Fractured Realms: A Postmortem

TL;DR

A good craftsman isn’t afraid of their tools

Yeah, this is a pretty long post.

In case the length of this post is too daunting for you, here are the high points:

• AI writing tools like ChatGPT and SudoWrite can help authors draft stories faster, but they are not a magic “write my book” button. You still need writing skills.
• I used AI to help draft a 12k-word Halloween story in 2 weeks. It generated rough prose based on my outline and direction.
• I had to revise the AI’s prose heavily to get my voice and style. In the end, ~60% of the words were changed or rewritten by me.
• AI is a powerful tool to get a rough draft quicker, but a human is still needed for creativity, story ideas, revisions, and crafting the final work.
• For generating ideas, ChatGPT was most helpful in pushing my creativity into new directions, not directly proposing usable ideas.
• Visual AI like DALL-E helped quickly create cover art and images, saving days of work. But it raises ethical questions about art ownership.
• Overall, AI is a valuable tool but not a replacement for an author’s skills. With the right mindset, it can accelerate parts of the writing process.

(Heh, you know it’s a long article when the TL;DR is >200 words.)

Fractured Realms

I didn’t do myself any favors on this project. I decided to write a Halloween short story with only two weeks left in October. 🤦

But, as you’ll see in a bit when I talk about brainstorming and outlining, I think in something other than short stories…more Novellas or Novels. You know, because my life is too simple otherwise.

Who wants that?

The goal was to complete my story idea, stem to stern, in two weeks: prose, initial edit pass, and cover image.

Did I make my deadline?

Actually, yes. You can check it out here: Fractured Realms: A Game of Souls

The following is a postmortem that focuses on how I used AI to help me write a 12k+ word novelette in two weeks.

The Tools

Here are the AI (and adjacent) tools I used to write this story:

• Grammarly
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• SudoWrite
• DALL-E 3

Let’s briefly talk about each.

Note: Some of the links provided contain referral codes. Just so you know.

Grammarly

You probably know about this app. It’s been around a while now. Did you realize it’s an AI tool? Yeah, you’re already using AI and didn’t even know it.

What I used it for:

• You know, spell-checking

Link: Grammarly

ChatGPT

You’ve probably heard of this too. I have a Plus account, so I use ChatGPT 4 almost exclusively.

What I used it for:

• Brainstorming (see heading below)
• Outlining (see heading below)

Link: ChatGPT

DALL-E 3 (via ChatGPT)

DALL-E has been around for a little while. It’s only now gotten good. Before version 3, I used either Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. But the integration of ChatGPT and the fact you can converse with it to get (close) to the image you’re looking for is a game changer (if I can use that over-used cliché).

What I used it for:

• Cover illustration
• Ending stinger image
• The website’s background image on my author’s website

Link: DALL-E 3 – I use DALL-E 3 from ChatGPT. If you have a Plus account, I highly recommend it.

Claude

A few OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) employees left and created their own LLM. Claude is it.

What I used it for:

• Marketing copy, it’s great at it

Link: Claude – I use the free version of Claude.

SudoWrite

• Synopsis first draft
• Rough draft of initial prose

Link: SudoWrite

Bonus Tool: Vellum

This one isn’t an AI tool. But if you use a Mac and can afford it, I highly recommend it. It creates beautiful ePubs and print-ready PDFs.

Link: Vellum

The Writing

OK, let’s talk about the writing process with all that out of the way. It’s the fun part! Right?

Brainstorming

Usually, I wouldn’t start out brainstorming story concepts. I have a backlog of story ideas years deep. But none of them fit with the Halloween spirit, nor are most of my ideas what you would call “short.”

Anyway, I used ChatGPT to get the ball rolling:

Me: Let’s write a short story for Halloween. I’d like it to be adventurous, humorous, and a quick/fun read. Please give me 10 ideas for us to start with.

And we went around for a bit until it finally suggested this:

AI: “Virtual Reality Séance”: A group tries a VR séance as a joke, but it works too well. They connect with spirits who are tired of the afterlife’s lack of updates. The twist? The spirits swap places with them, trapping the living in a ‘low-res’ afterlife.

I have no interest in the séance angle, but I like the idea of being trapped in a VR game.

Me: “Virtual Reality Séance” is interesting… Give me 5 variations, each a little more fleshed out for use as a short story, complete with definitive endings.

It did. One of them was this:

AI: “Virtual Souls”

• Synopsis: The VR séance app reveals an option to “upload your soul” for a more genuine experience. Curious, one friend tries it.
• Twist: His soul gets uploaded, but his body remains, soulless and robotic.
• Ending: The friends must answer a series of deeply personal questions that only the real friend would know. They succeed, downloading him back, but decide to delete the app and stick to board games.

So is that what I went with? If you read the story, you know the answer is no. No, I didn’t.

However, I had a reaction that I get a lot when dealing with AI in a creative capacity; It sparked other ideas… Of what I’d do differently. Maybe better.

Basically, the old, “Nah, that’s crap. This is how I’d do it.”

This was my response:

Me: I like the premise of Virtual Souls, that a soul can get trapped in a VR game. Let’s make it where the group is playing an alpha version of the game… We need a fun/creepy way to explain where they got it (one of them downloaded it off of the dark web?). As they play, one of the kids starts having an epileptic seizure, disconnecting his soul from his body without him realizing. Maybe one of the other kids disconnects to use the bathroom and finds him, convulsing. (We need to find a reason for them all to be in the same place, instead of apart from each other on the internet – local area play only???) She freaks out and yells at the others for help, but when she reenters the game, she finds the epileptic kid is there, and is fine… Not sure where it goes from there, thoughts?

That’s a big chunk of the story right there. Not based on the AI’s listing of random suggestions but inspired by them. Or one of them. Or, really, the vague concept of one of them. The point is, I made it my own.

I’m reminded of a lesson from a college design class (which applies to any creative field, I reckon). Our professor challenged us to brainstorm 10 initial ideas—and then throw them away. Why? Because they were the easiest and most obvious ideas. And if it’s obvious to you, it’s probably obvious to everyone else. Real creativity happens when you push past the point of discomfort. That’s when you get to the fertile soil. And that’s kind of what AI provides: Those most obvious ideas. It’s a way to jump to more fertile soil quicker.

Anyway, my conversation with ChatGPT goes on from there. We talk characters, iterate on a vague outline, and a story bible with character personality types (Meyers Briggs and Enneagram – That’s a topic for a different post, methinks.)

If you’re interested, you can read the entire conversation here: https://chat.openai.com/share/c14c6216-d6d0-4905-8bd0-d86d55030b7c

Outlining

So, I flipped the script on this one. Instead of asking the AI questions, I took the rough outline and story bible created from the last section, and that fed into a new ChatGPT session, having it ask me questions about the story and fill in the missing pieces.

One of the things it asked me was:

AI: How do the friends find out about the “Soul Energy Meter” and its importance? Does the game itself provide this information, or do they stumble upon it during the quest to save Ben? Knowing how they learn this could add a layer of discovery or urgency to the plot.

Now, we’re still using the placeholder names the AI provided. I changed “Ben” it mentions to “Mal” in the final story. But those questions prompted me to reply:

Me: I think (maybe) we start the story with the game intro where an NPC tells them what’s in store (in the game, the puzzles to save their souls) and explains any game mechanics we want the reader to know about – we can have the characters joking a bit, the NPC ignores them (mostly) – then there’s a “loading” screen and they talk about how awesome the visuals (or graphics) are (“Dude, totally in RTX” – or something). This is probably where Alex will say something that implies where he got the game – maybe he got it from a dark web auction site, the auction claimed it was a new game being developed for a new kind of arcade (that’s why the headsets have to be in the same place) – but the game creator died before finishing it, and it’s supposed to be a cursed game. Maybe Alex didn’t tell them that before they started, 'cause he thinks it’s just crap they wrote so it’d sell for more at auction.

Once again, that’s a big piece of the story that just popped into my head because the AI asked me a question. Would I have come up with this anyway? Probably. Would I have arrived at it as quickly? Hard to say, but I think not.

It feels much faster to break a story with AI. Typically, it’s just me pacing in my office. This feels less wandering since the AI is prompting me for answers.

Once again, my ChatGPT conversation goes on. You can read it here: https://chat.openai.com/share/c2351afb-5751-458d-8a51-6de421793307

I switched tools to SudoWrite from here.

I ran that vague outline through SudoWrite’s Story Engine. It reworked the elements into some standard outline formats: Save the Cat, Story Circle, and “Novel” Outline (not sure what that’s based on). It was interesting to see the differences. Mostly, it was minor arrangement and pacing changes. Ultimately, they were all too long for my needs. I wanted this to be a “short” story, after all.

So, I wrote the outline myself, formatted in a way SudoWrite prefers (for reasons you’ll learn soon). It looked something like this:

Act 1 - Game On:

Chapter 1: The Game Begins - Xan, Sara, Mal, Laila, and Jackson are standing in a circle in an eerie, ethereal plain with mist and floating islands. A skeleton in a long robe that looks like a long hoody materializes and introduces himself as The Gatekeeper. He introduces the game rules and objectives. A loading icon hovers before them, and the groups start talking about how good the graphics are and stuff. This is where it becomes apparent that they are in a VR game. Xan comments how it’s weird they don’t have any controllers and wonders if his purchase is incomplete. Sara is nervous about this place, this game. She doesn’t like horror stuff.

So on and so forth for all nine chapters. My long-ass, stream-of-thought sentences describing the chapters.

This took some time. Welcome to writing.

Rough Draft

This isn’t a tutorial for SudoWrite (although if people are interested, I can get into it later). But I will give an overview of what’s involved so you can understand how I used it to create the initial prose.

Beat It

We have a synopsis and an outline, good stuff. But we need to be more explicit when telling an AI what to write. Think of the AI as a reasonably competent but ultimately lazy ignoramus. You don’t want to leave it to its own devices. So, we create a beat sheet for each chapter.

Even though I’m not an ignoramus (most of the time), I usually create a beat sheet for myself as well. But it’s much more vague than the ones you have to create for AIs.

If your outline is in the correct format, SudoWrite will feed it to an AI to create the initial beats. But you should never use them as-is.

Here’s an example of the beats for the first chapter:

1. Begin the chapter with a vivid description of the eerie, ethereal plain, emphasizing the mist and floating islands to create a sense of otherworldliness.
2. Introduce Xan, Sara, Mal, Laila, and Jackson, providing brief physical descriptions and glimpses into their personalities.
3. Describe The Gatekeeper’s appearance and mannerisms, highlighting the contrast between his skeletal form and the long hoody-like robe.
4. Use dialogue to convey the game rules and objectives, keeping the tone informative but also slightly mysterious.
5. Show Xan’s curiosity and skepticism about the lack of controllers, emphasizing his tech-savvy nature.
6. Portray Sara’s unease and apprehension about the horror elements of the game, using her reactions and internal thoughts to convey her emotions.
7. Have The Gatekeeper introduce himself and explain the purpose of the game, emphasizing the importance of completing quests and obtaining the Spirit Crystal.
8. Include a loading icon hovering before the group, prompting them to discuss the impressive graphics and the absence of controllers.
9. Show Xan’s comment about the incomplete purchase, questioning the lack of controllers and hinting at his curiosity about the game’s mechanics.
10. Highlight Sara’s nervousness about the game, her dislike for horror elements, and her wariness about the unknown nature of the virtual world they find themselves in.
11. Use dialogue to create a sense of camaraderie and excitement among the friends as they discuss the game and its potential for adventure.
12. End the chapter with a sense of anticipation and mystery, as the loading icon hovers before them, signaling the imminent start of their virtual journey.

As I learned throughout this process, the AI gives us a decent starting point, but needs a lot of work to get it usable.

Also, it bears mentioning that each beat will generate 100-200 words of prose – Or thereabouts. So keep that in mind when writing your beats. You don’t want to give the AI too much to do, but you don’t want to give it too little either. You’re looking for that Goldilocks zone… Which is just trial and error, I’m afraid.

Here’s my revised version:

(Avoid dialogue tags. Prefer action tags. Make the character’s dialogue youthful but not cheesy, keeping with their personalities and types. Visual imagery in descriptions.)

1. Begin the chapter with a giant skull, The Gatekeeper, saying that all those who enter this realm are trapped and must complete the game to survive. Gatekeeper jokes about how their bodies may survive, but he makes no promises about their mind. Gatekeeper cackles madly.
2. The Gatekeeper introduces the players in an intro or gameshow style: Xan, Sara, Mal, Laila, and Jackson, providing brief physical descriptions and glimpses into their personalities.
3. A visually stunning transition from a digital nothingness to the ethereal plain with a vivid description of the eerie, ethereal plain, emphasizing the mist and floating islands to create a sense of otherworldliness.
4. The Gatekeeper appears in a pixelated puff. Describe the Gatekeeper’s appearance and mannerisms, highlighting the contrast between his skeletal form and the long hoody-like robe. Have The Gatekeeper introduce himself and explain the purpose of the game, emphasizing the importance of completing quests and obtaining the Spirit Crystal.
5. Use dialogue to convey the game rules and objectives, keeping the tone informative but also slightly mysterious.
6. Include a loading icon hovering before the group, prompting them to discuss the impressive graphics and the absence of controllers.
7. Show Xan’s curiosity and skepticism about the lack of controllers, emphasizing his tech-savvy nature.
8. Portray Sara’s unease and apprehension about the horror elements of the game, using her reactions and internal thoughts to convey her emotions.
9. Show Xan’s comment about the incomplete purchase, questioning the lack of controllers and hinting at his curiosity about the game’s mechanics.
10. End the chapter with a sense of anticipation and mystery, as the loading icon hovers before them, signaling the imminent start of their virtual journey. Use dialogue to create a sense of camaraderie and excitement among the friends as they discuss the game and its potential for adventure.

You’ll notice that most of the same stuff is covered, but I start acting like a movie director, dictating performances and how certain things should be done, like the gameshow-style introduction.

The first line, in parenthesis, is a header where you can add some marching orders for the AI to follow as it generates the prose. Why is that important? Because as impressive as it is, the AI can’t read your mind. If you want to put something in the draft, you must tell it.

The truth is, I wasn’t explicit enough and wound up becoming even more so as I went along.

Prose Generation

We have our synopsis. Our character list (from the story bible). Our outline. And our fresh beat sheet. Now, we can get down to generating some prose.

SudoWrite has different modes for transforming your beats into prose: Most Accurate, Best Prose, and Fastest. Behind the scenes, I’m pretty sure they’re switching which LLM they’re using: GPT 4, Claude 2, and GPT 3.5-Turbo.

I never use Fastest because I find the resulting prose useless.

So that leaves Most Accurate, which follows your beats well, and Best Prose, which is likely to use more creative writing but will tend to wander off script often. The thing is, I like them both for those reasons.

In the end, I generated each chapter twice, once using each mode. (Sometimes more, but in those cases, my beats needed to be more specific.)

Here’s how Most Accurate handled an example passage:

1 - 2

A skull the size of a house materializes, empty eye sockets glowing an eerie green. “Welcome, young ones,” the skull booms, jaw clacking with each word. “You have entered my realm now. The only way out is to complete the game.” The skull’s grin widens impossibly. “Your bodies will survive this, but your minds?” A chilling cackle echoes as the skull fades into mist.

Pixels scatter like shards of glass, revealing an alien landscape. Wisps of fog blanket jagged cliffs and sheer drops, the abyss below obscured. Floating islands drift aimlessly through the haze, some barren and craggy, others bursting with luminous foliage in impossible colors. An uneasy quiet hangs in the air, broken only by the occasional ominous moan of wind. This place feels ancient, haunted - and hungry for fresh souls.

You’ll notice it adds a marker indicating which beats were addressed.

So, despite being “most accurate,” it didn’t give me everything I asked for in the first two beats. But some of the descriptions of the environment are good.

Now, here’s the Best Prose output:

1 - 2

The giant skull loomed, its hollow eyes burning. “Welcome, players,” it rasped, skeletal jaw clacking. “You’re trapped here until you finish the game.” It cackled, the sound rattling from its ribs. “Your bodies might make it back. Your minds?” Another chilling laugh. “No promises.”

Xan tensed. Don’t freak, man. It’s just a game.

“Let’s meet our contenders!” the skull boomed. “Xan, our thrill-seeking hacker with the floppy hair.”

Xan ran a hand through his dark locks self-consciously. Guess character customization was pretty detailed.

“Sara, as cool-headed as she is blonde.” The skull winked one cavernous eye socket. “Nothing ruffles this one.”

A small smile played on Sara’s lips. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Mal, our happy-go-lucky jokester.” The skull’s jaw unhinged in a gruesome grin. “Too bad this game won’t be much of a laugh.”

Mal’s shoulders hunched. “Aw, man,” he muttered.

“Laila, loyal to a fault.” The skull dipped its head. “Too bad she got locked out of our happy nightmare.”

Laila shivered, glancing around the empty room surrounding her.

“And Jackson, old soul in a young body.” The skull’s eyes flashed. “Let’s see if those instincts help you now.”

Jackson met its gaze steadily. Game on, bonehead.

The skull cackled once more, a harsh grate of sound. “The quest for the Spirit Crystal begins. Don’t die!”

This gave me a lot to work with, dialogue-wise. But very little in descriptions… Which is like my own first drafts, now that I think about it.

So what did I do? I used parts of both, merging them in the rough draft.

(Note: Since I’ve written this, SudoWrite has a new prose generation mode: Unfiltered, which is uncensored. I have yet to mess with it, so I can’t comment on the output quality.)

Rough Edit

So, I took them and sandwiched them into my first rough draft:

1 - 2

“Welcome, players,” a giant skull looms, its hollow eyes burning, skeletal jaw clacking as it speaks. “Make no mistake, you’re all trapped here until you finish the game.” It cackles, the sound rattling from its ribs. “Oh dear, you look so frightened. Fear not, your bodies might make it back… But your minds?” Another chilling laugh. “No promises.”

Pixels scatter like shards of glass, fragments swirling into a blur. A blast of seemingly frigid air swirls around them. The pixels solidify into a moonlit landscape—endless mist cloaks jagged peaks, sheer cliffs, and ruins emerging from the gloom. Floating islands drift aimlessly through the haze; some are barren and craggy, others burst with luminous foliage in impossible colors. An uneasy quiet hangs in the air, broken only by the occasional ominous moan of wind. This place feels ancient, haunted—and hungry for fresh souls.

“Let’s meet our contenders!” the skull’s now-disembodied voice booms.

In a burst of pixels, the skull coalesces. “Xan, our thrill-seeking hacker with the floppy hair.”

With a flourish of special effects, Xan’s avatar appears and runs a hand through his dark locks, self-consciously. Guess character customization is pretty detailed.

“Sara, as cool-headed as she is blonde,” the skull winks a cavernous eye socket. “Nothing ruffles this one.”

A small smile plays on Sara’s lips. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Mal, our happy-go-lucky jokester,” the skull’s jaw unhinges in a gruesome grin. “Too bad this game won’t be much of a laugh.”

Mal’s shoulders hunch. “Aw, man,” he mutters.

“Laila, loyal to a fault,” the skull dips its head. “Too bad she won’t enjoy our happy little nightmare.”

Laila shivers, glancing around.

“And Jackson, an old soul in a young body,” the skull’s eyes flash. “Let’s see if those instincts help you now.”

Jackson meets its gaze steadily. Game on, bonehead.

The skull cackles once more, a harsh grate of sound. “The quest for the Spirit Crystal begins. Don’t die!”

I couldn’t resist tweaking some dialogue as I went, but I kept this to a minimum in this phase of the edit.

This merged Rough Edit gives me a launchpad - I set the narrative trajectory by providing the core storyline beats and direction. The AI then takes the controls, generating the actual written scenes and details that bring that framework to life. So I chart the “what,” the “why,” and the “how” while the AI handles the rest. It’s direction mixed with improvisation – I lay the tracks, AI makes the train run on time… Shall I mix some more metaphors?

Anyway, it still needs a lot of work. But if you compare it to the prose from my experiment with GPT 3.5, I think you’ll agree it’s much better.

From Rough Draft to First Draft

Once I generated and merged the whole story, I gave it another edit pass to get it closer to something that reads as mine.

I added/changed some characterizations and a fair bit of dialogue. Removed things that are a bit redundant or aren’t my style… Like dialogue tags. I don’t use 'em much. I much prefer action tags. AI doesn’t do them the way I like. So I have to do a manual pass for that kind of stuff.

Still, it’s easier to change something already on the page than creating the text whole-cloth.

Here’s how those beats read now:

“Welcome, players, to the Fractured Realm. Or as I like to call it…your doom,” a giant, scruffy-bearded skull proclaimed from above, his laughter echoing maniacally. “Once you accept my quest, there is no hope for escape. You’ll remain trapped here until the game concludes.” The skull’s rattling laugh punctuated his words.

“Oh dear. You seem frightened.” The skull’s hollow eyes gleamed darkly. “Fear not; your bodies will likely survive… but your minds? Well…” Another chilling laugh filled the air. “I make no promises.”

Pixels scattered like shards of glass before swirling into a blur. A blast of frigid air swept through the scene as the brightly colored motes solidified into a moonlit landscape–a thick mist shrouding jagged peaks and sheer cliffs. Ancient ruins emerged from the gloom while floating islands drifted through the haze–some barren and craggy, others ablaze with luminous foliage in hues of vibrant purple and shimmering green. An uneasy silence loomed, broken only by the occasional haunting howl of the wind.

Then, in a burst of digital fragments, the skull reappeared. “Well, enough dawdling. Let’s meet our contenders,” he said, his voice mimicking a game show host.

“Xan, our thrill-seeking hacker with the floppiest of hair.” The skull added in a stage whisper, “Can he rise to the occasion, or will he rush into disaster?”

An avatar of a thin young man with the floppiest of dark hair materialized in a blaze of stunning special effects. He self-consciously ran his hand through his mop of hair. “It’s not that floppy,” Xan said.

“Sara, storms are brewin’ in her eyes,” the skull mused, simulating a wink with his cavernous eye socket. “Will she find her voice when it matters most?”

A young woman appeared in a swirl of dazzling mist; a small smile tugged at her lips. Sara tucked a stray lock of golden hair behind her ear.

“Mal, the jovial joker,” the skull’s jaw unhinged in a grotesque grin. “Pity this game won’t be much of a laughing matter.”

A stocky young man with a face that smiled even at rest popped into existence like a soap bubble in reverse. Mal’s shoulders slumped. “Aw, man.”

“Laila, loyal to a fault,” the skull inclined his head. “Sadly, she won’t find any joy in our twisted nightmare.”

A young woman slowly faded into view. Laila trembled slightly, her kind eyes darting around anxiously.

“And Jackson, an old soul trapped in a young body.” The skull’s eyes shimmered menacingly. “Let’s see if your instincts serve you well here.”

A figure emerged from the ground, casting rocks and dust into the air. The square jawed Jackson brushed the dirt off of his arms and eyed the skull. “Game on, bonehead.”

The skull let out a harsh cackle. “The quest for the Spirit Shard will test your resolve… to the very bone!” His laughter echoed into nothingness as the skull vanished into the ether.

There’s no magic here, just heads-down work in a text editor.

Maybe it’s Me, Maybe it’s AI

So that got me to a first draft.

It’s worth noting that there are certain things that I have to do for myself… Trying to coax it out of the AI would take longer than just writing it myself. For example, there’s a bit about the Roman Empire (a take on the meme that is surprising to many a girlfriend/wife). It would take more words to explain the damn gag than just to add it in the edit.

Don’t forget: You’re a writer. Don’t be afraid to write.

Whose Work Is It?

Well… How do we judge that? We’ve reviewed how much writing I did on the outline and beat sheets. Then, the addition of whole sections and extensive edits after generation. What else should we scrutinize? Would it matter?

Who’s the judge of all this?

For this story, it’s me. I judge that it’s my story. I had a writing assistant to help speed along the process, but I was the one driving the narrative and making the decisions.

What do you think? Do you disagree with me? Is this story mine, or was it merely co-written by me? Is this something that I should be able to copyright? What does it all even mean in the final analysis?

Conclusions

So, what are the takeaways from all this?

You’ll notice that I used ChatGPT for inspiration, refinement, and brainstorming. But the ideas and decisions were ultimately mine. It pitched a VR Seance story, but my taking that as a starting point and putting my own spin on it caused it to become the story it is now.

There Is No Magic Button

Sorry, AI won’t magically write you a best-seller.

It seems unlikely to write an award-winning novel anytime soon (years). Why? Because it’s one of the hardest things to fake. Much like AI-generated visual art struggles with the details—oh, those pesky fingers. LLMs also have a problem with the details—nuance, subtext, etc.

AI as a Power Tool

Give a craftsman power tools, and they’ll build a house faster.

Give a layman power tools, and they still won’t be able to build a house.

AI is not a shortcut to circumvent learning the craft. You still have to understand story, pacing, dialogue, subtext, theme, tone, and all the many other aspects of storytelling. AI will only help you do some initial heavy lifting, but it’s just that…

Lifting, not crafting.

How Good Is The AI?

It’s a lot better than when I tried having GPT 3.5 write something, that’s for sure. Is it what I would write? No. I have to go through and revise a lot.

I wonder… Will we start listing the AIs as co-authors at some point in the future? Kind of like James Patterson… We put our name big on top, underneath in small letters: And Al Geppetto.¹

Potential Gotchas

Here are a few things that can be a problem or just a waste of time:

• Trying to get the AI to write “just like you.”
  • It’s not gonna happen. (Not without much specialized work that a non-coder would likely struggle with. Even then it won’t do it very well because, frankly, it’s not you.)
• Trying to get the AI to do “all the work.”
  • See my comment about craft… You have to do that. It’s work. Deal with it.

The Right Mindset

Working with an AI assistant takes a certain mindset… Here are my suggestions:

• The AI is your helper. You’re the one making decisions: It’s YOUR story.
• It’s here to help create your story—faster.
• It can help you get a first Rough Draft done (some people call this the Vomit Draft, which might be a good term for AI prose) but not the final prose (in my opinion).
• It’s good for bouncing ideas off of, primarily to push your imagination in a certain direction… “That’s crap, this is how I would do it…”
• In the initial stages, thinking like a director is good. You’re just setting things up and ensuring the actors (AI) understand what they are doing and why, and then just let the performance happen. You can fix it all in the edit.
• Don’t spin your wheels trying to get the AI to write the exact words you want. If you know exactly the words you want, do that in the edit—Or write the chapter yourself. Trying to get precision from the AI is like the proverbial herding of cats.

A Mild Tangent: What About Visual Art?

AI-generated text is one thing. But AI-generated imagery is another.

Right?

The Cover

Let’s talk quickly about how I created the images for this story before the more interesting questions… Like what are the ethics of all this? (Spoiler: I’m not sure.)

I won’t dwell on this, but this is how I created the cover and other related images:

• Initial cover image
  • I pasted my outline into ChatGPT and asked it to create some comps using imagery extracted from it.
  • After some iteration (a common theme with AI work), I got one I liked and used a Canva AI feature to remove some aspects that I didn’t like, including the malformed text.
  • Created the title text as vectors in Figma.
  • Composited it all in Figma and exported it into the various target formats.
  • Retired to Bora Bora…
• The stinger image at the book’s end and the book site’s background image were done similarly but without text treatments.

(If you’re interested, I can write a post that goes into more.)

Generative Visual Art Feels Different

Pictures and words. Yes, they are both creative arts. And supposedly, one of them is worth a thousand of the other.

For some reason, generative visual art (Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 3, Midjourney, etc.) is a different beast than text generation. Or, it feels like it is, anyway.

I’m a former illustrator, so that may muddle my thought process. But I’m unsure how I feel about the ethics of all this. I found some of my art in the LAION database—the database of images they used to train the stable diffusion models (and probably more). And I…really don’t care. That’s probably just me. (It also probably matters that I don’t attempt to make a living on my visual art.)

I was talking to a friend—another visual artist type—after I showed him the comps for the cover art and explained how I made them. He commented on how long it would take to create them by hand. And he’s not wrong. It shaved days off the timeline. Which is why I don’t think the tech is going anywhere. It’s just too damn useful.

The Techno-literate Artist

If I were still a professional illustrator, here’s what I’d start doing:

I’d create models (or LoRAs) based on my style or one-offs specific to the project I’m working on. Then I’d leverage Stable Diffusion + Control Net and crank out comps quickly. Once I’ve iterated with the client (which would be a lot more painless this way), I would then take that comp and do the “final” art with that image as a base (or just a touch-up phase) to give it that “human touch.”

My Future with AI

Will I integrate AI as a tool into my writer’s kit going forward? To some degree, yes. How much? That remains to be seen. I want to do other experiments and see how well I can integrate them into my typical writing process.

I can see the power of writing with the assistance of AI. I won’t be using it to brainstorm initial ideas. But it is helpful as a sounding board.

My (self-imposed) deadline on this forced me into a “get it done” mode that I don’t usually like to be in for writing fiction. It feels too much like work. Plus, I like to stew on things for a bit. I typically wind up with better ideas. But, given the timeframe, I’m impressed with my (our?) output in two weeks.

Next Experiment

My first drafts will sometimes be pretty sparse, almost like a screenplay containing—most importantly—the dialogue and then some stage direction. The fancy prose-y bits often come in a later pass.

It would be interesting to write that first pass myself, then have AI flesh out some surrounding prose and descriptions. See what that looks like.

(I did a proof-of-concept already: https://www.craft.me/s/q1uIPLBD7duMcd — that was fruitful enough that I’d like to use the technique on an actual project.)

Something else SudoWrite has in beta are plugins: A way to automate custom AI prompts in the editor environment. This has great potential to speed up editorial tasks… I’ll definitely be playing with that.

Fractured Realms Will Continue…

Look for Fractured Realms to become a trilogy of stories. Whether it will be released on successive Halloweens or not, I don’t know yet. But I do know there will be more from these kids.

You can expect more from me soon. From both Fractured Realms and my other series Smith & W’sin.

Speaking of which…

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