I wrote my novel by voice | Hissper
A guest essay from author Reid Hoffman on dictating 92,000 words over six months — and why he's never going back.
Category: Stories · Author: Reid Hoffman · March 28, 2026 · 11 min read
I started the book in October. I finished the first draft in March. Ninety-two thousand words. I typed maybe five thousand of them. The rest I spoke.
I'd tried dictation before — first with the built-in macOS one, then with a couple of paid apps. Every time I gave up within a week. The transcripts were too messy to fix, and the act of fixing them was slower than just typing the thing in the first place. Voice never crossed the break-even point.
The break-even
What changed for me with Hissper was the polish layer. I'd dictate a paragraph in the rough way you talk to yourself when you're working a scene out — half-sentences, weird tangents, repeated words — and the text on the page was already clean. Not perfect. But close enough that I was editing prose, not transcribing my own mouth.
"The keyboard kept getting in the way of the story. Now it doesn't."
What I gave up
Some things got harder. Dialogue is still better typed — punctuation matters too much. And anything code-like, anything with brackets or symbols, I'd rather just type. But for narrative, for description, for the long flowing parts where you're trying to keep a feeling on the page — voice is faster, and somehow more honest.
The novel comes out in the fall. I'll be writing the next one the same way.
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