Our Story
Backstory
In 1934, not long after “talkies” were first invented, Director Howard Hawks sat down with novelist William Faulkner in front of a new voice-recording machine and dictated two screenplays in one weekend.
Hawks read a bit of narrative action from a Faulkner short story into the voice recorder to set the scene — and then Faulkner performed all the dialogue which he had not included in his tight short stories.
Faulkner spoke as all the characters in each scene. Soon, he was doing both – dictating the action lines and creating new dialogue, voicing the conversation in his mind’s eye. No “he says”, “she says.” As if it was a radio play.
On Monday, a stenographer typed up all the audio tapes. Then the transcription was reformatted by script assistants. From 1934 to 1954, William Faulkner worked on around 50 films.
Ever since, many writers in Hollywood have used some version of this trick to crank out a fast first draft.
Billy Wilder and Iz Diamond recorded their Oscar-winning banter, Rod Serling used the Talking Draft method when writing The Twilight Zone. Writers from Duplass to Sorkin praise this method.
For the stage, Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller used the Talking Draft method when doing a dialogue pass to capture the natural rhythms of speech.
A Talking Draft is all about flow and pace. It gets the idea out of your head in the time it takes to “act out” the scenes. Unlike what Hawks and Faulkner’s staff went through, today a Talking Draft is possible in real-time.
But this is the 21st Century…
Only TalkingDraft.com frees you from needing clunky voice commands like “tab” to switch characters in a dialog, or having to say “action” before you describe what you imagine.
We free you from any grammar, spelling, and formatting ever slowing you down. We get you from your outline to your first draft in one sitting. We are the fastest first draft app in the world.
Our speech-to-text technology, customized by-and-for screenwriters is Hollywood’s next secret weapon.
…An update of Golden Age Hollywood’s secret weapon: the Talking Draft.
Our Position on AI:
Your writing is yours. Period.
Nothing you speak, type, or record in TalkingDraft is used to train AI. Your scripts, your voice, your stories belong to you alone. We proactively shield your content from any AI training programs. Your audio is processed to produce your transcript and stored securely for your own playback — it is never used to train AI of any kind. We are writers too. We built this tool because we needed it. The last thing we would ever do is feed your unproduced work into a plagiarism engine.
Prefer to work completely offline? A desktop version with local speech-to-text (no internet required, no cloud) is in development. [Join the waitlist →]
