Everyone’s afraid of AI replacing writers: I’m afraid of it hallucinating how many books I’ve written.
So, when I started digging deeper into Google’s AI Mode for search, I did what any curious author would do: I opened an incognito window and asked a simple question:
“How many books has Alicia McCalla written?”
The answers came back fast but completely different each time. A whole range of numbers pulled from who knows where.
That’s when I realized something important:
AI was sharing false information about me. And because it’s machine learning, it wasn’t “lying”—it simply didn’t have enough authoritative context to get the answer right.
That’s when my 20 years as a professional librarian kicked in.
The AI Overview
AI Overview mode was compiling and summarizing from whatever scraps it could find: fragments from Goodreads, Amazon, outdated interviews, old metadata, and even my Shopify store.
Then the anvil dropped:
I had never given the internet a definitive, authoritative answer to that question. And without a true source of truth, AI did what AI does and it filled in the blanks the best it could.
A lot of light bulbs went off for me. But the biggest?
The current debate we’re having in the fiction community about using AI for creativity is tiny compared to this. This issue is quietly reshaping our discoverability and our book sales.
This isn’t an “AI is taking our creativity” problem. This is an AI-without-our-authoritative-context problem.
And that distinction matters, because within the next 2–3 years, readers won’t just be searching Amazon or scrolling TikTok for their next book. They’ll be asking AI systems directly:
“What should I read next?”
“Who writes books like this?”
“Where do I start with this series?”
And if your digital author footprint isn’t clear, consistent, and discoverable, AI won’t be able to place you in those conversations.
Without context, AI search may retrieve you, but it may hesitate, hallucinate, or bypass you completely. Moreover, without authoritative signals, AI cannot recommend you. Without discoverability, you simply will not appear in LLM searches.
Authors who lack context signals such as blogs, bios, book lists, series pages, themes, story summaries, metadata anchors, won’t just be hard to find. They’ll be absent.
Or worse:
They’ll appear in AI Overviews in distorted ways like mis-categorized, misrepresented, merged with other authors, or hallucinated into something unrecognizable.
Why Fiction Authors Should Care (Regardless of Publishing Path)
Many authors abandoned SEO years ago when blogging felt irrelevant and social media took over. But AI Overviews have brought this issue full circle. They don’t operate on trends, virality, or follower counts.
They operate on:
consistency
clarity
definitional content
accurate metadata
stable author identity signals
And this affects every author, no matter how you publish.
Back to That Hallucinated Book Count…
If Google’s AI Mode can’t answer the simplest question about your career, it will not get your genre, themes, audience, tropes, storyworld, or series order right either.
This one question reveals whether your digital footprint is built for the future, or stuck in the past.
The Fix: Give AI a Single Source of Truth
Once my librarian brain kicked in and I saw how inconsistent the answers were, I didn’t debate AI or try to self-correct the hallucinations or “teach” the system anything from within AI Mode.
I did something authors have never needed to do before and I created an authoritative pillar post. One “book catalog” page that clearly spelled out who I am and how many books I’ve actually written.
That single post became the authoritative anchor AI Overview Mode was missing. And it too about 72-hours until the hallucinations were gone.
Your One-Step Assignment
If you’re concerned about what AI says about you, do this:
Open an incognito window on Google but use the AI Mode.
Ask: “How many books has [Your Name] written?”
If the number is wrong, or wildly wrong, don’t panic. Work on your discoverability footprint that works in 2025, not 2015.
And here’s the truth that many authors don’t want to here, if you don’t define yourself, AI Overviews will define you with whatever scraps it can find or hallucinate by filling in the blanks with made up information.
What did you find when you searched for information about your writing? Was it right?
If You Want to Go Deeper…
I created a step-by-step process for fiction authors on how to build a clear, discoverable identity AI Overviews can trust.
Because when your context is clear, AI finally gets your story right.
About Alicia
Alicia McCalla writes Sistas with Superpowers, blending speculative fiction, serialized storytelling, and entrepreneurial creativity into immersive reading experiences. Beyond her storyworlds, Alicia also shares practical tools for fiction authors navigating modern discoverability, including her Storyselling Superpower and AI Overview workbooks. Join her community of quiet writer rebels at: https://substack.com/@aliciamccalla
The process of writing fiction almost always requires the author to assemble a handful of the same key ingredients for each story. At the absolute, bare bones, stripped-to-the-studs level, the two things you need are characters and plot. We won’t be focusing on plot today, but as an overview, there are two broad ways to craft it: Plotting (that is to say, writing an outline) and Pantsing (which is just “writing by the seat of your pants”).
Writing characters is much more difficult to distill into a methodological binary, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try. Different people will have different names for their tactics, but for our purposes the two broad methods will be dubbed “Character Sketching” and “Character Discovery.” We’ll go into them in more detail shortly. For now, just know that my personal method is a combo that we’ll be calling “Character Improv.”
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though.
Sketching is for Plotters
It really is as simple as that. If you are the kind of person who wants a flawless, reliable roadmap for the whole story, you’re going to want two things: a complete outline, and a stack of character sketches. Just as the outline is at least a summary and at best a beat for beat blueprint for the story’s structure and events, the character sketches are note for note biographies for the “actors” who will be performing your piece. Think of them as the character sheet for a game of D&D. They can be as loose or as detailed as you want, but at the end of the day they exist to make sure you know, before you set foot along the path of the tale, who will be traveling with you.
Character sketches often include, but aren’t limited to: physical descriptions, character histories, quirks and traits, principles and goals, and interpersonal relationships. Putting together a character sketch can be loads of fun for many authors, as you get to play both police sketch artist and psychological profiler for the star of your story. And more importantly, once you’ve laid out a good solid sketch, you’ve got reference material that will keep your character consistent as you write their story.
This comes at the expense of flexibility. Stories don’t always go according to plan, and you can’t always predict who will serve the narrative best. If your sketch is too rigid, you may end up with a character incompatible with the changing circumstances. This isn’t a deal breaker, you can always iterate, but in the worst case this will lead to a great deal of redundant work.
This is why a lot of people opt for the opposite side of the spectrum.
Character Discovery
Having a map of the narrative isn’t necessary, or even desirable, for a certain type of writer. Those who like to sit down to a blank page and let the story unfold according to its own whims might decide the best course of action is to let the story craft the characters as well. This would be “Character Discovery,” and there’s really not much to it with regards to technique. Your cast of characters is as clean a slate as your plotline. As the needs of the story arise, the characters who can meet those challenges or who might have been shaped by that world step out of the fog, ready to have their fine details sculpted on the fly.
This is certainly a more exciting way to tell a story (for the author). Not even you know who is lurking behind each twist and turn. This means of character writing provides you with a naturalistic development of personality that’s difficult to beat. It can also be very efficient, because anything that doesn’t impact the story is never established, so no wasted effort is put into building out a history that isn’t explored.
But the method is hardly without its obstacles.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the consistency that is a strength of character sketching is a weakness of character discovery. You need to be diligent in keeping track of each new character and detail, or you’ll be at risk of contradicting yourself when the time comes to refer back to concrete details like hair color, number of siblings, or even name. (Let’s not talk about how, for several days, the published ebook for my first sci-fi story had the main character’s birth name change halfway through…). Essentially, unless you have a great memory, you’re going to want to end up with the character sketch that your Plotting counterpart started with. You also have to be disciplined with when and where you introduce new characters and assign new traits to them. It is oh-so-simple to end up with a conga-line of deus ex machinas, with just the right person showing up at just the right time, or our hero revealing a fluent knowledge of an ancient language that they just so happen to have needed right then and there. Revisions and retroactive foreshadowing are your friend here.
But maybe there’s a way to split the difference…
Character Improvisation
Like many authors, I didn’t start my writing journey with a full knowledge of the various methods used to craft narrative. (I guess you can say I “pantsed” my writing career.) Different books were written using different techniques. I’ve planned, I’ve shot from the hip, and I’ve started one way and ended another. These days I find myself pretty firmly in the plotter category for my longer fiction. Despite this, I try to allow for the maximum of flexibility, especially with regard to my characters.
When I’m plotting my scenes, I rarely prescribe exactly what a given set of characters will do in that scene, and almost never do I predetermine what they will say. Outside of the exceedingly rare instances of having a really good idea for a single line or a short exchange, the outline of a scene only tells me the direction the characters need to be heading as it ends. How the characters choose to get there is decided by the characters.
This is where you may note, “But Jo, you are deciding what the characters say. Isn’t that just you deciding how they’ll get there?” Yes and no. I like to write the dialogue line by line, each time asking myself “what would this character say in response to that?” These aren’t actors working from a script, these are performers improvising in the moment. (Hence “Character Improvisation.”) It’s not pure pantsing, because the framework of the scene and it’s place in the plot progression are established, but provides maximum flexibility on an intra-scene level. I find it gives me the fluid, natural conversation of a fully discovered character, while still starting from a place of structure and having a touch of guidance. And best of all, it allows chemistry to develop naturally.
Examples
Let’s look at some examples from my own writing.
When I was planning out Bypass Gemini (the aforementioned story where our main character switched from “Travis Alexander” to “Trevor Alexander” without me noticing.) I planned for there to be a snarky AI in a single scene. The gag was supposed to be that our hero thought it was a simple voice menu, but it was in fact a complete AI with human level intelligence. The outline for the scene called for “a few snarky comebacks due to the misunderstanding.” But as I wrote the scene, I found that the AI was really scoring some fun zingers. I was having loads of fun giving her better one-liners. Building out the main character by having him fairly quickly adjust and begin treating her like a person really gave him some depth as well. It made him feel like a better person, and gave her the opportunity to adjust her own opinion of him as well as her own expectations of how she ought to be treated.
The plot didn’t change much at all, but the AI became a much bigger part of it as I explored and experimented with her, letting her say what felt right at the time and having other characters act accordingly. By the end of the story I’d resolved to make her a staple character in the series from that point forward.
Similarly, when I was writing Free-Wrench (and more generally when I write any story), I didn’t plan romance from the start. This was an adventure story first and foremost, so it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that there would even be romance. Characters interacted, joked, argued, and generally bounced off each other as the scene dictated. And steadily, chemistry started to develop. Characters started flirting. It was never the plan, but these characters paired up nicely., those had too much friction. And entirely naturally, by the time I’d written two or three books, there was romance and drama simply because it was just how the characters had treated each other.
My story was able to surprise me.
As with the other methods, you have to be mindful of certain pitfalls. This basically provides you with all of the pros and all of the cons of each of the other methods. Letting the characters have long conversations can be fun in the moment but lead to rambling scenes if you’re not gently nudging them toward a point. A willful character can also wrench your story off the tracks entirely, something you’ll need to assess on a case by case basis if their new way is best or if you need to massage them into a compromise. You can also have a sequence of events plotted out in advance that, as the characters develop, will simply feel inappropriate to who they’ve become, and unwinding that can be a bit of a challenge. But at its best this method provides your audience with strong, vibrant characters who have agency and personality that’s hard to plan for while keeping the story’s structure and pace on target.
Chatting with your imaginary friends
One of my favorite ways to describe being an author is “having long arguments with your imaginary friends and transcribing the results.” Regardless of whether I start with a map of the plot or if I hack my way through the literary jungle with nothing more than a machete and a compass, I find that letting the characters develop on their own has always given me and my readers the best experience. Has it meant my planned boy-meets-girl character arcs have ended up in bitter, unplanned breakups three books later? Yes. But it has also elevated characters from bit parts to main cast, and made the act of writing as much fun as the act of reading. You meet some of the most fascinating people when you let your characters pick their own lines. Give it a try and maybe you’ll find a new star!
About Joseph
Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson.
When facing the daunting task of writing a fight scene, I think that most writers get hung up on the technical details. Research is a common procrastination method for most of us, and having facts and information can help us feel more confident in writing a scene we don’t otherwise feel comfortable writing. It is important to have your facts straight.
However, the truth is that the number of readers who care (and have the technical knowledge to tell) whether your character has their left foot forward when they should have their right foot forward is vanishingly small. I polled my martial arts club to get their opinions on common mistakes in fight scenes and, to my genuine surprise, nearly every single one said that writers get hung up on technical details and forget the experience of a fight.
I can’t tell you exactly what details you specifically need for your fight scene, and if you are writing scene with laser guns (or any guns), I probably can’t help you with details at all. So, let’s talk about what type of details are useful and what aren’t.
Big picture details are the most important. The overarching feeling of a fight is something that is often lost even when the nitty gritty details are correct.
What is and is not physically possible given weapons, armor, etc.
Be careful here because there are a lot of myths floating around. I firmly believed what medieval content creators on youtube said about dual wielding swords being book nonsense (because how on earth can anyone have the dexterity to pull that off?) until I watched someone spar with two swords at once.
What is the rhythm of this type of fight?
A knife fight feels different from a gun slinger show down feels different from a sword fight. Even different swords (saber, rapier, longsword etc.) all operate differently. How long does the fight take to start? Does it start slowly, or does it start with a bang? Is it over in one exchange, or do the opponents retreat and approach multiple times? Does it end with one fatal blow or is it death by a thousand cuts? I strongly recommend watching videos of people sparring or competing with the weapon you want to write about if you can’t watch a competition or performance person. Hollywood does not count.
Be careful with nitty gritty details.
Using too many technical terms that your reader doesn’t know can take them out of the scene. This goes for names of techniques and attacks as well as for details of armor and weapons. They don’t want to google what an uberhau or unterhau are. They probably don’t want to google the difference between a long sword, a broad sword, and a side sword either. Most people aren’t up to snuff on the intricate differences between types of swords or guns or polearms; keep this in mind.
Describing every single action in detail is going to bog down the pacing and get repetitive. This is a bit like world building in that you, as the author, need to know a lot more than what needs to be on the page.
Generally, details like the metallurgical composition of the blade or whether the mail armor is rivetted or butted are wasting valuable space in the middle of a fight scene. Unless it’s directly causing a problem, like the blade bending because it’s iron and not steel, it doesn’t need to be in this scene.
Part 3: The Experience of a Fight
So, if writing a fight scene is less about choreography and more about experience, what is the experience like? How do you, as an author who has never swung a sword or punched someone in a bar, write about that experience? The answer, of course, is research. Read interviews, watch videos, etc. I’ll try to give you a quick start guide here by painting the experience of a fight in broad strokes.
First, the most obvious thing: adrenaline. One of the reasons combat sports are fun is that your body isn’t amazing at distinguishing the difference between sparring and fighting for your life. You get an adrenaline surge every time. This will decrease over time, but it’s always there. If your character’s life is in danger, even if it’s something that happens often, they’ll feel it. Your character’s heart will be racing, their hands may be shaking, etc. Even if they have mental clarity due to experience, they will still have an adrenaline surge.
The second thing to consider are the other bodily experiences. This is a good place to bring in the visceral details that make a good fight scene immersive.
Physical exertion
In fights where guns (or gun equivalents) aren’t involved, there is going to be a level of physical exertion. Drawing a bow takes strength. Repeatedly swinging a sword takes endurance. Fighting is basically high intensity interval training. Your muscles will get tired, your breathing will get ragged, you will sweat.
Heat
If there is any sort of armor involved (and there probably should be), you are going to be WARM. Wearing gambeson is like exercising in your winter coat, and mail and plate are worse.
Pain
There is probably going to be pain. As my father told me, never draw a knife unless you are prepared to get cut. The likelihood of your hero getting exactly zero injuries in a close quarters fight is low. Injuries are a good way to add complications to your plot. Keep in mind that adrenaline effects how you feel pain; I once got a bronze medal in a long sword competition with a broken thumb, definitely in part due to adrenaline. But it still hurt.
Let’s think about our senses, what is a combatant perceiving?
Sight
It’s very common to hyperfocus on your opponent in a fight and not really see what else you is around, especially if you are not an experienced fighter. However, it will still matter how bright or dark it is. Metal objects (and a lot of weapons and armor are metal) also reflect light, which affects visibility.
Sound
This one is heavily dependent on the details. Battle fields are loud and chaotic. Swords clang when they interact, and the sound can be extremely loud in an enclosed space. I often wear ear plugs when practicing longsword in a small room. Gunshots are louder, loud enough to damage your hearing at close quarters. Helmets and fencing masks muffle sound. People make sounds when they fight: breathing, talking, laughing, and taunting. Bodies also make sounds when they are struck: bones crunching, fits thudding against skin, etc
Smell
People stink when they sweat, and battle fields stink worse. Armor smells, sometimes of sweat but also of oil or whatever else is used to maintain it. Metal on metal strikes of swords on armor have a distinct smell. Smell is one of the most evocative of our senses, don’t forget to use it.
Touch
In fencing, you learn to respond to the sensation of the opponent’s sword against yours. This is because the signal from your hand to your brain is faster than your eye to your brain. You fight by feeling. This sense is largely covered in the section above but also consider the following sensations: the weapon in your hand, armor on your body, sweat running down your skin, your hair in your face, and the heat of someone else’s body against yours.
Taste
This is often neglected and might not be the most relevant in this context, but never say never. The taste of blood due to injury to the mouth or the salt taste of sweat are both reasonable experiences in combat.
What on earth is your character thinking about? This is something that is both character specific and context specific. Here is a list of non-exhaustive suggestions:
The weapon or the opponent
Someone who is an inexperienced fighter or who is facing a new or particularly dangerous weapon is going to focus on the weapon. However, (at least in a sword fight) an experienced fighter is looking at the body of their opponent. Shifts in stance and core/shoulder muscles will give you more warning than the movement of the weapon itself. Whether you are throwing a punch or swinging a sword, the motion involves your whole body.
Distance
There are a lot of distance scales to keep track of in a sword fight (and other styles of combat as well). The most important, as the fight begins, are the distance between you and your opponent, the distance from which you can reach your opponent, and the distance from which your opponent can reach you. These are not, generally speaking, the same (especially if there is a difference in height). Playing with distance using footwork and subtle maneuvering can win a fight right off the bat. These distances depend on the weapons being used, the stance, the type of attack, the reach of the opponent, etc.
Tactics
Combat is rarely about brute force. Brute force and speed won’t get you as far as you might think, at least not against anyone who either knows what they are doing or who has a weapon. The mental/tactical component of fencing is so important that fencing is one of the Olympic sports with the oldest athletes. The average is around 28, but there have been Olympic fencers in their 40s. It’s also one of the few sports where you can start training at 12 or 13 and still make it to the Olympics. It’s like chess. It’s like a dance. For every action there’s a reaction. That being said, the individual exchanges generally move so fast that you don’t have time to explicitly think about these interactions; your body responds to what’s happening instinctively based on your training. Then you break and circle, and your active brain can process.
The terrain
We usually practice sports in gyms on smooth floors but fights in books can happen anywhere. Foot work is important. If you have proper structure, someone twice your size can’t move you, but if you put your foot down wrong, you’ll twist your knee and end up on the ground and needing crutches.
The surroundings
Are there people nearby they are trying to protect? Do they need to avoid a priceless artifact? Is there another enemy approaching? The surroundings could be a dangerous distraction or a valuable asset.
Not getting hit
This sounds obvious, but it’s something that is very different between a real fight and a combat sport. In competition longsword, it can be a good strategy to go for a two-point target and give up a one-point target. In a real fight, with a real weapon, defense has to come first. It doesn’t matter if you take your opponent’s head off if they stab you through the heart.
Surrender
Is this fight really worth dying over? Historically, we know that knights were essentially always ransomed, which meant if they couldn’t fend off their kidnappers, it wasn’t worth their life to fight back and they’d surrender. Similarly, bandits would attack merchants on the road, but they’d break and run if the target fought back to hard.
Summary
Writing a good fight scene is about so much more than getting the details right. Immerse your readers in the experience. Crawl inside your characters head. You’ve got this.
Have a question for an experienced fighter, ask Alex in the comments.
About Alex
Dr. Alex Jemetta (she/they) is an astrophysicist and fantasy author. When she isn’t at her desk with her two cats, she is practicing historical longsword. Her love for research, the night sky, and historical weapons seeps into her world building. As a disabled, neurodivergent, queer author, she’s passionate about writing classic fantasy stories from a non-traditional perspective.
If you want more in depth ramblings about fight scenes and swords check out her website or subscribe to her newsletter.
You can also find her on Instagram, twitter, threads, blue sky, and TikTok at @astroalexwrites.
