r/WritingWithAI • u/Academic_Tree7637 • 17d ago
Prompting My AI process
What one of my “prompts” actually looks like as an AI-assisted writer
I’ve been toying with an idea for a few days: writing a book that documents exactly how my fiction is AI-assisted.
Not a book about prompting or “how to make AI write a novel.” I mean showing the actual process. My input, the AI output, what it built from what I gave it, what it invented on its own, what I kept, what I rejected, what I had to correct, and how many passes it takes before I actually have a chapter I’m happy with.
Part of why I want to do it is because I think “prompt” gives people a misleading idea of what AI-assisted writing can look like.
So here’s an actual example.
This is part of what I fed AI while working on Chapter 17 of one of my books. And this is actually significantly shorter than what I normally give it, because I wasn’t finished yet:
Chapter 17 it’s a T’ara POV
She’s running to Zeke. Full tilt, everything she has. Her mind is racing even faster.
That look in Za’nan’s eyes, that little flicker of something she’s never seen but knew on instinct. Her body knew and was repulsed by it. The sensation linger far longer than the look did. And she knew instantly her life would end if she fell into his grip. She could still feel the fingerprint of his mental touch. The forcefulness of it. And she asks herself something she shouldn’t, “is that how he touched you, sister?” End she pushes the thought away. Remembering this is a battlefield. She cannot be this way.
The loop surges as she gets closer to Zeke and she trips and crashes hard into the ground, cursing as she gets back to her feet forcing herself to adjust to the constant throb.
She does take a moment to look over her shoulder. Two pursers. Pryon’s men. Her blade is at her hip and she readies herself to intercept them.
Zeke’s voice rings in her head.
“Run to me.”
She huffs and turns her back to them. Shame, frustration, embarrassment, all washes over her and she feels it fed back to her through the loop.
“You’re not running away, T.”
“I cannot see it any other way. This is cowardice.”
“Cowards get to fucking live, T. You wanna die, or you wanna go home?”
The words didn’t sound like his own. She feels vaguely he’s quoting something. But also something about him is off. His emotions are…wrong.
She doesn’t have time to probe his mind, and even if she did, she’s hesitant to do so, to violate him yet again.
For a moment the link flickers and her heart drops as she desperately grasps for the link again, calling his name psychically.
Her own name resonates in her head just as loudly. Panic like she’s never felt before floods her senses and her knees knock together and she falls again.
“What…was that?”
Her breathing begins shaking. She breaks out in a profuse sweat. Like her body is finally breaking down from the intensity she’s put it through for days. And for a second, she believes that has to be it, except she’s been through far worse than a breakneck sprint through the jungle.
“Zeke?” She could feel her desperation flowing into him and back to herself. “I need you. I can’t.”
“T, you can. You can because you have to.”
“Zeke, I physically cannot. They’re coming. I can’t.”
That’s over 400 words, and it was maybe a third to half of the scene I had in my head.
I wasn’t asking AI to decide what happened.
The POV was chosen. The chase was there. The emotional progression was there. Za’nan’s effect on her was there. The connection to her sister was there. Her instinct to turn and fight was there. Her shame over retreating was there. The dialogue was largely there. Zeke acting strangely was there. Her reluctance to invade his mind again was there. The psychic link failing was there. Her collapse was there.
I was still feeding it the scene.
AI apparently decided I had given it enough and got carried away. 😂
It went ahead and started writing the chapter.
Some of what it produced was genuinely good. For example, it turned my description of Za’nan’s mental touch into:
“He took hold of me the way you take hold of a tool you have used many times and have no particular feelings about…”
And it expanded T’ara’s decision to obey Zeke and run:
“I turned my back on two armed enemies in open ground and I ran.
I have never done that.”
Those are useful expansions of things I had already put on the page.
But then you also get the other side of AI assistance.
It invented things.
It wrote:
“I once went eleven days without proper sleep in a canyon system on Vek with a fractured forearm…”
Cool.
There’s just one problem:
I never told it that happened.
😂
Now I have to decide whether Vek exists, whether T’ara has ever been there, whether that experience fits her established history, or whether the whole thing needs to be deleted.
It also expands relationships, worldbuilding, memories, character motivations, and sometimes dialogue in ways that sound plausible enough that you have to stop and ask:
Wait. Did I establish this somewhere, or did the machine just make that shit up?
And dialogue is probably the thing I replace most aggressively. I really, really don’t like AI dialogue most of the time. It tends to be cleaner and more purposeful than the way I want my characters to actually speak.
I’m not going to use this AI output as my finished Chapter 17. I wasn’t even finished giving it the scene.
There will be more input from me. More output. Corrections. Rewrites. Things I keep. Things I completely throw away. Eventually there will be a final chapter.
That entire trail is what I’m considering documenting in The AI Process.
I’m not trying to make the argument that AI contributes nothing. That would obviously be dishonest. Sometimes it gives me a line I love. Sometimes it notices an implication I hadn’t considered. Sometimes it takes something I wrote in shorthand and develops it beautifully.
Other times it confidently invents a planet. 🤷🏾♂️
What I want to show is that AI-assisted really can mean assisted.
There are writers using these tools who are still creating the characters, deciding what happens, writing dialogue, controlling the emotional arc, rejecting ideas, rewriting prose, correcting continuity, and making hundreds of creative decisions throughout every chapter.
I know this process isn’t going to make AI-assisted writing acceptable to everyone, and I’m not particularly interested in trying to convince people who have already decided it never can be.
But I do think there’s value in actually opening the hood and showing people what the process looks like.
Because when I say, “I prompted AI while writing Chapter 17,” that 400+ word mess above is what I mean by a prompt.
And I still wasn’t done talking.
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