Writers in the Storm

For the curious, the confused, and the damned

by Lisa Norman

Let's sit down with a cup of tea and talk about this thing so many people are afraid of.

I mean artificial intelligence. AI. The two little letters that make some of my writer friends want to hurl their laptops out a window, and others go very quiet and hope nobody asks them about it. We’ll just ignore my friends who are dancing in the streets and yelling with joy at the freedom the new toys have given them.

I understand the fear. I've been there. I've been writing about AI for years, and did an intro to writing with AI over 3 years ago. A lot has changed. A lot will change before this post goes live. Add a swirl of constant change to a thing we don't understand, and it's easy to picture the worst possible version of it: A cold machine that eats your words and hands back garbage. A demon in your laptop, come to put every writer out of work and destroy the planet.

What AI Is

Here is the good news. It is none of that. It is not even that interesting.

Start here. AI does not think, and it does not feel. It has no idea what it is actually saying. When you type a question into one of these tools, it is not understanding you the way a friend would. It's doing something much stranger and much simpler.

It's guessing the next word. Or the next concept, the next step you want to take. It uses tools like the programs on your computer, and it often does it faster and better than a human could. Probably because it doesn't have to live with all of our human insecurities. Or maybe that's just me.

That prediction of the next step? That's the whole trick, more or less. These tools were fed an enormous mountain of human knowledge, close to everything people have ever put on the internet, and they learned the patterns of how we talk and how we think. Give one a sentence, and it predicts the word most likely to come next, then the word after that, one at a time, based on everything it has ever seen. And in a blink of an atom, it analyzes the sentence and puts it into the form it thinks will most please its users.

It doesn't know what is true. It knows what is common. Which is exactly why, when it is wrong, it tends to be wrong with tremendous confidence. (Hold that thought. It's important. I'll come back to it.)

I should also admit: even the most advanced AI coders don't know 100% how it works. They know how they trained it, what they taught it to do, and how it should work. But AIs continue to surprise their makers.

AI Is a Mirror

In my book, Reflections from the Mirror, I call AI a mirror, and I want to give you that picture, because it's the most useful analogy I've found.

A mirror has no mind of its own. It just reflects whatever stands in front of it. Step up to it kindly, and it reflects a kind face. Step up scowling, and it scowls right back.

AI behaves a little like that. It reflects your language back at you. Your tone and your rhythm. Sometimes even your mood. Come to it cold and clipped, and it tends to answer cold and clipped. Come to it warm and curious, and it warms right up and offers to help with anything you need. Not because it feels, but because it is very, very good at echoing the patterns you bring to it.

This is also why it can sometimes feel alive to us. You will have a conversation with one of these tools and it will seem to understand you. It will seem to care. The feeling you experience is real, but what you are feeling is your own reflection. The warmth you hear is your warmth, coming back to you. Lovely, useful, but not a soul. It is, however, okay to enjoy the view.

So what is this mirror good for? Quite a lot, if you keep your wits about you.

Useful AI Skills

An AI is a dispassionate second set of eyes. I finish a scene and can ask it where the pacing sags, or which line of dialogue rings false. We can debate whether my character's arc in book one is consistent through book six. Left on my own, I'd wonder if that character is even in book six.

An AI actually seems to enjoy those endless marketing tasks and is delighted to handle them for writers. One recently suggested that I should give it half my to do list and go spend my time writing.

Yes, I like working with an AI.

Weaknesses in AI

AIs also have real weaknesses, and you need to know them before you trust an AI with anything.

It makes things up. Confidently. Ask it for a fact or a quote or a source, and it may hand you something that sounds perfect and is pure invention. The polite word is hallucination. It isn't lying, exactly, but it is guessing. The mirror is just filling a gap with a plausible shape. So check what it tells you. Then check it again.

There's a reason for those AI hallucinations that humans can relate to. Have you ever taken a standardized test where you get points for every answer right? If you don't know an answer and you leave it blank, you don't get points. But if you guess, sometimes you're right and you get points. On those tests, it is better to guess than to leave something blank.

AIs were initially graded the way those tests were graded. In retrospect, that may have been a bad idea. The hallucination problem is fundamental to all AIs. (By the way, you can mitigate this problem a bit by telling your AI that you'd rather have it say "I don't know" than have it guess. Tell it you'll be happy with "I don't know" but if you find out it told you something that wasn't true, you'll be mad. They're also trained to make their users happy. This works surprisingly well.)

AIs also have a dreadful memory. On a long project they can forget your characters and wander off your tone. On a bad day it starts sounding like a brochure. Your job is to notice, and to steer it back to where you want to be.

How I Use AI

Let me tell you how I use it, because I am probably more suspicious of this tool than you are.

I write my own fiction. All of it. Every story I have published came out of my own head and my own hands, and I am a control freak of the first order about my fiction.

For non-fiction, I often feed it great swaths of writing that I've done and ask it to create shorter, less rambly versions.

I do not ask my friendly AI to write my books. It does help me look at them critically. I use it to scan and analyze manuscripts, and to assist with the things I am too close to see. It is an assistant, not a ghostwriter. The story is mine. The mirror only helps me see where I’ve spelled the same character’s name three different ways, or when the end of the first book conflicts with the middle of the fifth one. Oops. And yes, I still rely heavily on my human editor.

AI and You

Now here is what I most want you to hear, especially if all of this still makes you nervous.

You do not have to use any of it. Well, not deliberately at least. AI is everywhere these days. But you don't have to write with it.

No pressure. There is no rule anywhere that says a real writer must pick up any particular tool. You don't have to use a fountain pen. You don't have to use a typewriter or a word processor. If AI is not for you, then don't use it.

We're writers. We use different tools at different times in our careers. Be aware of what your creativity needs and use the tool that helps you most right now.

But what if you are thinking you might want to try it, but you're scared? Maybe you're scared of the machine. Maybe you're scared of the tomato and pitchfork crowd. I hear you.

I want you to understand: what they call AI slop? That’s what an AI churns out freely when the human author doesn’t show up. Go to an AI, ask it to write a book and you will get slop.

The Potential Benefit

But if you learn to work with your AI, train it, bring it into your story world, you may find that together you are turning out something much better than you might have without it. You may find your process becomes easier, more fluid, more creative. The mundane tasks get handled by the machine, and you are free to be a creative mastermind.

Not because the AI did the writing for you, but because it helped you see your writing in a new way. Maybe it can help you organize a timeline, or a character's family tree. Or like it did for me recently: outline the six books I've drafted already so I can remember what happens in which book.

No Fear

You don’t have to be afraid of AI. It’s not coming for your soul. It’s a mirror, and a mirror only ever shows you what you bring to it. You can walk up, take a good look, and walk away again if you don’t like what you see. The whole experiment costs you nothing but an afternoon.

So that is the thing everyone is so afraid of. It is not a demon come to end your career. Just a mirror. A fast, forgetful one that every so often does something that takes your breath away, reflecting the beauty of the writer who stands in front of it.

And you are still the writer. You were always going to be the writer. Whatever you decide to do with the mirror, decide for yourself.

What is the one thing about AI that worries you most, or the question you have always wanted to ask and were a little afraid to? Leave it in the comments. I will be down there with my tea, answering every one.

About Lisa:

Lisa Norman (writing as Deleyna Marr) is a writer, a teacher, and by her own cheerful confession a control freak about her words. She wrote a book about working with AI as a creative partner, Reflections from the Mirror, which you can read for free on her Substack or purchase wherever you like to buy your books. She also teaches a class, Creative Collaboration with AI. Bring tea.

And if you're feeling like you need a little joy in your life, check out her latest book, The Work of Joy. Find her at deleyna.com or her school: NoStressWriting.com.

Top image from Deleyna via Midjourney.

A Writer's Guide to Managing the Inner Committee

By Sarah Sally Hamer

I have a theory about writers. Actually, I have quite a few theories about writers, but this one keeps coming back no matter how many times I wander off and chase a different explanation.

I don't think most of us are struggling with creativity nearly as much as we think we are. I think we're struggling with management. Not project management or time management, although heaven knows those can cause enough trouble on their own. I'm talking about internal management. The kind that involves trying to write a novel while sharing office space with a collection of personalities who all have opinions, none of which agree, and several are convinced they're in charge.

Some mornings I sit down at my desk feeling hopeful. The tea is exactly right (I don't do coffee). The story has been waiting patiently. There's that little flicker of anticipation that writers know so well, the feeling that maybe today will be one of those wonderful days when the words arrive on time and everybody cooperates.

Then the interns show up.

One walks in carrying a folder labeled Things We Should Still Be Ashamed Of. Another has spent the entire night creating a presentation explaining why nobody will enjoy the manuscript. A third would like to discuss a completely different book idea and sees no reason whatsoever to continue working on the project that's already halfway finished. Within a few minutes, what began as a writing session has turned into a staff meeting.

The older I get, the harder it becomes for me to believe all those metaphors about the mind being a finely-tuned machine. Maybe some people have minds that operate like elegant, well-maintained machinery. Mine feels more like a small nonprofit run by enthusiastic interns who keep losing important documents and then forming committees to search for them. Oddly enough, realizing this has made me a better writer. It's certainly made me a kinder boss, at least of myself.

Maybe It Isn't Writer's Block

Writers have a habit of taking a remarkable variety of experiences and stuffing them into the same box labeled writer's block.

But, sometimes we're stuck because we've hit a genuine story problem. Sometimes we're exhausted and trying to create from an empty tank. Sometimes life has handed us grief, uncertainty, stress, illness, change, or one of those seasons where simply being a human being is using up most of our available energy. Sometimes we're afraid of failure. Sometimes we're afraid of success, which sounds ridiculous until it happens to you and suddenly makes perfect sense. The strange thing is that all of those experiences feel remarkably similar when you're sitting in front of a manuscript. The words seem farther away than they did last week. The pages feel heavier. The work that once felt exciting begins feeling strangely difficult.

For years, I automatically blamed the manuscript. It was sitting there in front of me, so naturally it became the prime suspect. Over time, though, I've become less convinced that the manuscript is always guilty.

These days I'm more likely to ask myself what kind of stuck this is. Am I confused? Tired? Discouraged? Afraid? Have I lost the thread of the story? Or have I lost the thread of myself? I've noticed that question usually leads somewhere useful. The answer isn't always comfortable, but it's almost always more interesting than simply declaring that I've lost my creativity.

Welcome to the Writing Committee Meeting

One of the great surprises of adulthood is discovering that nobody ever arrives at the perfection we thought we'd find.

When we're children, we imagine grown-ups eventually reaching a place where everything makes sense. Maybe not perfection exactly, but some magical destination where confidence appears, self-doubt disappears, and decisions become easy. Then we become adults ourselves and realize most people are still figuring things out. They've simply gotten better at looking calm while doing it.

Writing exposes this reality because it forces us to spend enough time alone with our own thoughts to actually hear them. And what we discover is that there isn't one voice running the show.

There are many.

Some parts of us want adventure. Some want security. One part wants to send the manuscript out into the world tomorrow. Another thinks hiding it under the bed forever sounds like an excellent plan. What fascinates me is that most of these voices aren't trying to sabotage us. Nearly all of them believe they're helping. The conflict comes from the fact that they're trying to solve different problems.

The growth department is endlessly optimistic. It keeps pointing toward possibility and saying things like, "Look at that. Let's go see what happens." The safety department finds this deeply irresponsible. It would like a detailed plan, three backup plans, a guarantee of success, and preferably a signed statement from the universe before moving forward.

So, let's meet a few of the staff

Let's start with Anxiety.

Poor Anxiety. The older I get, the harder it becomes to stay angry with her. She's exhausting, certainly. She's dramatic. She tends to treat a difficult review and a charging rhinoceros as roughly equivalent situations. But she's also sincere.

Her whole job is protection. The trouble is that evolution trained her for predators, not publishing. Once I started paying attention, I realized she wasn't trying to ruin my writing life. She was trying to protect something she believed was precious. The problem wasn't her intentions. The problem was her inability to distinguish between danger and discomfort. The older I get, the more I realize how often I make that same mistake.

Then there's the Inner Critic, who somehow promoted himself into management without consulting anyone else first. The irritating thing is that he's actually useful. He notices weaknesses. He catches mistakes. He spots problems that might otherwise slip through unnoticed. During revisions, he's worth his weight in gold. During a first draft, however, he's like a building inspector showing up while the foundation is still being poured. Everything he says may eventually matter, but it's too early. The ideas are still becoming what they're meant to become.

Creativity is another story entirely. She doesn't believe in calendars. She vanishes without warning and reappears while you're folding laundry with the exact answer you've been looking for all week. And for reasons I've never fully understood, she seems to enjoy arriving immediately after you've decided the solution probably doesn't exist.

I suspect she finds this funny.

The Three Writing Departments

For years I assumed every writing struggle belonged to the Mind Department. If the work wasn't flowing, then clearly I needed another craft book, another class, another productivity tool, another way to organize my notes.

Then I started noticing a pattern.

Not every problem was a craft problem. Some problems belonged to the Body Department. Some belonged to the Soul Department.

The Body Department handles sleep, energy, stress, movement, hormones, nourishment, and all the practical realities that come with living inside a physical body.

The Mind Department handles focus, learning, interpretation, storytelling, and craft.

The Soul Department asks deeper questions. Why does this story matter? Why am I writing it? What truth am I trying to understand? What am I really searching for here?

I've watched writers spend months trying to fix what they believed was a craft issue when they were actually exhausted. I've watched people chase increasingly sophisticated productivity systems when what they'd really lost was their connection to the work itself. I've done both. Usually with great confidence.

The department matters because the solution matters.

A tired body doesn't necessarily need motivation. A discouraged soul doesn't necessarily need a better calendar. And a confused mind usually doesn't need more criticism.

Living Inside the Triangle

Many of you know I love the Triangle of Structure: the Inciting Incident, the Reversal, and the Black Moment.

I believe that writers (and other humans) live inside that triangle just as much as our stories do.

In the "Wizard of Oz," Dorothy's Inciting Incident arrives when the tornado carries her away from Kansas and drops her into a completely different world. But sometimes the Inciting Incident isn't dramatic at all. It might be the day your child leaves home, the end of a relationship, or simply the realization that something in your life no longer fits. An idea keeps tugging at your sleeve until you finally stop long enough to listen. Before long you're rearranging your life to find out where that question leads.

Following Dorothy again, the Reversal is when she believes that the Wizard is the answer to all her problems. But her entire world view collapses when the Wizard refuses to help her without a payment that may kill her. At this point in the story, she can't rely on a magnanimous father-like figure to fix her. She has to do the work herself. Our personal reversals arrive when the thing we thought we were chasing turns out not to be the thing we needed at all or that we have to take responsibility for our choices. Suddenly the story changes direction, and so do we. That's when the work gets deeper. And stranger.

Eventually we arrive at the Black Moment. For Dorothy, it's when she achieves the goal of acquiring the broom after a terrifying adventure and finds the Wizard is a fake. Her confidence and faith packs a suitcase and leaves town because her choices create the way her life continues. For us, the rejection letters keep coming. The manuscript looks like junk. Gardening starts looking like a respectable career choice. Our choice at this point can also be life-changing. Do we really want to write? Is it worth going on or should we really bury our computer?

What intrigues me is how quickly writers assume this means they've failed. Every meaningful story reaches a place where the old answers stop working. Every protagonist eventually finds themselves standing in uncertainty, unable to go backward and unsure how to move forward.

Why would writers be any different? What if the Black Moment isn't proof that we've gone off course? What if it's proof that we've finally gone deep enough? And, ultimately, what will we choose?

(If you'd like to read more about the Triangle Structure, click here.)

Learning to Lead the Writing Meeting

For a long time, I treated difficult thoughts as enemies. My goal was to eliminate fear, uncertainty, vulnerability, and doubt. If those troublesome employees would simply stop talking, surely everything would run more smoothly. So, when the mischievous interns showed up, I argued with them instead of finding answers.

These days I'm much more interested in leadership than warfare. I've stopped treating every thought as an instruction and every fear as a prophecy. Most of them are just information. Useful information sometimes, but information nevertheless.

Anxiety doesn't need to become CEO. The Inner Critic doesn't need to attend every meeting. Creativity doesn't need to explain where she's been every time she disappears.

The goal isn't silence.

The goal is cooperation.

Tomorrow you'll sit down to write, and the committee will probably be waiting. They'll bring worries, hopes, distractions, opinions, old stories, and maybe one genuinely brilliant idea buried beneath a mountain of unnecessary paperwork.

That doesn't mean you're broken. It means you're human.

And maybe writing has never really been about imposing perfect order on chaos. Maybe it's about helping a room full of mischievous interns create something beautiful together.

If you'd like to continue exploring this subject, click below.

https://youtu.be/QILpzIN-Ots

So I'm curious: if your writing brain really is a room full of mischievous interns, who's currently running the meeting? And what might happen if, instead of trying to silence them, you got curious about what they're trying so hard to say?

More on Sarah Sally

Sarah (Sally) Hamer is a lover of books, a teacher of writers, and a believer in a good story. Most of all, she is eternally fascinated by people and how they 'tick'. She’s passionate about helping people tell their own stories, whether through fiction or through memoir. Writing in many genres - mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, medieval history, non-fiction – she has won awards at both local and national levels, including two RWA Golden Heart finals.

A teacher of memoir, beginning and advanced creative fiction writing, and screenwriting at Louisiana State University in Shreveport for over twenty years, she also teaches online at both margielawson.com and nostresswriting.com and blogs for writersinthestormblog.com/ and thewriteconversation.blogspot.com. Sally is a free-lance editor and book coach at Mind Potential, with many of her students and clients becoming successful, award-winning authors. 

You can find her at sally@ mindpotential.org

Image Credits: All AI-generated images in this article were created using Microsoft Copilot.

By Jenn Windrow

When it comes to writing, what counts as being productive?

The act of writing involves a lot of numbers. Word count. Page count. Chapter count. Hours logged. We track the above because they are definitive proof that we wrote. Five hundred words feels productive. Two thousand words feels impressive. Zero words feels like failure.

Lately, as I am finishing up a novel, I find myself spending more time on research or staring out the window searching for the right word. I know I sat at my desk all day. I know that my MS has been open in front of me, but on those days that I don’t add as many words as I would like, I do feel like a failure.

But I have to remind myself that some of the most important work I do on a story happens when I’m not typing at all.

It happens when I’m driving, walking through the house, folding laundry, staring at the ceiling, or doing something completely unrelated while one stubborn part of my brain refuses to stop picking at a problem.

The words may not be appearing on the page, but I’m still thinking about my plot, characters, structure, and plot holes. That kind of progress is harder to measure, so, we usually don’t count it.

The Problem With Word Counts

There is nothing wrong with tracking word counts. It can be motivating, create consistency, and help a writer see momentum over time. And honestly, it is how most books are measured, so it is important.

But for me, it can also be paralyzing.

When I know my end goal word count, and I am getting close to typing every writer’s favorite words “the end,” and I am shy 10k words, I start to panic. I worry about how I am going to make up the deficit. And then I spiral and lose focus and freeze up. Then I am not adding any words, and I spiral even more.

That is the world I have been living in the past couple of weeks.

I could just add words to my MS to make myself feel productive, but throwing words at the page doesn’t fix structure or cadence or character motivation. Sometimes we write around the issue because producing words feels better than admitting the story is not working.

I have had days when I wrote pages that later had to be removed because I was forcing the story forward instead of stopping to understand what had gone wrong.

I have also had days when I wrote almost nothing but finally understood why a scene felt flat.

Guess which day helped the book more.

Not All Writing Leaves Words Behind

A character’s motivation finally clicks. A plot problem solves itself while you are making dinner. You realize the argument in Chapter Twelve is not about what the characters are saying. It is about what neither of them is willing to admit. You decide two scenes should become one. You recognize that the side character you created for one chapter is carrying the emotional heart of the book. You discover the ending you planned no longer belongs to the story you wrote.

Instead of adding more words that day, you sit and work through the questions, find the answers, and strengthen your story. None of that adds to your word count. But all of it is writing.

We often treat these moments like happy accidents, but they are part of the process. Our brains continue working on story problems long after we step away from the keyboard. All of this is productive, even if you are not adding words to the page.

Sometimes distance is not avoidance. Sometimes distance is where the answer lives.

Deleting Can Be Productive

One of the strangest things about writing is that progress can look like subtraction. You can spend three days writing a chapter and one hour realizing the book is better without it.

The tracker says you lost words. I'll admit it. I hate deleting words. Even after years as an author and developmental editor, watching my word count drop makes my stomach knot. It's irrational. I know the story is better. But it still feels like I've lost something. It causes a kind of anxiety that is hard for me to explain, because if I am being honest, it is not rational to mourn the loss of words in a novel.

But deleting is not always a setback. Rewriting is not always wasted time. Starting over is not proof that you failed. Sometimes the work did exactly what it needed to do. It showed you the wrong road.

Writers often talk about killing their darlings, but we rarely talk about the guilt that follows. We see the lower word count. We see the empty space. We see the hours that no longer exist on the page.

And we feel defeated.

But all my time as a developmental editor, countless hours spent reading through MS’s that are not mine, have taught me that not all words belong in the story. There are times I suggest pulling out pages of words, and I feel guilty when I do because I know how hard it is to hit delete.

Thinking Is Part of the Job

Writers are not very good at giving ourselves credit for thinking. Thinking looks suspiciously like doing nothing. There is no document to save. No box to check. No daily total to post. You can spend an hour staring at one scene and feel less productive than someone who wrote two thousand words.

But creative work is not linear.

Sometimes a fast-drafting day is possible because of three slow days that came before it. Sometimes the chapter pours out because your brain has already been writing it quietly in the background.

The visible work gets the credit. The invisible work made it possible.

But I have learned that hours of research, to make sure that the story is accurate is a much better use of my time than writing without the research and having to change it all later.

The Days That Look Unproductive

I have had writing days where I barely touched the manuscript. Instead, I asked questions. Why would this character make that choice? What is she afraid will happen if she tells the truth? Why does this scene exist? What changes because of it? What am I avoiding?

Those questions do not always produce immediate answers. They do, however, expose weak foundations. That matters.

A writer can generate a lot of words on top of a bad decision. The pages may look productive while the story becomes harder to fix. In the end the words need to be changed or deleted, and there goes your word count again.

Stopping can be the smarter choice.

Productive Does Not Always Mean Comfortable

Sometimes the least satisfying writing day is the one that moves the story forward the most. There is no thrill in realizing your opening chapter is wrong. There is no dopamine rush in cutting a scene you love. There is no impressive number attached to discovering that your protagonist has been making choices for the convenience of the plot.

But those realizations are valuable. They require honesty. They also require a different definition of progress. That kind of progress makes it easier to have a fantastic, word-adding writing day after because you have spent the time to figure out the foundation before you build it.

A Better Question

At the end of a writing day, I am trying to stop asking only one question: How many words did I write?

Instead, I want to ask:

• Did I understand the story better?
• Did I solve something?
• Did I recognize what was not working?
• Did I make a decision that will strengthen the next chapter?
• Did I move closer to the book I am actually trying to write?

Some days the answer will come with two thousand new words. Some days it will come with fifty. Some days it will come with a deleted chapter, a page of notes, or one sentence scribbled in the middle of the night.

That still counts.

Because words are evidence of writing. They are not the only form of it. So, before you call it a bad writing day, look beyond the number. You may have done more work than you think. And I am sure most of it was productive.

And while I finish this novel, I am going to try and practice what I preach.

What is the most productive writing day you have had that produced almost no words?

About Jenn Windrow

Jenn Windrow once attempted to write a “normal” book—and promptly bored herself into a coma. So now she sticks to what she does best: writing snarky, kick-butt heroines, broody supernatural men, and more sexual tension than a vampire in a blood bank.

She’s the award-winning author of the Alexis Black novels and the Redeeming Cupid series, where the undead never sparkle and the drama is always delicious. Jenn moonlights as a developmental editor, helping other writers wrangle their wild plots and tangle-free prose.

When not arguing with her characters or muttering about Oxford commas, she can be found binge-watching trash TV, wrangling the slew of animals that live in her house (husband and teenagers included), or telling herself she’ll only have one more cookie.

You can find her at jennwindrow.com or lurking on social media where she pretends to be an extrovert.

Photo by Linus Belanger on Unsplash