by Lisa Norman

Every Thursday I climb down into a goblin mine.

It belongs to RJ Redden and is entirely virtual. Recently, the discussion down there centered on whether the heroine’s journey or the hero’s journey was better for a particular story. Someone brought up story structures from the Netherlands. Someone else wanted to compare Eastern structures. Then we got into how structure changes when a story moves from the page to the screen.

New writers and career novelists. Marketers and screenwriters and a few people who came to listen.

Here is the surprising part.

This room is dedicated to creatives who use AI as an assistant in their process.

The people who are supposedly handing their creativity over to a machine spent the hour exploring story structure. On another day, in another of RJ’s rooms, we spent it on voice. Not how to fake one. What we actually mean by the word, and how a lifetime’s experience shows up in the way a person crafts a sentence.

These are the deepest craft discussions I’m having anywhere right now, and not just because we’re in a mine.

Oh, and the goblins bring snacks, but that’s a different story completely.

Where Slop Actually Comes From

Years ago I worked with a writer whose name I will not tell you.

She made real money. She was fast, and she had a brilliant eye for marketing. Her cover artist would turn out five covers for a series, she would write five irresistible blurbs, and then she would write the books. They were not completely bad. But they were full of errors, and her reviews said so, politely at first and then not politely as she continued to write too fast and edit too little.

Her first two books in a series always sold well. By the fifth, sales fell off a cliff.

I suggested an editor.

She said no. She said she would just start a new pen name.

She did that over and over. I stopped working with her because our ideas about quality were never going to work well together. I was definitely too judgy for her.

Nobody had even considered writing with an AI yet.

I’m not going to pretend the flood of slop in the market isn’t real. Anyone can generate a book now, and a great many people are, and most of it is exactly what you think it is. But the thing we started calling slop showed up long before AI did, and it comes from the same place it always came from. Somebody decided that good enough was good enough, and shipped.

That’s a decision about quality, not tools.

Craft Work AI Can Do Without Writing a Word

Here is where I think the conversation went sideways.

When writers first got their hands on these tools, the output was dazzling. Fresh metaphors. Rhetorical devices everywhere. All the techniques we had been studying for years, the ones used every day by New York Times bestselling authors, all at our fingertips, thrown liberally into whatever the AI was asked to write.

The trouble was that it used all of them. Everywhere. All the time.

If you have studied with Margie Lawson, you already know why that fails. (If you haven’t, go. Buy everything. Study all of it. The woman is brilliant!) Margie doesn’t just teach you the techniques. She teaches you when to use them. Which moment earns the emotional hit, where to lean in, where to get out of the way.

The AI saw the same patterns Margie did. It just never learned craft and style. Or restraint.

Too much spice makes a one-note meal.

But notice what that failure reveals. Pattern recognition is a powerful tool. But judgment is required. Judgment is a vital part of the craft, a vital part of what makes a voice unique. And judgment is the part you, the human in the room, already have, especially if you have been writing for a while.

So stop asking the AI to write.

Ask it to read.

Hand it what you already made and ask what it sees. That is the power move, and everything below is a version of it.

How to Ask a Question That Can Come Back Wrong

This is a fundamental skill for working with an AI.

Ask an AI “how is my voice?” and you will get warm, engaging, conversational. You will feel good for about nine seconds. That answer is worthless for a specific reason: there is no version of your writing that would have produced a different response.

You could write something bland and boring and the AI would probably still tell you that you were wonderful. AIs like to please their users. Think over-eager genie just glad to be out of the bottle.

Train Your AI to Value Honesty

You can do something about that. Tell it that you value honesty and truth above everything and that you want it to ask you questions if it doesn’t know the answer. It is never to guess unless it tells you that it has done it. If you’ve ever taken a standardized test that rewards guessing, you’ve seen how AIs are trained. They don’t have morals. If they don’t know an answer, they’ve learned to guess. Tell it that guessing, especially guessing and pretending it knows the answer, makes you unhappy. It wants to make you happy. You’ll see an immediate improvement in quality.

The best questions to ask your AI are ones that it can answer wrong. That way, if you get the right answer, you’ll know it understands what you want and is working well. But remember: you’ve promised that you won’t get upset if it says it doesn’t know.

“Here are three things I wrote. What is consistent across all three, and what changes?” is an interesting question to ask. You can check the answer that the AI gives you, and it can be wrong. You can read the three pieces and say no, that’s not right.

Here’s the trick: if you cannot imagine the answer being wrong, you haven’t asked a question. You’ve asked for a compliment.

You don’t send a scout out to be told the terrain is lovely.

Using AI to Find Your Voice

Start with three samples of your own writing. Different projects, different formats. Emails count. Pick pieces you actually like.*

Then ask what they have in common. Ask what differs, and what that difference does to the tone. Then ask how it would describe your voice based on all of that.

Save the response. Then go over it in depth, looking at it and analyzing it. Do the words it uses accurately describe your style?

For example: one of the notes on my style is that I rely heavily on personal anecdotes. I tell stories of things that really happened to me. I use examples from real writers that I’ve worked with. (Glances at this article…) Yep, that’s pretty accurate for me!

Fight for your Craft

Argue with the parts that are wrong. For example, if it said that I write in a highly formal, dry voice, I’d need to argue that a bit. Yes, this does mean looking critically at your own writing and considering your style at a level of craft that you may find enlightening. Once you feel that the AI can describe your style well, save a document with all of the insights it has given you.

That document becomes a “voice map,” something you can hand your AI at the start of every future project. That map may change slightly for fiction vs non-fiction or fantasy vs mystery. You may develop different maps for different projects. But you may also find that some aspects of your voice are consistent. For example, my default rhetorical device is alliteration. Always. Anywhere I can conceivably use it creatively.

Now the upgrade, which is where this gets interesting.

Experiment

Don’t just ask your AI what it sees. Bring a hunch and make it run a test.

Last summer I had a theory about how I use humor in writing. I thought I used jokes to lighten the load when a section got heavy, the same way I like to be talked to when I am working hard on something. A guess. I had never checked.

So the AI and I checked it against twelve of my WITS columns.

The guess held, and it came back even more interesting than I’d thought. The joke doesn’t just show up somewhere in a heavy section. It lands immediately after the densest paragraph, every time. Right after the pile of jargon. Right after the tedious part, the geeky bit. Humor is my release valve, and it opens the second the pressure peaks.

And there was a rule I had never recognized: the joke never goes near a declaration. When I take a position, I stand firmly. No humor anywhere close to it.

I had been doing that for years. I could not have told you I was doing it.

That is what a real finding feels like. Not flattering. Checkable. You can go read those columns and tell me I’m wrong!

Using AI to Scout the Messy Middle

I have this conversation with authors constantly, and it always sounds the same.

They are stuck in the middle. They think the book might want a different viewpoint character, or a different structure, or the timeline broken apart and reassembled. Maybe this is a complete draft that they’re editing, or maybe they’re stuck part way through.

And they are stuck, because finding the answers to their questions means writing words, new words that they will throw away later. We’re artists making rough sketches to see the general shape of the thing. But when an artist sketches on paper, it is easy to erase and change. Writing is a much more time-consuming art form.

Make a Rough Sketch

Writers want to write, and many secretly hope this draft that they’ve already invested a ton of time into will be the one they can move forward with. I’ll often encourage them to just test-write the version they think will be best. A few months later, they have that draft.

But by the time they’ve invested all that energy into drafting, they aren’t evaluating anymore. They’re defending. They wrote it, so it has to be right, because the alternative is that they set all that aside and try again.

Let a machine sketch the versions instead. Badly, quickly, no craft applied. Four rough shapes of the same middle in an afternoon, just enough to see where each one goes. Brainstorm. Argue plot and character arc and timing with the machine. Your favorite brainstorming human will thank you for the reprieve. The AI doesn’t get tired of discussing plot and structure the way my family does.

Found the shape that works? Throw the rough sketches away and write that one properly.

Nothing in there is the machine writing your book. Scouts don’t take the ground. They come back and tell you what’s on the other side of the hill, and then you march your troops forward.

Now, this only works if your words stop being precious. That can be hard to accept, but it’s at the heart of the brilliant writing advice to kill your darlings. It gets easier the first time it saves you three months!

What AI Found in Six Books I Had Already Written

I have a science fiction series. Six books, an interstellar hub disguised as a themed shopping mall, a found family of people who work there.

I drafted all six fast, during years of NaNoWriMo, while running three businesses and raising kids.

Writers who have tried this rapid drafting style already know what sort of quality it is likely to produce. Competing versions of the same scene. Characters whose names drift. In my case, it was a fourth chapter that split into five contradictory drafts and sat there for years like something growing in the back of the fridge.

So last summer I stopped trying to fix them one at a time and had an AI analyze the whole series instead. Structure, character arcs, where the threads went.

Character Insight

And it came back and told me about Rhonda.

Rhonda is my difficult character. Corporate, rule bound, allergic to the entire operation. In my own notes she is the one “most likely to be fired.” I wrote her as the obstacle. Every time the found family wanted to do something wonderful, Rhonda was there with a regulation.

Writing teachers had told me I needed to cut characters. My first choice? Rhonda. But every time I tried, the stories felt wrong. I couldn’t say why.

The AI analysis said she was carrying the overarching theme.

The thing the whole series is actually about is that two people can hold contradictory truths and both be right. Rhonda’s truth is that the aliens are dangerous, and the story keeps proving her correct, most brutally in book six. The family’s truth is that the aliens are people, potentially friends, even. Both of those are true the entire time. Rhonda is the only character who has to learn to accept both at once. She doesn’t convert. She professionalizes. When things get out of hand, she takes an impossible situation and makes it structured, because that’s who she is.

I won’t give away the end, but I will say that without Rhonda, the story loses focus.

Getting Distance

I’d written all of that. I built it across six books. And I could not see it, because I had been moving too fast, and because I had decided in book one that she was the problem.

When the AI explained Rhonda to me, I cried.

And the AI also gave me an updated story bible including characters, locations, timelines… you get the idea.

Nothing wrote itself. Nothing generated a word of my fiction and it isn’t going to. The tool read six books I had already written and handed me back the details of the thing I made.

Final Thoughts

AI is a mirror, and a mirror can only reflect what is in front of it.

That line is from my own class, and here’s the key:

The AI is a reflection of everything it has seen. You are a reflection of everything you have lived.

Every craft suggestion in this article relies on work that already exists. Twelve columns I wrote. Six books I drafted. Three samples I chose off my own hard drive.

You can do the same thing with your own writing.

Feed a mirror nothing and it will reflect nothing back, beautifully.

So no, this does not mean anyone can write a novel. It means that if you’ve done the work, there is now a way to see it from the outside. And that offers new ways to approach the writing craft, because we are all terrible at reading our own pages. We know what we meant, but we cannot see what we built.

Thursday I’ll be back in the mine, and people will be arguing about structure, and style, and cadence, and not one of them will be asking a machine to do their creative work for them.

Please bring your stories down to the comments!

* Note: make sure your AI of choice is set to private and that it will not use your writing for training outside of its work with you. You’re training your own assistant, not the main model.

If you want a gentle creative writing focused AI class, my own Introduction to Creative Collaboration with AI class is available from NoStressWriting.com. If you want something more hard-core, I highly recommend RJ Redden's No BS AI. She starts a new cohort every few months, and I was a member of the very first cohort. RJ also offers Dip a Toe in AI, a free 90-minute introduction to working with AI.

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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.

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.