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

In my previous post, What my AI fiction writing experiment taught me about my creative process, I mentioned SJ Pajonas’ post, “The Joy Factor: How to Use AI Without Losing What You Love About Writing”. In that post, she talked about how 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.

Why do this? If we outsource tasks that we don’t like or cognitively drain us, we will be able to save that cognitive energy for tasks we value and love.

Tasks I will outsource to AI

Brainstorming outlines
Note: Brainstorming, not creating! I find AI’s plots pretty pedestrian, to be honest. Besides, I want ownership of my plots.

I’m a discovery writer, or a pantser. I may have the whole story in my head, but there are gaping holes in it. I find it hard, sometimes, to understand how my story goes from point A to Z. So, sometimes I get stuck because I write myself to a corner. AI will help me brainstorm a way out. I hope to explain my brainstorming process in a future post.

Editing and proofreading
Despite being a professional editor in real life (once for a national newspaper, at that), proofreading drains my cognitive batteries like no other. I just prefer to write! AI will help me massively in this. My tool of choice is Prowriting aid, which I have paid a lifetime subscription.

Creating story bibles and “fact-checking”
I like coming up with character arcs and plots, but that doesn’t mean I like write about them.

I find the work to create story bibles tedious, so I’m glad I have AI to generate the copy I need for my outlines, character descriptions and more.

With the story bible, I can ask AI to ensure consistency and accuracy in character names, places and plot lines, something I truly hated to do in the past – fact-check my own fiction!

Marketing
Book blurbs, social media promotional posts — I am more than happy to outsource this to AI, thank you very much.

Book covers
This is controversial, but I may do this.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for me is that I write in genres where pre-made covers are just not that great or even readily available: Science fiction, and the unique Chinese genres of wuxia and xian xia.

In the past, I tend to rely on pre-made covers as I don’t have the energy nor the money to work with an artist to create specialised covers.

My previous attempt with a cover artist was not great. I sunk RM500 into th ewhole thing but it was a disaster because the cover turned out awful, and I never used it in the end.

If I do use pre-made covers, I spent countless hours searching through the catalogues of cover artists. Most of the time I had to settle with what I could find at my budget.

In the end, I thought of creating the covers myself, but the stock images for science fiction novels are generic and overused. I remember the dismay I felt when, after paying a pretty penny for a premade cover, I found the same exact cover being used by another author.

So, yes, I probably will use AI to generate the image for my ebook cover.

Tasks I will keep because they give me joy

Coming up with the actual plots and character arcs
AI can pry this from my cold, dead hands.

Writing the prose
I read with interest, people who generate first drafts and then rewrite them. I did try that out of curiosity, but I think it was so awful, and the rewriting work so much, that I don’t think it’s worth it. Apparently, you can train the AI to write in your voice, and while I did try that and the results were much better, I still felt uncomfortable outsourcing this part of the process to AI.

Because my biggest joy is to write prose, and to learn to write better prose. I’m a craftsman who enjoys the process of improving my craft.

There are moments when I’m so inspired that the text just flies off the keyboard for me, and writing the entire chapter is effortless.

But there are moments when I cannot seem to write a word because my brain is so bored with writing necessary scenes and just wants to write the “fun bits”.

AI would be helpful in making that “rough ugly first draft”. However, I must supply it story beats (rough outline of the scene) and dialogue. Without it, that first draft would feel like too much work, not mine, and an unsatisfying exercise.

Somehow that first draft enables my brain to get over that inertia and finish and even extend the chapter. There’s probably some neurological hack at work here, which I hope to explore in the future.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, you can see that “using AI to write fiction” is a lot more complex than just the act of generating raw text, do zero edits, and then slapping it together into an e-book format and publishing it on Amazon.

It is more of a collaboration between AI and human. Think of AI as that research assistant, cover artist, writing buddy or beta reader or proofreader that will never get bored of your requests. It is someone who will tirelessly work with you at your side as you hammer away at your book.