novel is a much larger version of the same problem.

A short novel is at least 50,000 words long, according to a Wikipedia article on the novella that quotes a 2018 article in The Writer ⁵. At 480 to 900 words an hour, a draft that long would take 56 to 104 hours of composing by speech, before planning or editing ⁶. That is why the outline matters: it lets you speak planned scenes instead of working out the story as you talk.

A workable outline lists each scene on one line, with its point, the people in it and how it ends. Pick one scene per session, speak it through once, and save the transcript under the scene name so the book can be rebuilt in order.

Dialogue and invented names each need their own method

Fiction has two hard parts for dictation. The first is dialogue. Quotation marks, speech tags and new paragraphs need a check of their own in the edit, as the steps below explain. Our guide to writing a book by dictation covers the full method.

The second is names. Apple researchers report that end-to-end speech recognition still has a significant error rate for entity names that appear infrequently in its training data ⁷. Invented characters and places are exactly that kind of name. Keep a names list at the top of the outline, and search for each name after the draft is complete. The glossary entry on custom vocabulary explains how apps can be taught words of your own.

The edit is where a dictated draft becomes a novel

A raw dictated draft is not finished text. In a study of clinical notes dictated in 2016, the speech recognition draft had 7.4 errors per 100 words ⁸. Clinical notes are not novels, and the rate will differ for your text. The point is the direction: plan for the edit, not just the drafting.

A workable edit runs in this order:

1. Read the chapter aloud, slowly, and mark every sentence that does not sound like you.
2. Search for every name on the names list, and check each spelling against your notes.
3. Check every quotation mark and every new paragraph in dialogue.
4. Fix the marked sentences with the keyboard, not by dictating again.

It depends on the book, the voice and the room

The method suits some books better than others. Nonfiction can be explained aloud one section at a time, to one imagined reader. Dialogue and invented names are where this guide puts the most checking, and we found no study that compares their error rates with descriptive prose. Plan a break into a long writing day, and check each session's transcript before the next session starts.

The honest answer for a novel is yes, with conditions. If you can speak a planned scene clearly, the method works. If you cannot plan before you speak, the method will cost you more in the edit than it saves in the draft.

For the wider question of which app to use, see the best dictation software for writing a book. For the rates that set the pace of a long draft, see how many words per hour you can dictate. For a related question on a writer's routine, see can dictation help with writer's block. The full method is in our guide to writing a book by dictation, and for nonfiction and academic books, see our guide to dictating academic writing.