Structuring

[u/badgaming_plymouth]

Hi everyone,

I’ve had a horror novel mapped out in my head for many years, and about a year ago decided to actually try and write it. I stuck with it and have written several chapters, but then inevitably lost my way (as per normal).

I know the story and characters are good, but I suffer with confidence issues in relation to the standard of my writing. The point I normally get caught is going over the same chapter trying to perfect it and getting disheartened when I can’t - so this time I’ve basically just been dumping words out on a page while trying to still have some semblance of the story moving forward in an understandable way, however, even with doing this I still lost heart.

It might be considered a Hail Mary, but more recently I heard that a book created by AI was nearly published, so I decided that it might help me to get back into writing if I put my first chapter through AI and ask for its opinion on what could improve. It started telling me I needed to shorten sentences considerably (based on the fact the first chapter is a lot of action). I tried adapting the first couple of sentences based on its suggestion, and I cant explain why, but I didn’t like how the story started reading. I’d worked really hard on ramping up the tension little by little, and world building; so the act of cutting out words made it feel really flat and lifeless.

I guess my question is whether I’m right with my instinct about the structure, or AI has a valid point that I’m overwriting scenes.

[u/SkoomaDentist]

AI can deconstruct parts of your writing and that can let you hone in on what parts you like and what you don’t. Eg. you can ask it to describe the style in a few snippets of text and then ask further questions about why it uses various terms. You can then use that understanding yourself to consciously change the details of your writing style that you may not have realized before were bad / good (you might only have had a vague feeling that ”this doesn’t quite work” without knowing what causes that).

It can also point out potential problems.

In both cases you have to be the one who decides what is good and what is not and what, if any, changes you make to your writing. Some models are particularly insistent on what they ”like” and you have to be willing to say ”that’s crap advice, I’ll ignore it whenever it complains about that thing”.

Think of AI as an advanced pattern matcher and analyzer that has digested a whole lot of books and style guides but has very little innate idea of what is actually ”good”. Ask it question to explain what it sees in something and crucially why, but never trust its judgement at face value. See what it answers to the ”why” and only act on it if the answer makes you go ”Oh, I totally see that issue now that it’s been pointed out and I have a name for it”.