Dictate your November draft: a free guide for fiction writers From the Murmurtale team. Free to read and share. Nothing here requires our app: every tip works with the Dictation already built into your Mac, or with any other tool. (Murmurtale runs on Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or newer) with macOS 14 or later.) Why dictate a draft A first draft is mostly getting words onto the page. Speaking is faster than typing for many people, it keeps you moving, and it takes your inner editor out of the room. You will still revise. A dictated draft is rough, just like a typed one. The 30-day plan in one page Before November 1 (20 minutes): 1. Pick your app (the one you already write in) and test dictation once. On a Mac, turn on Dictation in System Settings ▸ Keyboard ▸ Dictation and choose a shortcut. 2. Make a names list: characters, places, invented words, with the spelling you want. Keep it in a note you can see while you talk. 3. Choose a daily time and place. A fixed slot beats good intentions. Every writing day (20 to 45 minutes): 1. Plan the scene in three lines: who is in it, what they want, how it ends. 2. Talk the scene through in one go. If a line comes out wrong, say it again and keep going. Do not stop to fix it. 3. Stop when the scene ends. Leave the cleanup for later. Once a week: 1. Read the week's pages once without fixing anything. 2. Then fix repeat offenders: names, punctuation, paragraph breaks. At the end of the month: step away for a few days, then do the real revision. Seven tips that make dictation work for fiction 1. Talk in scenes, not chapters. Short, bounded chunks stay coherent and are easier to fix. 2. Dialogue is where dictation shines, and where cleanup piles up. Speaking your characters' lines out loud often gives more natural dialogue. The cost is punctuation: quotation marks, a new paragraph for each speaker, commas before dialogue tags. Decide up front whether you will say "comma" and "new paragraph" as you go, or fix it all afterward. 3. Keep a names list. Invented names and unusual spellings are what dictation gets wrong most often. Fix repeat offenders in one pass after each week, with find and replace. Make a backup copy first. 4. Say it again instead of fixing it. The pause to correct costs you the thread of the scene. 5. Plan the scene before you talk. Dictating with no plan tends to wander. 6. Mic and room. A headset or a desk mic close to your mouth helps more than an expensive mic across the room. A quiet room with soft furnishings helps too. 7. Edit in passes. Read once without fixing anything, then fix names and punctuation, then do the real revision. A quick look at the dialogue problem (Illustrative sample text, not a recording and not a screenshot. It shows the kind of formatting work dictation leaves you.) What you said, as plain text: she looked up from the map and said you are late he shrugged and said the bridge was out she said then you took the long road he said I took the only road What you want on the page: She looked up from the map. "You're late." He shrugged. "The bridge was out." "Then you took the long road." "I took the only road." That quote-and-paragraph work, done by hand, is the cleanup that piles up. It is the problem we built Murmurtale to take off your plate. If you want a tool for that (We're the developers of Murmurtale, so read this as our own description.) Murmurtale is a Mac dictation app for fiction writers. You click into the app you already write in, hold a key, speak, and let go. The finished text lands where your cursor was. In Fiction mode with the cloud engine, dialogue goes in quotes and a new paragraph starts when the speaker changes, and character and place names are spelled the way you've taught it. It formats what you said and stops there: punctuation, capitals, quotation marks and paragraph breaks. It doesn't write for you, add sentences or continue your scene. - Free to download. A free account gets 5,000 on-device words a month. - Free trial: 14 days or 20,000 cloud words, whichever comes first, with no card. - Pro is $14.99 a month or $119 a year, with 60,000 cloud words a month and unlimited on-device dictation. - Requires an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) and macOS 14 or later. English only. Available in the United States. - Honest limit: the text lands when you release the key, not word by word. Start a free trial: https://murmurtale.com/start.html?ref=nov-guide Questions: support@murmurtale.com Murmurtale · 8401 Mayland Dr Ste S, Richmond, VA 23294 · support@murmurtale.com

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