The Honor Roll of Story Dictation
If you believe the legend, Greek poet Homer probably dictated the entire Iliad and Odyssey because, according to tradition, he was blind.
Throughout the centuries since, some of the greatest storytellers in the world created many of their classics by talking. It’s no surprise that so many of those who became proficient at dictation also became hugely prolific. This is because not only does the Talking Draft Method help you finish your first draft faster than any other method, but because the first draft usually takes the longest time to write with traditional methods, it stands to reason that those who talk their first drafts end up getting far more work done over the course of their careers because they are not hung-up as often by the “first draft trap.”
Sometimes, it may be a physical impairment that causes a writer to try speech-to-text dictation. For example, after he lost his eyesight in the 1650s, John Milton dictated the entirety of Paradise Lost to his daughter who worked as his amanuensis – a specific kind of literary assistant who takes dictation.
Other times, it is ambition and a fertile imagination that brings a writer into the Talking Draft camp. French playwright Voltaire was an extraordinarily prolific maestro. Voltaire wrote more than 50 plays, dozens of treatises on science, politics and philosophy, and several books on history. He kept up his prodigious output by spending up to 18 hours a day dictating to secretaries, often while still in bed. Ninety-percent of his output was in the handwriting of his assistant Jean-Louis Wagnière.
Two-hundred years ago Stendhal, the innovative French writer, dictated his renowned novel The Charterhouse of Parma to a secretary in under two months.
Nineteenth century master storyteller Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo (and 158 other books) also dictated his novels to a secretary before they were fashioned into his acclaimed works. He actually started a production studio where he hired multiple writers to continue projects that he started, often by dictation, checking in with each project to make edits and adjustments.
Over 120 years ago, Fyodor Dostoyevsky dictated many of his novels to a stenographer – Anna Grigorievna – with whom he fell in love and later married. Dostoyevsky first used Talking Draft Method to get out of financial trouble. The great Russian novelist was under contract to produce a book with a horrible deadline but he had gambled away his publisher’s advance. If he failed to deliver, he was contractually bound to pay off the advance with manual labor. His friends and family convinced him to put out a classified advertisement in a newspaper for a stenographer to take his dictation. The first book which he mentally composed and dictated aloud was his novel The Gambler. This became his normal working method.
After suffering with arthritis in his mid-fifties, Victorian-era writer Henry James hired a secretary to transcribe his spoken words, ushering in a new era of productivity for him which culminated in The Wings of the Dove, now widely regarded as one of his finest works.
The First Dictation Technology
Audio recording machines were invented in the late 19th century, and were immediately incorporated into the workflow of many prolific writers. American master Mark Twain was the first. After writing the start of his Autobiography with a typewriter, he felt that the work lacked the spontaneity and free-wheeling voice of his popular lectures, which were akin to a stand-up comedian’s monologue.
Twain began dictating his Autobiography onto one of Thomas Edison’s first phonograph recording machines. He then had the wax cylinder played back for an assistant who transcribed the audio.
It’s largely forgotten that English Prime Minister Winston Churchill was massively published in his day – after all, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not only was Churchill’s four volume epic A History of the English-Speaking People entirely dictated, but almost all of his newspaper and magazine articles were dictated too. His memorandums in parliament were all dictated, his private letters were dictated; all in all, he dictated millions of words throughout his career.
In the middle of the 20th century, audio recording devices finally got small enough for mass market users. Picking up where human amanuensis left off, portable “Dictaphone” machines were used by politicians, business executives, doctors, lawyers, writers, and others to record correspondence, notes, and drafts of stories. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and President John F. Kennedy used a Dictaphone machine to keep up with his correspondence while in the Oval Office.
A writer who used dictaphone recorders, or their assistants, would then listen to the recording and type up the tapes for revision. Often, documents would be reformatted and revised again. Even with all those post-recording steps, the Dictaphone speech-to-text process was fast. And for creative writers it was especially useful. Many writers used Dictaphones…
Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason novel series was a two-finger typist but thanks to his Dictaphone tape recorder, his output was overwhelming. Literally 141 of his books were in print at the time of his death. His books have sold more than 320 million copies in 37 languages. Gardner’s work habits were legendary: Rising before dawn, he would begin the day by dictating new novels for several hours. He employed a pool of typists to transcribe the recordings and he would spend the afternoons revising and preparing his manuscripts to send to the publisher. This productivity landed Gardner in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s fastest novelist. He could dictate up to ten thousand words a day.
Dame Agatha Christie dictated perhaps half of her 66 famous mystery novels. She spent the majority of time with each story creating an outline in her notebook, working out all the plot details before she actually started writing. When the writing started, as her grandson Mathew Prichard explained, “she then used to dictate her stories into a machine called a Dictaphone and then a secretary typed this up into a typescript, which my grandmother would correct by hand.”
What Agatha Christie was to mystery novels, Barbara Cartland was to romance novels. She published over 700 books (the most of any author). To get herself in the headspace for storytelling in her particular style, she famously used to lie on a fabulous pink couch with a pink wrap over her shoulders holding one of her many Pekingese dogs in her arms. Eyes closed, she would then dictate her saucy romance tales. She would have several transcribing secretaries around her taking down different stories so she could talk through more than one novel at the same time.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American writer who was prolific in the genres of adventure, science fiction, and fantasy. He is best known for creating the characters Tarzan and John Carter. Some of his other works include the Pellucidar series, the Amtor series, and the Caspak trilogy.
Beginning with his first published short story in 1912, Burroughs went on to write nearly 70 novels over a forty-year career. After purchasing one of Edison’s phonograph machines, the “Ediphone,” he wrote to the Edison Company to share how, “I have written longhand and had my work copied by a typist; I have typed my manuscripts personally; I have dictated them to a secretary; and I have used the Ediphone.” He would later purchase a Dictaphone, Edison’s competitor. Wax cylinder dictation machines became Burroughs’ preferred tool, he described his workload in terms of how many wax cylinders he’d gone through in a day. As he recorded in his log: “May 24 Dictated 5 cyl. today — something over 4000 words.”
In the letter to the Edison Company, Burroughs described why he preferred to work using dictation machines: “Voice writing makes fewer demands upon the energy … it eliminates the eyestrain … the greatest advantage lies in the speed. I can easily double my output.” He kept his more portable Dictaphone near his bedside “to record those fleeting inspirations that would otherwise be lost forever.”
Frank Yerby, a famous American historical novelist, began using a tape-based dictation system for some of his novels while living in Europe. His thirty-five historical novels ranged from the Athens of Pericles and Biblical times, to Europe in the Dark Ages, to the Antebellum South.
Richard Powers wrote his National Book Award-winning novel The Echo Maker using dictation software. During an interview with Wired magazine, he endorsed writing via dictation by pointing out that, “Typing is a highly unnatural activity, and your writing style ends up reflecting the cognitive shackles. When I started to use the [voice recorder], things that are extremely difficult to do on a word processor opened up to me.”
There was a time when Isaac Asimov developed problems with his eyesight so he bought a dictation machine. He dictated his stories and then his wife Gertrude transcribed his tapes on the typewriter. He wrote several stories this way. The two only stopped this working arrangement when his wife gave birth to their first child.
In the 1960s, Aldous Huxley suffered from failing eyesight and so he dictated some of his last works to his wife Laura.
Contemporary science fiction writer Kevin J. Anderson records himself talking out his first drafts. He is the author of 56 bestsellers, over 140 novels totaling more than 23 million books in print worldwide. Also, Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, recently revealed that he dictates all his rough drafts using speech-to-text software.
Dictation in Hollywood
After Howard Hawks and William Faulkner brought storytelling dictation into the screenwriting realm, the practice caught on very quickly. For the last 90 years, many writers in Hollywood have used some version of this trick to crank out a fast first draft of their screenplays.
In addition to Howard Hawks, many directors who also write have had a similar knack for seeing the whole story in their mind’s eye. When using the Talking Draft Method, the job of a writer-director such as Alfred Hitchcock simply becomes one of describing what they see. Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant learned this firsthand when he was hired on Hitchcock’s anthology TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Silliphant once described how he was ushered into Hitchcock’s office and sat down before a typewriter. “Hitchcock dictated the script to me — shot by shot, including camera movements and opticals. He actually had already SEEN the finished film.” Silliphant gladly took the dictation and the screenplay credit. In total, Silliphant was credited with writing 11 episodes for Hitchcock. Some of which he actually wrote.
Winning Academy Awards for his comedies and dramas, Billy Wilder was one of the most brilliant and versatile writer-directors of Hollywood’s golden age. Working on 60 films over 50 years, an incredible twelve of Billy Wilder’s scripts were nominated for Academy Awards including The Apartment and Sunset Boulevard. In 1959, Wilder partnered with writer-producer I.A.L. “Iz” Diamond, a collaboration that remained until the end of both men’s careers. Billy Wilder and Iz Diamond used to tape-record their jokey banter around the office — some of which made its way into their witty masterpieces.
For decades, writers for stage and screen often used the Talking Draft Method to capture the rhythms of stylized speech when doing a dialogue pass. Playwrights Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller did just this for the Broadway and West End stages.
Playwright and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon was prominent from the 1930s to the 1970s. First working on Broadway, Sheldon began writing musicals for the stage while continuing to write screenplays for both MGM Studios and Paramount Pictures. He earned a reputation as a prolific writer; for example, at one time, he had three musicals on Broadway, while one of his five Broadway plays won a Tony Award, and one of his screenplays won the Academy Award.
During his 20 years in television, Sheldon created many hit TV shows, sometimes with more than one show on the air at once. Sheldon wrote almost every single episode of all his shows. For example, on I Dream of Jeannie, Sheldon wrote 115 of the show’s 139 episodes. Like other prolific writers who used the Talking Draft Method, Sheldon’s writing routine was simple, as he explained:
“Each morning from 9 until noon, I had a secretary at the studio take all calls. I mean every single call. I wrote each morning — or rather, dictated — and then I faced the TV business.”
On the best days, Sheldon dictated 50 pages. In addition to his scripts, he wrote all of his 18 novels by dictating the first drafts. His 18 novels have sold over 300 million copies in 51 languages. Sheldon is consistently cited as one of the top-10 best-selling fiction writers of all time.
In the mid 1940s, Paramount hired legendary detective writer and screenwriter Raymond Chandler to write a rush script based on his unfinished novel, The Blue Dahlia. Due to the short timeframe, the studio began shooting with a partial script, but quickly the filming caught up to the script. The producer of the film met with Chandler to find out how he could finish the script as quickly as possible. Chandler presented a list of his requirements:
- Two cars with drivers available 24×7 to deliver script pages to the studio, get a doctor who could fill him with vitamins, and a maid who could buy him alcohol;
- Secretaries to take dictation;
- A direct line to the producer.
Chandler knew he wrote best in his flow state when inebriated. The producer agreed to the terms, and over the next eight days, Chandler cranked out the rest of the script.
In the early 1970s screenwriter Ernest Tidyman was an A-List hitmaker known for his Oscar-winning script The French Connection. He worked best when driving cross–country from LA to Connecticut dictating his screenplays onto tape which he’d then have transcribed. This is how (and where) he wrote High Plains Drifter for Clint Eastwood.
Rod Serling - Master of the Talking Draft Method
Rod Serling was an award-winning screenwriter, playwright and TV producer who massively shaped the early years of TV. He penned scripts for most of the anthology TV shows at the time including, Kraft Theatre, Studio One, The U.S. Steel Hour, Playhouse 90, and 12 feature films.
Most famously, Serling wrote 92 Twilight Zone episodes and 36 scripts for his TV series Night Gallery. This staggering output was aided by his dedicated use of The Talking Draft Method.
In the ‘50s and ‘60s Rod Serling was never far from his beloved Dictaphone machine. Serling recorded his scenes onto 1,152 “dictabelts” which are now finally getting the digital conversion they need.
According to the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, the writer began dictating scripts early in his television career to save time. The Foundation, which has been administered by his family since his death at age 50, suggests that his use of The Talking Draft Method greatly “influenced his writing and his mastery of dialogue.”
Read More About Rod Serling’s Mastery of the Talking Draft Method.
When screenwriter Aaron Sorkin started his habit of driving around town with an audio recorder as he barreled through his dialogue, the whole Talking Draft Method process was still manual, as it had been since the days of Howard Hawks. Sorkin used script assistants to type up his recorded dialogue.
“When I’m writing, I’m playing all the parts; I’m saying the lines out loud…it’s the greatest feeling.”
– Aaron Sorkin
David Milch dictated all his NYPD Blue scripts himself while laying on the floor of his office. His typist at a desk would take his dictation. On his HBO show Deadwood, Milch was able to write scenes and shoot them in the same day.
David Lynch outlines on index cards using the Eight Sequence structure that he learned from Frank Daniel and then he dictates dialogue and action to an assistant.
For decades, every unsung amanuensis in Hollywood tending to the transcription needs of some of the most prolific screenwriters has had to cope with the same big problem: More than the effort of actual transcription, it is the issue of figuring out “who-says-what-when” in dialogue which has always been the thorniest problem facing the amanuensis-style script assistants. This task, marking who-says-what-when is known by linguists and technologists as “diarization.”
Today's Dictation Technology
TalkingDraft.com is the culmination of this history of oral storytelling. Read more about how our technology works and why it works so much better than any other tool.