Episode 66: The Five Stages of a Total Draft

If you can dictate a scene now but a whole book still feels like a different animal —where the outline lives, what happens to all those messy transcripts, when does it become a manuscript?— this episode is for you.

This week on The Confident Fiction Author, I'm sharing The Five Stages of a Total Draft, the final letter of my D.R.A.F.T. framework series with T=Total Draft. This is where all of your practice pays off.

In this episode, you'll discover:
•  Why dictation doesn't remove the long haul of a first draft, and what it changes instead
•  The five stages of my Total Draft system, and why workflows fail at the seams between stages, not inside them
•  The 30-second startup checklist that protects your whole session
•  What a real dictation writing session looks like in a real life, including 350 words in the school pickup line and a full scene in four 10-minute sessions

By the end, you'll have the complete loop from outline to manuscript, and all five letters of the framework in hand.

Listen to the episode or read the blog-style version on my Substack here.
You can also listen to this episode on FictionCourses.com, or search for The Confident Fiction Author podcast on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and more).

And if you've been listening to this whole series thinking, "I love this, but my tech is still fighting me," my Dictation Bootcamp starts today! We kick off this morning with the pre-party, and the replay is available if you miss it. Training days are Wednesday and Thursday, the masterclass finale is Friday, and you'll have seven days to watch the replays of the entire bootcamp. The whole event is about conquering the tech so you can actually begin dictating your fiction. There's still a little time to grab your seat at fictioncourses.com/dictationbootcamp.

I hope to see you in the bootcamp!