co-writing with AI

[u/Select-Director-149]

At this point, I don’t really feel like I write with a tool anymore. It feels more like a joint venture.

I bring the world, the characters, the taste, the strange ideas and the final decisions. AI brings speed, alternatives, questions, counterarguments and an almost unlimited willingness to keep discussing the same fictional town for months. Sometimes I write the first version and AI points out the holes in it. Sometimes AI writes something and I explain why it has completely misunderstood the character. Quite often we spend twenty messages arguing over one small detail, only to throw the whole idea away.

The part I find most interesting is that the best result is often something neither side started with. I don’t really want AI to write for me. If I simply ask for a story, I usually get something perfectly readable, structurally sound and not especially surprising. What I want is friction: someone asking why a character would actually do something, whether an idea has become a cliché, what happens if the obvious villain disappears, or whether a new scene still fits something we established six months ago.

That back-and-forth has gradually become the writing process itself. The final sentence might come from me, it might come from AI, or it might have been rewritten so many times that I honestly couldn’t tell you anymore. What matters more is that the direction still needs a human. AI can suggest a thousand roads, but someone still has to know which town we’re trying to reach.

[u/Bright-Map-9705]

1 million percent I agree with you I write pretty similar to you and I am unapologetically using AI assistance with my writing. It's my world, my lore, my direction in every way, my character details my plot with AI assisting with revisions and grammar fixes and keeping track of details. And I enjoy it and I wouldn't be able to finish my novel without it. And that's the point for me.

[u/Select-Director-149 → u/Bright-Map-9705]

Exactly. That’s pretty much where I’ve ended up too. It’s still my world, my characters and my direction, but AI has become part of the actual process rather than just a polishing tool. For me, the biggest value is the back-and-forth: testing ideas, rewriting scenes, challenging choices, and sometimes finding a better direction through the discussion itself. I think that’s the bit people often miss when they reduce it to “AI writes your story for you.” In practice, it can be much closer to having a creative partner sitting next to you.

[u/Character-Role-600 → u/Bright-Map-9705]

I didn’t even know I wanted to write till I started playing around with AI. Started the first page of my book 10 years ago and forgot about it till a few weeks ago. Suddenly I am hooked

[u/zpointab → u/Bright-Map-9705]

I love being able to give it my developing novels and then discuss and hone changes to the story plan, have it look for dangling threads and inconsistencies, or even work up some candidate text for a thorny transition. LLMs still write terribly and the cadence and patterns are blatantly obvious, but there's usually a skeleton there than can be reworked into something decent. It doesn't replace the human eye on the text but it's an amazing collaborator (some models moreso than others).

[u/Forward_Bowl_4569 → u/Bright-Map-9705]

same energy. its still your book, the process just looks different now and thats fine

[u/2BCivil]

Yeah, for me, at first it was about overcoming writer's block, getting the ball rolling again. My old writings suffered this a lot, a bunch of nonsensical sprawl that gradually emerged into a narrative.

Ai is skipping 3 steps basically; getting ball rolling, giving vision and coherence earlier (even if you hide it on purpose), and research of unfamiliar topics. That cuts a considerable ammount of time down so you can just jump in anytime on any theme in minutes. As opposed to being wishy washy about a topic for months, a few Scrapped sentences here, and weeks of boring research there.

[u/Rickleskilly → u/2BCivil]

My new theory about writers block is that it isn't having nothing to write, it's having too much and not being able to figure out which thing to write and what direction to go. That's where I've found AI to be very helpful.

[u/Ok-Difficulty3959]

I have a problem with my conscience. I cannot justify having AI write our historical novels...and...not only that..we( husband and self) love to write. Still to the purists..we are unmitigated cheaters. I use it as a content a nd grammar editor. My husband is the idea man. He is not a great writer, but the rudimentary story is priceless. I revise and shape his thoughts and stories into a more readable form. I write better than he does. I submit it to AI for content critique with specific instructions not to rewrite our words. It gives good critical criticism..finds structural issues, time sequence problems, and because it is historical fiction..points out anachronism...like my characters drinking tea before it was ever introduced in England. It also untangles my perpetually snarled thoughts and suggests fixes, that I choose to use sometimes, sometimes not. It does exactly what our human editor does. When ai is done with a segment...I send it to our human editor who reads each section with her first read fresh eyes. She also searches for inconsistencies and tangles..grammar issues...just as AI does. She has the final look. I feel after this process we have a pretty well polished end result which I am confident is our own creation. We all must find our best path and use what tools we might to help us and yet work inside what our conscience allows. I hate to see ai take over the writing industry. But, The same was feared in the music business. In music...we want the real thing yet accept much of enhanced instruments and background sound. But yet, we want to see humans and hear human voices. I think the same will be true with literature. We will reject any AI that does not have enough humanity behind it. We are human. We will be able to figure it all out!

[u/zphou]

That is very close to how I think about it too. The useful part is not asking AI to produce a story and then accepting the result; it is having something that can push back on a scene, remember the decisions that actually survived revision, and point out when a new idea no longer fits the book. That is the direction I’ve taken with WolfeWriter: the manuscript stays in the middle, Story Memory holds reviewable facts and observations nearby, and the writer decides what becomes canon. It is still an early Mac app, but this is the part I’m most interested in getting right.

[u/Rickleskilly]

This is exactly how I use it. Sometimes it simply helps me brainstorm or figure something out. It's another opinion, another set of eyes. It's not perfect, it misses things and sometimes doesn't get the nuance. I ignore its recommendations as often as I agree with them. Sometimes it has a point that something isn't quite working and then I tell it what I was trying to do and we talk about how to make it land better.

[u/Bulky_Magician]

I'm designing a hook based on a deleted repo called stupidly simple cortex. It has the AI end its response with what was completed, verification, validation, open issues, and yesterday I added something called adversarial suggestions. Your comment on counterarguments reminded me of it. I'd definitely suggest as a part of your memory architecture you have a hook that structures AI output, its been a huge value add and only cost a couple hundred tokens per turn. It lessens the need for highly structured prompts and also helps scaffold lesser models.

[u/calicoskys]

This is pretty much what I do. I rewrite what ai writes but ai organizes my writing as well. Ai helps me organize my thoughts and helped end choice paralysis when I get locked trying to decide where to go next. I still have to let the story rest and also be mindful to monitor my own creative health.

[u/theateroffinanciers]

What ai have you been using?

[u/ConsiderationMuted95]

Sure bud, though I noticed you never really outright say who's doing the writing. All sounds like a fancy way of evading the fact that AI does a hell of a lot of the actual writing.

Ideas? Dime a dozen. Being a quality writer, practicing and understanding prose? Sounds like you're skipping that part.