About Fictate™

Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer, historical fiction author

Hey there, I'm Sarah

I'm a full-time author and authorpreneur with 19 published books, 11 of which I wrote solely by dictation.

Around 2011, I had learned about authors dictating their fiction, speaking it instead of typing. I was stoked. Then I priced out what dictating fiction cost: the software everyone recommended, a recorder, a special microphone. Nearly a thousand dollars before I ever spoke a word of a story.

That price tag kept me from starting for years.

When I finally did start, I learned something nobody had told me: dictating fiction is half tech and half brain training, and both halves have their challenges. Learning to speak your story takes practice, and that part is worth every hour. The tech half shouldn't even be a challenge, and certainly not one that stops you before you even begin. You shouldn't have to wonder: Where does the audio go? How much mess will I be left to clean up? Will my characters' names survive the trip? How does any of it land in my manuscript?

A dictation workflow doesn't fail inside its stages. It fails at the seams between them.

I've spent years teaching fiction authors how to build a dictation workflow that fits their real writing life, through my courses, my bootcamps, and my podcast, The Confident Fiction Author. Thousands of authors have come through those teachings.

And every single time, we ran into the same wall: the workflow was sound. The tools were not.

So I designed the tool we fiction authors needed

Every dictation app I tried was made for someone else. Meeting notes. Email. Medical charts. Business memos. They were perfectly good at those things, but got totally lost in the oceans of new storyworlds created from human imagination. Words and worlds the software never knew could exist.

Fictate™ is the opposite. It assumes you are crafting strange new worlds, or ordinary ones in new ways. It assumes your characters have names nobody has heard of, that your invented words are spelled the way you decided they're spelled, and that when you're done, the words need to be in your manuscript rather than trapped in a random notes app.

It took months for me to design this app, but over a decade and a half for me to figure out what it needed to be.

Fictation®, Fictate™, Fictator

Fictation® is the act of dictating your fiction. The word exists because the thing needed one. Dictation already meant a boss and a steno pad, or a doctor and a chart. None of that is what happens when a novelist speaks a scene out loud and a character answers back.

So the rest followed from there. To fictate is the verb: to write your story by speaking it. Fictate™ is the app named for the verb, the tool that finally made the verb practical.

And a Fictator is what you become. Not someone who tried dictation once and gave up on it, but an author for whom speaking the story is the writing. It stops being a workaround and turns into the way you write.

Designed with authors, not just for them

Before Fictate™ opened to the public, more than 650 fiction authors put it through months of real-world testing. They dictated on the walk home from work, in the car with the phone sitting in the center console, and early in the morning before the rest of the house woke up.

They wrote in accents ranging from Australian, northern British, thick Southern, South African, and French.

Some had never dictated a word before. Some had been dictating for over a decade.

A good bit of what you'll use in the app exists because a working author asked for it.

“I noticed my comments about the paragraph indents were addressed, and I appreciated it. Definitely made me feel like I helped make it better. It makes a difference to me that you listened.”

—Martha Hutchens, inspirational historical romance author

“I've been very pleased with the ease of dictating and how accurate the app is... everything I've needed has been added before I got a chance to respond.”

—Jaden Terrell, mystery and thriller author

“I think you made the best dictation app out there. With the features writers actually need and love, because you involved the community the way you did.”

—Thea E. Quinn, contemporary romance author

What we promise you

Your words stay yours

Your writing is never used to train AI models.

We do not read your work.

You hold every right to everything you dictate.

It's your book.

AI is always optional

The ✦ marks the features that use generative AI, and every one of them can be turned off. If you do decide to use the primary AI feature, the Cleanup Tool, know that it only tidies punctuation, verbal stumbles, and adds quote marks around your dialogue. It never rewrites your sentences into what a machine thinks you meant.

Your feedback is heard

Those first testers watched their requests turn into shipped features, week after week. That does not stop now that Fictate™ is public. Tell me what your writing needs, and it goes on the list.

“Having used Dragon for years with basically nonexistent customer service, this is a revelation. Mainly because it works immediately much better than Dragon ever did, but also because we are able to send feedback that actually gets taken.”

—Maisey Yates, contemporary romance author

How I train authors to become Fictators

The app is the tool. Becoming a Fictator is the skill, and that part I teach.

Your brain has spent years routing story out through your fingers. Speaking it instead is a genuinely different skill, and it is learnable in a specific order. That's why I developed the D.R.A.F.T. framework:

D — Devices. Choose your dictation tools. You do not need Dragon or a thousand dollars of gear, and sorting this first is what stops the tech from being the thing that ends the experiment.

R — Reps. Practicing dictation with no pressure attached. Daily Morning Pages, five minutes at a time, until speaking words out loud stops feeling strange.

A — Approach. Choose your dictation method. There are three, and you practice all of them: watching the words appear on screen as you speak, working with the screen out of sight so nothing pulls you out of the story, and recording now to transcribe later. Most authors end up with a favorite and a backup, because a walk and a desk ask for different things.

F — Fiction. Train your brain to speak story. This is the part no business dictation course teaches, because narrative asks something of your mind that a memo never does.

T — Total Draft. Dictate your full first draft, start to finish. You also watch me draft an entire novella by dictation, mistakes and all, rather than a polished demo of how it goes when nothing goes wrong.

That is a Fictator. Not a person with a microphone. An author whose words come out loud, on purpose, every working day.

Dictation trainings

Courses, bootcamps, and resources for learning to dictate your fiction, whether you are brand new to it or refining a workflow you already have.

Explore the trainings →

Free Quick Start Guide

Get the Dictation for Authors Quick Start Guide, and I'll send you dictation tips, new trainings, and what I'm learning as I write my own books.

Send me the guide →

The podcast

The Confident Fiction Author is where I work through the craft, the habits, and the mindset of finishing books. Listen on Substack, YouTube, or any of the major podcast platforms.

Listen and subscribe →

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A dictation app created by an author who dictates all of her fiction