Yrurtj

I have heard that authors can do 5000 words an hour with dictation. For a six-hour day writing, that is 30,000 words. Thus it would take less than three days to complete a standard novel manuscript.

Since I've also heard that writers produce much better quality work by dictating, this seems to mean that they wouldn't have to spend too much time on revision or editing other than correcting a few minor mistakes here and there. Even with normal typing, writers like Dean Wesley Smith don't do much editing and never use editors.

This obviously means that we can expect to see prolific writers churning out new 100,000 word novels every week (at least) as dictation technology becomes more widely used.

Am I right in this assumption? Or where am I wrong?

I can type at about 5K words per hour, but I can't write nearly that fast. I need to think of what's going on. I need to keep some sort of consistency, and I can't remember all the details. I need to do some planning. My creativity seems to burn out somewhere around 5K words each day. Putting words on the computer screen is one thing; knowing which words to type is another.

There is much more to writing than typing or speaking, and neither word processors nor dictation machines will affect that.

Historically, there were and are writers who could afford to write by dictating, using a human in the process rather than technology, and I don't know of any of them who were anywhere near that prolific.

In theory this could be possible, but such an author would burn themselves out after a couple of days with such an intense schedule. A novel is more than just a 100,000 words thrown together. There needs to be a story and characters. You need to engage the audience, ensure there are no accidental contradictions. This requires planning and revisions and this is time not spent writing, but making sure everything flows together to capture the audience. This time spend developing a story from an idea is important, and it would be plain wrong to just ignore it when it comes to writing a novel.

From another angle, 5000 words an hour is 83 words a minute. Not too bad and definitely possible. Now keep it up for 6 hours straight, while maintaining focus and building your story from scratch. Its a bit harder.

Another comparison would be that the average typing speed is 40 words per minute. Or 2400 words per hour. A more advance typist can reach up to 120 words per minute or 7200 words per hour. Which means they could pump out novels even faster by typing (Maybe once every 3-4 days).

The flaw in your comparison is that you assume 5000 words is a long term and consistent average. Its not. People won't be able to consistently work in a super high intensity environment for such a long period non stop, and during the development of a book, time has to be invested into a lot more than pumping out 100,000 words as fast as possible.

As a final comparison, using Stenography, handwriting speeds of up to 350 words per minute can be achieved [From wikipedia]. This means 21,000 words per hour or an entire novel could be written in just a single day.