🌸 P.S. Follow the guide on my experiment writing fiction with AI—it includes a list of all the posts about it.

In my last post, I wrote about my experiment using AI to write fiction.

The whole exercise was born out of curiosity and frustration. The story, Forever, at last, was just one of many that I could not finish, but it refused to leave me, literally haunting me when I try to sleep.

What I discovered

This experiment has made me realise a few things about my creative writing process:

Reading a story generated by AI, even it I had written the story beats and dialogue, was unsatisfying to read.

I enjoy writing a large part of my fiction, like 90%. Taking that away from me would make writing fiction a truly passion-less and boring exercise.

I am far too territorial with my writing to use AI copy wholesale.

I have a Hemmingway-ish style of writing, thin on description, minimalist and economical. And there’s nothing wrong with that. (I ended up cutting away a lot of the content AI generated.)

Most of the enjoyment I have when writing fiction comes from writing the dialogue. In fact, I think I am more of a scriptwriter by nature than a prose writer.

Understanding my process

I have come to the conclusion based on my experiment with fiction is that I need to write the dialogue (which I enjoy), detailed storybeats with a light description of the scene (which I don’t enjoy) before even using AI.

I will then dialogue with AI to find ways to improve my description which I am weak at.

I seem to love chatting with the AI on how I can improve the existing descriptions or the descriptions it generated. The act of learning is very enjoyable to me.

I do not judge anyone who wants to generate first drafts and rewrite them – some people are satisfied with just rewriting, but I realize I want a lot more ownership, and that I need to vividly visualise the scene and create the dialogue. That is the only way I can use AI without sacrificing my enjoyment of writing fiction.

However, I don’t mind asking AI for help in improving my sparse descriptions of settings.

Understanding what parts of the writing process I like or don’t like

What I love:

• Imagining and visualising the scenes vividly in my head, and then writing the storybeats
• Writing dialogue (I’m especially territorial about this!)
• Creating character arcs (This is my second most territorial thing)
• Creating the entire plot
• Learning how to improve my fiction prose writing

What I don’t enjoy:

• Writing detailed outlines
• Writing descriptions of characters, settings and action scenes (only because I take too long thinking how to do them. I have a feeling once I master this, I’d enjoy it too.)
• Creating story bibles
• Proofreading
• General admin work related to creating the ebook and uploading it to websites
• Marketing the damn book

To me, writing fiction is all about the craft – writing sentences that convey emotion, story flow, character arcs …

I have very little interest in marketing the book or even distributing it for others to read. I have a very interesting approach to my creations. Once I create a novel or piece a fiction, I tend to forget about them and move on to the next. I don’t check up on them, read the reviews, or see how they perform. To me, the piece of art is done, and it’s time to create another.

So, it’s no wonder that I find the latter half of the process incredibly tedious and unfun.

Outsourcing what you don’t enjoy

Here’s what I tell authors: Identify your pain points — the parts of the process that are most annoying and aggravating. Then let AI handle the majority of the work in those areas. – SJ Pajonas, “The Joy Factor: How to Use AI Without Losing What You Love About Writing”

“AI-positive” indie writer SJ Pajonas wrote in her Substack recently that we need to find the parts of our writing process that we loved, and the parts where we didn’t. The parts that we don’t, we can outsource to AI.

It was an intriguing idea. So, I’ll be exploring this idea in the next post.