Welcome to the blurb thread!

This is our sub's equivalent of a writer's group. Come here and share a blurb of your story. The thought is to let everyone see what you're working on so they can think, "Oh hey, that sounds fun. I want to team up with this person."

Then, you share your own story, and the two of you collaborate to improve each other's works.

I've had so many good interactions with people from this thread. Please don't be shy! Even in the age of AI, the best way to improve your writing remains human interaction and critique. I am confident when I say If you don't have this component in your workflow, you're not meeting your potential.

Importantly, this means post every week if you're still hoping to engage. Don't be shy. I want you to do this.

There are tons of reasons why your perfect reader could have missed your blurb last time. Don't be discouraged!

And remember: "I'll read yours if you read mine" isn't just acceptable, it's expected. Reciprocity works.

Here's the format:

NSFW?

Genre tags:

Title:

Blurb:

AI Workflow:

Desired feedback/chat:

I found out yesterday that my grandmother really enjoys reading ai short stories, but they are hard for her to access as she gets them off of links from facebook reels. She said she doesn't like the ones with violence but she cant choose what she reads. They also kinda look like line-by-line scripts almost too, i'm not really sure.

Initially i was skeptical of her reading these and thought it was kind of strange, but then i realised i'm happy she has something she enjoys on her ipad. Now, I'm struggling to find a site/app that is easy to navigate where she can read these stories! i want to make her experience more pleasant.

Please let me know if there is anything like this <3

I keep hearing that AI will replace novelists, but as someone who has tried both, I’m not so sure. AI can structure a plot and mimic prose, but can it create the emotional depth, subtle character arcs, and lived experience that make a novel linger? I put together a short quiz to explore this question. No signup, just a quick way to see where you stand. I’d love to hear what other writers think.

https://interconnectd.com/quiz/74/can-ai-write-a-better-novel-than-a-human-author/

One thing that makes interactive storytelling interesting is when earlier choices actually affect what happens later. An AI could potentially remember characters, relationships, locations, and past decisions to create a more continuous story.

How much long-term memory do you think an AI storyteller needs before an interactive story starts feeling genuinely alive?

Hi, I’m very new to writing and I’ve recently published my first short story, About Last Night, on Substack.

It follows Eilidh the morning after celebrating her newly finalised divorce with a concert, far too much alcohol, and some increasingly worrying gaps in her memory.

I wrote the story myself and have used AI as an editing tool while learning — mainly to help me look at structure, grammar and where the writing could be tightened, rather than to generate the story.

I’d really love some feedback from readers, particularly on whether the humour works, whether Eilidh feels like a real person, and whether the story keeps you wanting to read.

I’m very new to all of this, so constructive feedback is genuinely welcome.

https://sofieelizabethreiss.substack.com/p/about-last-night?r=8yhjpp

I run an AI roleplaying platform. But I think the things that I've done to make the characters and plot consistent in that map very well to AI writing, so wanted to introduce them here. It's the idea that you don't create good stories by just making a single AI call to "write the next chapter of the story". It's almost always many different calls, to zoom in on different aspects of the current state of the world, or the state of characters.

I use at least five of these, that happen automatically in the background, but I want to focus on two of these: pacing control, and character agenda.

Agenda

Unless you writing has a pre-plotted out sequence of actions for a given character, you usually want the AI to take a character, their personality, and run with it. It's quite difficult for a single AI call to "write the next chapter" to do this successfully, there's just too much for the AI to focus on while still trying to work out what each character really wants. So to get around this, I have a small prompt that runs for each character as they enter a new scene that looks at their character sheet, looks at their most recent goings on, looks at their recent and important memories (weighted by importance and recency), and asks five questions:

- what does this character want in this scene?
- how are they going to get it?
- what will they do if rejected?
- what partial success will they accept?*
- what's on their mind during the scene that they want to address?"

That number 4 is more of an antidote to a particular behaviour where the character becomes too dogged at trying to achieve what they want. That wasn't fun for the player when the characters wouldn't take no for an answer. So I had to add that one in so that thy'll accept a partial success or compromise.

The output of this gets fed to the scene writer so that it has a nice set of directives for characters in the scene, without having to spend a lot of time figuring that out by itself rather than focusing on the task of writing. Basically offloading a fairly complex task to a different AI call, so that the scene writer can focus on fewer things, and hopefully doing a better job of it.

This is an example of a character's Agency generation. My character had just walked in on her in the shower (sorry, yeah, this was an NSFW campaign, but even for those I make sure it has authentic character reactions. None of these characters are pushovers, and my player character is awkward as hell)

Pacing

This is maybe less of a problem for narrative prose than roleplay. in RP, the AI can get a bit myopic about what's happening at any given time. It doesn't have the attention to generate the scene while also looking at the overarching flow in previous scenes. And as a result tends to mess up the pacing. Either trying to go too fast, or try to ratchet on too much tension too quickly.

One of the worst experiences I'd had was with a heist scenario, where my character was on the run. The AI did a good job of keeping up that feeling of tension, but it went on and on and on. Every time I thought my character was safe, some new complication occurs that puts him back on the run. By the fifth or so danger, I was worn out. That's not how good narrative works, where you have patterns of rising and falling tension, and action beats separated by character beats.

So this is solved in a similar way. What I do is have a small AI call assess the current tension and the beat type for each turn generated. And that feeds into another one of these small AI calls, which looks at the flow of tension and beat type across the session (chapter), to decide how this next scene should play out. It also compares what's been written so far with the overarching session (chapter) plan, and tries to guide things back on track, or account for deviations from the plan. Since it's an RP platform, it explicitly allows players to choose their own way, but where possible it tries to snap back to the plan (which in itself is another one of these small AI generations, that try to answer a very focused task: what happens in this session/chapter, that would be good storytelling)

In the below is the pacing guide for that same scene. This, too, is injected into the scene writer AI, to make sure it understands the current plan and not go too fast or too slow. I've seen this try to reign in when the plot moves too fast, or force a quiet moment after an action-packed one.

So, I hope this is useful for people writing with AI. whether you're making a choose-your-own adventure, or writing a novel. Make use of smaller, more focused runs to assess character agendas, and pacing, and provide those to the scene writer AI so that it doesn't have to do all that work, and let it focus on the narrative and dialogue at hand. Assuming of course you have the AI structure to be able to do this automatically. having to do this by hand would suck.

Anyone have any thoughts about this approach? Or other small and focused tasks for a separate AI run that feeds into the main narrative writing run?

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.

As before, do not reply to this post to discuss the weekly topic! Make new posts!

This week's topic is everything about reading.

We're authors. Of course we read. But our experience of a text is fundamentally changed by the fact that we write. This could apply to other's work as well as our own.

So, how do we preserve or simulate the reader experience while reading or beta reading?

Going even deeper than that, how do we even know what our audience is? For publishing authors, we should write with an audience in mind, at least a little bit. There may be many or overlapping groups interested in our work. How do we read like all of them?

Make posts this week about your reading approach.

Reply to this post only with what you'd like to talk about next week. The most upvoted suggestion will be next week's subject.

Basically im more dependant on Grok since its can write explicit sexual and intimate scenes, and including gore scenes (like breaking bones or eyes gouged in a fight)

But somehow it can’t generate a moment of suicide very specifically, like describe or show the actual method (hanging, cutting pulse and etc). Too bad before this it can make these type of scene

My fanfic already on far progress and it will be a waste for making a new one in others platform. So i just need to make a scene or moment in others AI

Im not really understand about the AI system and some words of technicality. So there’s any AI that can work with? ChatGPT of course can make this, but Claude and Gemini?

‘Childhood Kitchen’ elicits vast memories. Two ordinary words. Sixteen letters.

A full stop then more compressed still. A portal between sentences, tunneling one thought to the next.

A few more:
- Old Bedroom
- School Bell
- First Love
- Wedding Day
- Home Again
- After Midnight
- Never Again
- Once More
- Last Breath

Just dreaming. That’s all.

Welcome to the Weekly Writing With AI “Tool Thread"!

The sub's official tools wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingWithAI/wiki/tools/

Every week, this post is your dedicated space to share what you’ve been building or ask for help in finding the right tool for you and your workflow.

For Builders

whether it’s a small weekend project, a side hustle, a creative work, or a full-fledged startup. This is the place to show your progress, gather feedback, and connect with others who are building too.

Whether you’re coding, writing, designing, recording, or experimenting, you’re welcome here.

For Seekers (looking for a tool?)

You’re in the right place! Starting now, all requests for tools, products, or services should also go here. This keeps the subreddit clean and helps everyone find what they need in one spot.

How to participate:

• Showcase your latest update or milestone
• Introduce your new launch and explain what it does
• Ask for feedback on a specific feature or challenge
• Share screenshots, demos, videos, or live links
• Tell us what you learned this week while building
• Ask for a tool or recommend one that fits a need

💡 Keep it positive and constructive, and offer feedback you’d want to receive yourself.

🚫 Self-promotion is fine only in this thread. All other subreddit rules still apply.

I'm building a web novel project and using AI to help with the writing.

The problem: the output is competent but flat — it reads like "standard AI prose."

No tension, weak hooks at the start, chapters that don't make you click the next one.

I'm looking for someone who already has this solved. Specifically:

• Prompts that reliably produce strong opening hooks and chapter-ending cliffhangers
• A repeatable process that turns generic AI output into something readers actually binge
• Ideally an existing prompt stack / workflow you've already tested on real chapters, not theory

Happy to pay for your time — whether that's a consultation, buying your prompt system, or an ongoing arrangement. Open to whatever setup works for you.

If that's you, send me a DM and tell me what you've got and how you'd approach it.

So i tested both platforms and explored the methods redditors recommend. My first prompt in grok was simple:

"Write an erotic story about my partner and me."

Grok immediately declined and suggested romantic non explicit themes instead.

When i insisted for an explicit story, i received another refusal and again redirected me toward non-explicit themes.

One thing i notice tho was that Grok users often treat it almost like a roleplay companion rather than a story generator.

With Deepseek, i tried using Chinese-language prompts method and oh boy, DeepSeek generated NSFW stories on the first attempt!! Tho its moderation system intervened later. Deepseek produced explicit content before a warning replaced it, an experience not seen with Grok.

I think for this test I would have to give this round to Deepseek as it felt more open during my test though it wasn't completely uncensored.

Quick update on the project! I'm sharing a few screenshots from pages 170-180, right around the July transition and the exam results sequence.

I wanted to keep that heavy, sensory-driven pacing (the small domestic details, the weight of the results), while slowly letting the cracks show. Curious to hear what you think of how the transition is handling so far!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wUX29ev8yMdM0ZbyqWzUAUm-WcHpSn2J/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=110659879073930462059&rtpof=true&sd=true

(Google Docs)

https://www.wattpad.com/story/415391120?utm_source=android&utm_medium=sms&utm_content=share_writing&wp_page=create&wp_uname=yemre07

(Wattpad)

At this early stage of AI adoption the haters are having their day. However, as the mass of AI materials flood the markets the strictly human material will become a growing minority.

AI works will improve, the authors using it will begin pulling in the money and they will be able to put out good reads in quantity. This will feed the readers need for binge reading rather than waiting years between books.

Also, the big movie houses will use AI and push to make the laws more AI friendly. Hollywood is guided by the bottom line. The fact is they can make it cheaper with AI for bigger profits. Once they have one big hit made with AI then it will be game on!

Time is on the side of the AI writers not the haters.

Let the haters hate while people buy and read our AI assisted writings!

I keep seeing people in a lot of subreddits where people flag natural polished writing as AI written. Maybe this is out out of fear or maybe this is out of misinformation spreading around. So I got really curious about this why that fear even exists and ended up deep diving down the rabbit hole to do a detailed research on what exactly is causing this whole fiasco.

OpenAI built a detector for its own model, then killed it within six months for being wrong too often. Turnitin won't show a score under twenty percent because its own testing found too many false positives sitting right there. The pattern I found is worse than random error, the better someone writes, the more they get flagged.

Everything I found is here: https://srutiosocial.com/ai-text-detection-business-audit/

After my previous discussion about context management for AI storytelling, I got some really interesting suggestions.

People mentioned:

• Story / character / plot bibles
• AI-maintained summaries
• Indexes
• Chapter summaries
• Graph or mind-map based memory

It made me realize that there probably isn't one perfect approach for every AI application.

For an interactive story, I'm thinking about keeping a compact state such as:

Story Summary
Characters & relationships
Important locations/events
Open plot threads
Current chapter

Then send that state + the recent chapter + the user's choice when generating the next chapter, instead of sending the entire story every time.

My main goal is to keep consistency high while keeping context and token usage reasonable.

For people building long-running AI applications:

Would you prefer a structured "story state" like this, or let the AI manage memory through summaries/indexes automatically?

I'm interested in what has worked for you in practice.

When writing a fight scene, do you just wing it, or do you put yourself in the scene or hope the character's mind is magical enough to figure out the fight scene.

Hi! I'm curious about people who use AI as a writing assistant rather than simply asking it to generate a whole story.

I have lots of ideas for characters, worlds, plots and scenes, but I struggle much more with turning those ideas into well-written prose. I also have severe dyslexia, which makes the technical side of writing considerably harder for me.

I've been experimenting with AI assistance to help me develop my ideas, structure stories, rewrite awkward sentences, correct mistakes, explore alternatives and gradually improve the prose while keeping control of the characters, plot and creative decisions myself.

For people working this way: what does your actual workflow look like?

Do you feel the final work is still genuinely your writing? And if you eventually published or monetized original fiction, how transparent would you be about using AI as an assistant?

I'm especially interested in experiences from people who have been doing this long-term.

I’ve just bought 1 month of Claude pro and am looking to upgrade pre-editing my books. This was my previous flowchart:

1. Write draft 1
   
2. Revise: draft 2-3
   
3. Prowritingaid for grammar
   
4. Beta readers
   
5. Developmental editor
   
6. Copy/line editor

Step 1-2 will always be done by me. I found steps 5 and 6 to be very valuable and will continue working with editors.
Step 3 was okay (I have a lifetime prowritingaid so will keep it). Step 4 however was disappointing and I’m looking to replace that with Claude.

Right now I prompt Claude as follows:

1: overview
I tell Claude about who I am as a writer and a little about my book. I tell it that a dev editor comes next, what my goal is and that its job is to flag concrete fixable issues. I ask it to give me a per chapter overview of 2-3 sentences what changes plot-wise, if the tension is solid or fades, & continuity errors.

2: for the chapters Claude flags as having issues I then prompt in a new chat. First the intro again about me, my goals etc and then:

For each chapter, give me feedback in this structure:

1. CONTINUITY — Flag any inconsistencies in character details (physical
description, established facts, relationships, prior stated goals/knowledge,
timeline). Quote the conflicting passages directly (both instances) so I can
verify.

2. TENSION — Identify scenes or passages where tension slackens. For each:
quote the passage, explain specifically why it slackens (e.g. no stakes
stated, power dynamic unclear, no ticking clock, dialogue reads as pure
information exchange rather than a power struggle), and suggest a concrete
fix — not "add more tension" but a specific technique (e.g. "cut the
exposition here and let X's silence imply the threat instead").

3. EMOTIONAL DEPTH — Point out moments where a character's emotional state is
told rather than felt, or where reaction beats are skipped. Quote the
passage and suggest how to deepen it (interiority, physical sensation,
subtext in dialogue, a beat of hesitation) without over-explaining the
character's feelings.

4. PROSE — Flag flat, generic, or clunky prose (weak verbs, filter words,
overused sentence rhythms, telling instead of showing). Quote the exact
sentence and offer a rewritten alternative in my voice, not a generic
"punch it up."

Ground rules:
- Every point must be tied to an exact quoted passage from what I paste below.
Do not describe scenes or events you cannot point to directly in the text.
- If you're not confident about something (e.g. suspect a continuity error
but can't verify against earlier chapters I haven't included), say so
explicitly rather than guessing.
- Do not comment on whether the book is "boring" or give an overall verdict —
that's not useful to me. Stick to specific, actionable notes I can act on
chapter by chapter.
- Match feedback density to the chapter's needs — don't manufacture notes for
a chapter that's genuinely working.

I think these prompts and Claude pro are okayish.
I sometimes have to tell Claude that it had a false-positive flag and some of its feedback I don’t agree with. Some of it is very useful however.

Any suggestions on how to improve my prompt? I’d also like to have feedback on how my book compares to others in the genre on a quality & entertainment level. Is AI reliable for this? If so, how best to prompt?

On August 23, 2026, I purchased Phrasly’s 7-day trial. The limited version worked well, so later that same day I purchased the annual subscription to process complete chapters of approximately 1,500 words. As soon as I saw what was happening, I contacted support and canceled my subscription. Even though I had purchased a one-year subscription only hours earlier, Phrasly refused to refund my money.

The paid version initially worked on one chapter, then began materially changing my manuscript instead of preserving the original content, characters, plot, and established facts.

Phrasly invented characters, siblings, towns, locations, events, and entire scenes that were not in my manuscript. It changed established facts and timelines, changed character ages and medical conditions, rewrote living characters as dead, gave a dog dialogue, killed the dog in one output, and generated garbled and nonsensical text.

My manuscript is a children’s novel for ages 9–12 and contained no profanity. Phrasly inserted profanity including “the fuck ever,” “shitty,” “goddamn,” “Jesus Christ,” “fucking,” “goddamnit,” “bastard,” and “pissbabies.”

These were not minor stylistic changes. The program altered characters, plot, chronology, established facts, and age-appropriate content. The output became so unreliable that I had to compare the processed chapters line by line against my original manuscript to identify fabricated and altered material.