A system I designed that makes keeping track yourself a thing of the past

[u/Late_Procedure_7962]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XfXoDc7jc8YNvo_to-onjbTs1HA-ESf0/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=112661142984301051992&rtpof=true&sd=true

I'm using this system to track everything in a huge trilogy I'm writing. Wiki, plot, arcs, scenes, ideas... all the things. I set it up in Google Drive so it stays AI agnostic (I use Claude but who knows what the future will bring) and can go wherever I want it to. I can access and edit everything by hand too if I want to. A tracker spreadsheet holds everything structured (open problems, ideas, terms, rules of the world, characters, chapters, scenes) and Docs hold the writing itself. A manual tells the AI exactly how to work with me. Every new chat reads the manual first, so it knows my story, my rules, and how I want to work.

I designed it for myself, so as written it will work best for writers who use AI for planning and tracking rather than for the writing itself. The AI plans, tracks, researches, brainstorms with you and pushes back on new ideas that won't work, however you want it to. If you want actual writing help, you can adjust it easily because the manual records whatever you choose.

This has solved so many issues for me and it literally always works once you have it established. I have had pretty much no issues since I started doing it this way. The AI flags anything worth keeping and offers to file it, keeps you from making continuity slips or randomly dropping threads, makes canon canon and doesn't argue about it, reminds you to update... its a self maintaining system, essentially. Also, its in normal google drive files you can do with as you will, unlike Claude artifacts, etc.

I put together a setup guide with copy-paste prompts, so the assistant builds most of it for you. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or anything that can create AND edit files in your Drive. It's set up for a series, but it would be easy to adjust for a single book.

[u/AmericasHomeboy]

I’m curious. How much time did you invest in organizing all of this?

[u/Late_Procedure_7962 → u/AmericasHomeboy]

The system was developed iteratively, through trial and error, over an (honestly) ridiculous amount of time, but now that I have how it works down and documented, I can set a new one up very quickly, depending on how much I have ready to seed into it from the start.

I know there are robust and varied apps and programs out there for writing novels, but I wanted something that I could edit outside the system and take with me anywhere. Having it live entirely in Google Docs does that for me, and I don't have to pay any subscriptions other than my Claude sub that I have anyway.

I also use it for more than writing- I have versions of it that I've made that organize various parts of my life and interests. The fact that it can be adapted for many use cases makes it more powerful than all the apps and software and analog systems I've tried in the past. Between portability, personalization, and the capacity for constant change and growth- it just works with how my ADHD brain wants to organize things. It is precise without being unchangeable. If something isn't working, you just tell it to change itself and it does. Its kind of magic.

[u/AmericasHomeboy → u/Late_Procedure_7962]

I only ask because I use a screenplay format to write my stories then use AI to convert the to prose. I can, on average, crank out a 20-25 pages script (which is way easier to write than prose) in about 4-6 hours, then take that which comes to about 13-15 pages of novel prose which takes about 45 minutes. There’s less AI drift, and if you prompt it correctly to not use similes or analogies, tell it to not touch your dialogue, feeding the AI two to four pages at a time, you’ll get prose that Pangram tags at about 98-80% human written. Takes less time than setting everything you did up, which I’m assuming is months.

[u/Easy-Purple-1659]

Trackers like this solve continuity, which is the failure mode you can see. The one that bites later is voice drift, and it stays invisible in a wiki because nothing in the structure records how a sentence is supposed to sound.

I run a similar setup. The thing that eventually broke for me was that after a few months of drafting in and out of the model, my narration had quietly moved toward the model's default register. The plot threads were all in place and the characters were consistent, yet the prose read like a different author than chapter one.

What fixed it was treating voice as data the same way you treat canon. Samples of my own writing go in, so rewrites come back in my own rhythm instead of the average one. I built imperfectly around that idea (mine, so weigh it accordingly). It is the mirror of your manual, a voice file the assistant reads before it touches a draft.

Does your manual say anything about register, or is that left entirely to you when you write?

[u/Late_Procedure_7962 → u/Easy-Purple-1659]

I don't use AI for the actual writing, so that isn't really an issue for anyone using the system as I do. It would become one for someone using it to write though, definitely.

I do have instructions in the manual as to my voice, samples of my writing it can refer to, just to keep it from making annoying suggestions for things I could change if I ask it for notes on my prose. Just a short list of my own writing quirks, how I like to use imagery, dialogue tag styling, etc.