How I Use AI as an Author

AI usage is a hot topic in the writing world, and rightly so. As a reader, I can completely relate to not wanting to be bombarded by a flood of low-quality books generated by lazy prompters, but as a writer I am thrilled with the plethora of AI tools now available to help me make my writing life easier and more fun.

But before you burn my books and unfollow me on social media, let me explain how I use AI, and perhaps then you’ll agree with me it’s not as bad as you think it is.

Editing and Critique

I run every story or blog post I write through ProWritingAid, which acts as a proofreader to help me catch grammar and other language issues.

For my fiction writing, I also make use of the critique function on ProWritingAid and I sometimes throw the story into ChatGPT and ask for a critique, mostly as an ego boost (it’s really validating to read good things about your work before you have the courage to unleash it upon the world), but also because it often points out some areas that I can improve upon, which I then choose to action or ignore.

Non-Fiction Writing

I can see an LLM like ChatGPT being very useful in generating lists of topics for non-fiction writers. The only non-fiction pieces I write are the ramblings on this blog and entries on my travel blog. Since both depend on my own thoughts and experiences, I don’t really use AI much, although I can see myself asking it for writing-related blog post ideas in the future.

Fiction Writing

I use ChatGPT extensively in my fiction writing for brainstorming and initial research in my fiction writing. How I use it differs for my flash fiction and my novel writing.

Flash Fiction

I write a monthly flash fiction piece, and sometimes I have a very clear idea of a story, and sometimes I just vaguely know that I want to write something with a dragon in it, for example. When that’s the case, I ask ChatGPT to give me 10 ideas for stories that relate to XYZ. Sometimes I can grab one of those ideas as is and run with it, but usually I take a bit from one of its suggestions and mix it up with another one of its suggestions, or it just sparks another idea that I like better.

Once I have a story idea, I sit down and write it and might chat to ChatGPT about specific elements of that story – for example, in a recent story I wrote about a whale I asked it how a boat’s passing may affect a whale, and what kinds of laws exist against illegal whaling. Other times, I might ask it to give me some sensory details, since I’m a more plot-driven writer and don’t always stop to smell the roses!

If I’m really stuck, I might even upload the story I have so far and then ask it to suggest endings or write a paragraph where XYZ happens. In this case, there might usually be a really good sentence or two that ends up in the finished story (after some tweaking), but I’ve never taken more than that and pasted it as-is into a story. (By the way, I have tried SudoWrite for assisted story writing, but I found the ideas it came up with never meshed with what I had in mind, so I don’t use it as part of my process at all at this point.)

I’ll write another blog post at a later point to show exactly how this process works for me, if you’re interested.

Novel Writing

For longer pieces of writing, I mainly use ChatGPT as a research partner to help take my ideas further. As an example: in my Mythical Menagerie series, I write about a man tasked with tracking mythical creatures, so I might ask the AI to give me 10 examples of mythical creatures found in London. I would then pick however many I needed and delve deeper into the lore and see how they can connect to what I have in mind for the story’s plot. I don’t ask the AI for plot ideas, however.

After I’ve written a particularly difficult scene, I might paste it into ChatGPT and ask it for a critique on how I can improve it, especially if I want to work on something like sensory details.

In both types of story writing, you can be 100% assured that any actual writing comes from me and if there were words contributed by the AI, they are very minimal. When I’m struggling, I might use ProWritingAid’s rephrase functionality to suggest a better way of saying something, but in almost all cases I’d use a sentence at most (and usually just a few words instead) generated by the AI.

On the non-writing front, I’ve also started uploading my novel chapters into ChatGPT to create a story bible, although I might move this over to NotebookLM (which I hear is especially good for this purpose). My hope is that the AI will tie everything together to create character biographies and plot summaries to help me keep all the details of the series straight.

Book Covers, Social Media and Other Images

I know AI art is a very controversial subject, but as someone who can draw beautiful stick figures and not much more, I love the creative freedom it gives me to bring the images in my head onto a digital canvas. In my defence, I would never have commissioned or bought non-generated art anyway, so no one is worse off for me now using the tools at hand. I still envy artists who have the creativity and skills to create art, but unfortunately I’m not one of them.

I use Midjourneyextensively to generate images for inspiration, whether that’s character portraits or scene ideation. I also create images for my flash fiction that I use in my newsletters and on social media and other places, as well as inside my physical books.

To date, I’ve generated images for the covers of two of my books using Midjourney (I’ve also played with Dall-E ages ago), although I still work with a human cover designer when I can’t manage my vision for the cover on my own. Additionally, I also make use of the generative inpainting function in Affinity Photo to alter or extend images as needed.

Conclusion

I imagine the list of AI tools might grow as more things become available in the future, but for now, I’m thrilled with how AI has improved my author experience.

The world has changed and AI is here to stay, whether or not people like it. As someone who has a day job in IT, I know AI is merely a tool to be used – how it’s used depends on the human behind it. The way I see it, you can either hate AI and avoid it, or you can figure out ways that it can help improve your life.

Do you use AI tools similarly? Do you have any others that you can recommend I look into?