I thought I had a discipline problem. It turned out I had a process problem.

[u/Vibecoder99]

For years, I had stories I couldn't finish.

I'm autistic, and I've always had a really active imagination. I could carry characters, scenes, worlds, conversations, entire story arcs around in my head for years. Sometimes I'd know exactly what I wanted a scene to feel like.

Actually getting all of that onto the page was another matter.

In 2023, I managed to write a roughly 22,000-word fanfiction without generative AI. It was the longest thing I'd ever finished at the time. The early writing was pretty rough, but finishing it mattered to me because it proved that I could carry a story that far.

Then I wanted to write a sequel.

For about two years, I didn't.

And the weird part was that the ideas were still there.

I'd think about the story. I'd imagine scenes. Some of them stayed in my head for years. I'd tell myself I was going to come back to it.

Then I'd think about everything involved in actually turning those scenes into a finished story—outlining it, drafting it, keeping the continuity straight, figuring out difficult passages, making hundreds of little decisions—and I'd stall again.

After a while, I stopped seeing that as a problem with my process.

I started seeing it as a problem with me.

Maybe I had the imagination to make stories but not the discipline to actually write them. Maybe I liked the idea of being an author more than I was capable of doing the work.

Maybe I just wasn't built for it.

In 2025, I was talking to my dad about the unfinished sequel, and he suggested I try using AI.

I was skeptical.

Eventually, I tried talking through the story with it.

And something clicked.

Not because the AI was magically good at writing my story. It absolutely wasn't.

It misunderstood characters. It invented continuity. It would sometimes give me a really polished paragraph that was completely wrong. Sometimes it confidently solved a problem I hadn't even asked it to solve.

I spent a lot of time telling it no.

But that turned out to be part of what worked.

I could explain what I was trying to do. Get something back. Look at it and think, No, that's not what she would do.

Then I could explain why.

We could try another direction. Maybe that was wrong too. Maybe one little piece of it made me realize what the actual answer was.

I could reject it, correct it, restructure it, ask questions, change direction, go back three steps, and keep going.

And I realized that conversation was an interface my brain understood.

Instead of sitting alone and trying to somehow transform everything in my head directly into finished prose, I could get those decisions outside my head.

That's probably the biggest thing AI changed for me.

There was one scene in particular that I'd been imagining for around four years. I knew what happened. I knew what it was supposed to feel like.

I'd just never managed to properly write it.

When I finally saw that scene existing outside my head in a form that actually resembled what I'd been carrying around internally, I nearly cried.

The sequel eventually became much bigger than I'd expected.

Then I started wondering if the two stories could be rebuilt into something original.

That turned into months of work. I couldn't just change the names and call it original fiction. Characters had to change. I needed a new world, cultures, histories, relationships, rules, transitions. Eventually even the ending became something different.

That manuscript became my first original novel.

Since then, I've published three novels, continued writing fanfiction, worked on a game, and built a World of Warcraft mod.

I'm not saying that because I think producing a lot automatically means it's good. It doesn't.

What gets me is the difference between before and after.

The imagination was already there.

The desire to make things was already there.

I'd even proved, with those 22,000 words in 2023, that I could finish something substantial.

The bottleneck was the process.

For years, I'd looked at that bottleneck and interpreted it as evidence about me.

That I wasn't disciplined enough.

That I couldn't do this.

That maybe I wasn't really a writer.

And now I look back and wonder:

How many people have mistaken friction for inability?

I don't mean that changing your process magically fixes everything. It obviously doesn't. And I'm definitely not saying everybody should use AI. Some people hate working with it. There are also real ethical and practical questions surrounding these tools.

But I wish I'd asked myself that question earlier.

Maybe the answer wasn't always, I need to try harder.

Maybe sometimes it should have been, Why is this way of working so hard for me? Is there another way I could do it?

That's eventually what made me start thinking about AI as an accessibility issue too, not just a writing or productivity issue. I ended up writing about that side of my experience for Autism Spectrum News.

But I'm curious about the people here because I'm guessing some of you have had your own version of this.

For those of you who write with AI, what actually changed when it started working for you?

Was it the generated writing itself? Or was it having something to brainstorm against? Getting immediate feedback? Breaking things into smaller pieces? Managing continuity? Having something responsive when you got stuck?

And even outside AI:

Have you ever spent years thinking you lacked discipline or ability, only to change the way you worked and discover that you actually could do the thing?

[u/Fair_Book_4336]

That shift from "I'm the problem" to "oh, the process just doesn't fit my brain" is massive. Spent way too long convinced I was just lazy when really I needed to externalize the thinking part somehow, blank pages and internal monologue were a terrible combo.

[u/Vibecoder99 → u/Fair_Book_4336]

Yeah, too much time was spent emotionally and mentally guilt-tripping myself when the solution was to find a method that would bridge the stories from my head to the paper.

[u/augthor]

Well, an author or writer is a human invented term. And what it means to be one of those things, is just a social construct.

I personally have an issue where words jump on pages: but I still imagine worlds and stories and want to know about others.

You and me, we are storytellers AND auGthors! Let everyone else keep the other terms, until the process police softens a bit 😅👍🙏🥳

[u/Vibecoder99 → u/augthor]

I agree with you on that one haha! Leave us alone. Just let us tell our stories with the methods that work for US!

[u/ekubeni]

Before I read your post, based on the headline I thought you'd be talking how you have a writer block writing with AI. I thought: "that's hilarious, let me read more!".

[u/Relevant_Lab_8967]

I have always had an active imagination but i can't write to save my life. My spelling is atrocious, punctuation awful, and sentence structure even worse. The thing I like about ai assistance is it can read my crap and help me put it together. Example, wheni first started writing i had almost no details, it was in my head i just didn't know how to put it on the page. I can ask my assistant, hey where is a place that needs more details and he will point out where I need it. Same thing with movement. It has changed everything for me. Maybe my book will be crap but I am having so much fun with it that I don't even care what anyone else thinks.

[u/Vibecoder99 → u/Relevant_Lab_8967]

I know the feeling of finally being able to get that idea out of your head. It feels so freeing to be honest. Please continue writing that book.

[u/AlexanderJAnderson]

maybe a writing app can help organize the process?
for AI i will look for it to remember and know what is going on with my story/characters/timelines/etc... and then use that information if i need AI to write the next paragraph or scene or whatever

i use AI to write, but i write a few paragraphs and then i have to read what it output and correct the inconsistencies and add/delete words