Richard Powers on his process:

Except for brief moments of duress, I haven’t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words — or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I’ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn’t even have keys.

I write these words from bed, under the covers with my knees up, my head propped and my three-pound tablet PC — just a shade heavier than a hardcover — resting in my lap, almost forgettable. I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate’s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace. I hear every sentence as it’s made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind’s ear.

Like all good Jetson futures, speech recognition is really a memory. Speak the thing into being: as dreams go, that’s as old as they get. Once, all stories existed only in speech, and no technology caused more upheaval than the written word. In the “Phaedrus,” Socrates — who talked a whole lot but never, apparently, wrote a word — uncorks at length about how writing damages memory, obscures authority and even alters meaning. But we have his warning only through Plato’s suspect transcript.