Alright: You are now ready to start your book. You’ve done your research, you’ve looked at the tools you have available to you, and you may have a solid idea of the general structure and plot of your book. Next comes every writer’s favorite step: the writing.
All good authors must love the writing process. Even if they get stuck sometimes, even if it gets hard, they need to have a passion for writing. If you do not have a passion for writing, or a passion for the subject that you are writing about, then you shouldn’t be writing a book. You are not writing because you want to write a good book or bring eyes on a cause that you care about, you are writing for a quick buck. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting a quick buck, I think we’re all guilty of this at times, but in the world of literature, people will notice. A book that feels like a quick cash grab is, ironically, not going to sell very well nor will it be reviewed very well by audiences.
This is why it’s a fools errand to write a book from scratch with AI. There’s no pathos to it. No heart. AI is very good at imitating corpo-speak (for lack of a more delicate term), but struggles with other styles of writing. As Bob put it in a previous blog post, AI tends to be mechanical in composition, choppy in regards to flow, with the text jumping from thought to thought.
But this isn’t to say that AI is completely useless in the writing process, far from it. Like with research, you have to treat it like a personal assistant.
Back to writing your book: You may have an idea of the general plot beats of your book: The beginning, the middle, the end, but no way to transition to and from each plot point. AI can be used to help fill in these gaps. If you are writing a drama book, and you need to have 2 characters reconcile before the third act, AI can help give suggestions on how to do so. It works in reverse, too. You may have a general idea for your book, but you’re inexperienced and not quite sure how to go about telling the story that you want to tell. AI can help map out the skeleton of your story, let you know what to put and where to put it, give you information on how plot structure works, and then you can write in the gaps between each plot point. But remember: The more that AI has to guess with the plot, the more that AI might make up stuff on it’s own. It’s always important to keep your book thematically consistent with the rest of your book. If you’re writing a realistic, down-to-earth, slice of life drama and the AI starts to suggest giving the characters superpowers and a talking dog for a single chapter that’s never mentioned again… It might be best to ignore it (or you could get creative with it and include it as a dream sequence!).
AI is especially useful in case you have a serious bout of writer’s block. If you have written yourself into a corner and can’t think of anything to get out of that corner, or you have no idea of how to proceed to the ending with where you currently are in the book, AI might help with that. But AI is very much a last resort when it comes to writing. Most AI programs are trained off of datasets, many of which include other books. If you use a scenario written by an AI, even if you wrote it yourself and just used the idea, it’s always a good thing to double check and make sure that scenario wasn’t done by someone else already. Coincidences can and do happen, and if it suggests a common trope that’s used in a variety of books you shouldn’t worry (Utility belts, secret lovers, etc.). But if it’s especially detailed and a specific scenario that you haven’t seen anywhere else, you might just want to check.
That leads into our next topic: For anything that you have had an AI write, even something as simple as an email, the one thing you should ALWAYS do is fully proofread and edit it beforehand. You might not think that people will be able to tell: They will. Of course, there’s a few telltale signs:
- A formal, second person demeanor, especially the sort of fluff that you would see in a YouTube essay. Phrases like “In today’s ever evolving landscape” and “Let’s unpack this” are almost a dead giveaway.
- An overabundance of em dashes (—), a long line used to break up text.
- Excessively clean formatting: Breaking up multiple lists of bullet points by giving them headers or giving each bullet point its own, semi-related title.
- In longer-form texts, introducing plot points or elements on the fly with no build-up, and forgetting about them soon after.
- Heavily contrasting writing styles (i.e. going from a casual, playful tone of voice to the formal voice that ChatGPT uses.)
By far, THE most important thing you can do: Edit out any intro text! This is by far the easiest way to tell if something is written by AI, and a surprising amount of people leave it in. There have been instances where authors (not affiliated with Biblio Publishing) would leave in the intro text directly addressing themselves, by name, in their own book. By that, we mean paragraphs would sometimes start with “Thanks for asking, Connor! Here are 5 different ways to start a paragraph.” This is in a book. This just shows a lack of care and effort in not just editing your book, but the creation of the book itself.
That’s the thesis statement for today: Avoid using AI to write sections of your book unless you are completely stuck, and even then, you should just take the idea that sites like ChatGPT or CoPilot give you, and re-write them into your own words.
AI can be useful in spots, but overall it is not a great tool for writing. Now formatting and revising on the other hand… we will get to that in the next blog post.
Written by Connor Mayhorn
ChatGPT was used for additional research for this article.