Sometimes, I get frustrated with the writing community. I’ll casually post something about using AI for writing, and almost immediately, someone would drop a rude comment without finding out how I use AI to write!

They immediately jump to conclusions and think I generate novels with a click of a few buttons.

Yes, unfortunately there are some writers who do that.

Personally, I feel that generating 200 novels a year – even if you write fast before the age of AI – is not sustainable for the environment or for the mental health of the creator. I also highly doubt this method could produce something highly unique or impactful. I’m pretty sure very talented writers can, but they most probably cannot generate more than a dozen highly unique works a year.

However, in the world of genre fiction, this factory line use of AI can work because some readers just like to read the same story, tropes, and plots as long as there’s enough variety to the plot or characters to keep them happy. (Let’s face it, we know readers like these exist and I even read these novels for relax sometimes.)

In the world of content engineering (which is what I actually do at work these days), these stories are said to have a specific content model which can be fed to LLMs to generate stories very quickly.

These stories serve a very hungry market. Readers of these types of novels read so fast writers can’t produce enough books for them. The writers perform a service whether you like it or not.

AI as a ghost writer?

As a reader and a writer of fiction and non-fiction, I personally do not agree with this way of using AI for writing because it reminds me too much of factory production.

I generally do not find the process of writing books like this fun at all. Nor do I generally read these type of books in volume; I like books that have a deeper meaning, and I definitely love books with beautiful prose.

However, I do not condemn nor heckle the writers who write novels this way, because it still takes a certain amount of effort and creativity to do this, and they serve a market that I don’t write for. Far be it for me to wag my finger at other writers whose process I don’t jive with.

These writers are essentially treating AI like ghost writers. In real life, many writers (James Patterson, anyone?) use ghost writers. Is it wrong to use ghost writers, human or AI? Well, I personally don’t think it’s wrong; it’ll be hypocritical of me to say so because I’ve ghostwritten for clients before.

It’s just business. That’s the cold, hard fact, so why get delicate about this.

These writers will find readers who will appreciate them.

You, who prefer not to write with AI, will find readers who will love you for this very fact.

And I, a writer who uses AI to assist me, will also find the readers who will appreciate me.

Basically, we are not competing for the same pool of readers, so why squabble as if there’s a limited pool of readers out there?

Using AI to write fiction looks different for everyone

Not ALL of us write like this. I certainly do NOT.

For one, I love crafting sentences. It’s a fun challenge for me. I especially like writing prose that makes people laugh and I like my romantic scenes subtle and filled with nuance. AI is never going to take that away from me, nor is it able to produce the kind of fiction I like to write.

Here’s how I use AI to write fiction and non-fiction:

For fiction, I generally use AI to bust my creative blocks or when I’m especially brain fog-gy. I write most of my prose, but I use this method when I’m especially blocked and can’t write a word:

• I create an agent that helps me write story beats for me by having a dialogue with me. I give it my current story beats for a scene, and then we have a long dialogue where it asks me questions. My replies will improve the depth of the story beats. Then, I use these story beats to generate a first draft.
• This first draft acts more like swipe files for me. If you work in the content profession, especially in advertising, you’d know that swipe files have been kept by writers for decades. I use to grab novels off my shelf and read it when I feel “dry” and need inspiration to write my prose. It’s usually a frustrating experience as it doesn’t fit what I need. (Swipe files for ad copy is much easier, due to the shorter lengths.) Now, I have a highly targeted swipe file that suits my scenario or the scene I want to write.
• I then rewrite the first draft extensively.

For non-fiction, I get very technical. I use a lot of content engineering principles. Content models. Schemas. Things like that, but here’s one favourite way – I usually use this for more casual internal blogs:

• I create an agent which will dialogue with me.
• I will go for a walk and just talk into an app that transcribes what I say.
• I activate the agent, feed it the transcript and it’ll dialogue with me, asking me a series of questions so I can clarify my thoughts.
• At the end of it, it’ll generate a post – I’ve created “guardrails” for it so that it will use up to 80% of the words in the transcript.

As you can see, I’m heavily involved in this process. My ideas. My words. AI is there to help me clarify my thoughts.

I also have an agent that critiques my work; I designed it so that it is a firm mentor who is hell bent on making me a better content engineer and writer. (I once asked it to generate an image of a website menu that we were working on together, and it responded with: “I’m your mentor. I don’t generate images for you. I tell you how to improve.”

I designed it a tad too well, I think hah!

So, you can see that there are so many amazing ways that writers can use AI with their writing.

AI use cases for writing are extremely diverse and exciting. It’s all about automating the parts you do not like and find tedious. (My favourite use case is transcribing my thoughts! I am very much a “talk it out” person, and writing blogs by talking it out has sped me up considerably.)

I wish more would be more open to the possibilities and expose themselves to AI use, experiment and stop hiding their heads in the sand. And if they do, stop attacking those who are, because that’s not going to stop writers like us from honing our skills further, so it’s pretty much a useless exercise.

Whinging about what “AI is doing to writers” and leaning into AI doomerism is about one of the most useless things to do with your keyboard now. I’m not saying that you should go to the extreme end and be an AI evangelist.

Instead of whinging and attacking other writers, it’s far more productive to:

• Start experimenting with AI and writing and automate the things you find tedious
• Lean in even more into your craft, and be the next Sun Tzu or Margaret Atwood
• Find a way to help readers to find the writers they’ll love. If there’s one damage that is being made to the writing world, is that the book world is getting insanely noisy due to the deluge of books being created. Obviously, the old ways of finding books to read isn’t working any more. We need to find a new way.