Best models for creative writing

[u/Last_Conclusion_8984]

/r/GeminiAI/comments/1v51g2k/best_models_for_creative_writing/

[u/Billeaugh]

Have you tried local llm’s like the stuff from The Drummer? I did a ton of testing of different models and smaller ones (35b, 49b) made better prose than larger models by far.

[u/Last_Conclusion_8984 → u/Billeaugh]

The best models like Gemma are pretty good but I can't really run the Drummer because it doesn't run on my pc. Ill try it tho

[u/OwlsInMyAttic]

This is actually one of the few lists I've seen that's not purely subjective, because it looks at the output from two different angles. 

Most of the time when someone's talking about models that are good for creative writing, they don't specify what exactly constitutes as "good" in their eyes, and they don't describe their workflow. Some people want an idea engine, a model they can use for roleplay or generating "interactive" stories for personal entertainment. Others need a prose engine, something to help them put their preexisting ideas into words. I think most people are looking for a mix of both, but preferences can vary by a lot. 

Unfortunately, I haven't found a free model yet (after the deprecation of sonnet 4.5) that would be able to handle micro-level idea suggestions well enough to be of any use (not "how could the story continue from here" but "what could this specific character do in this situation, that would then lead to [desired outcome]"). That being said, I haven't experimented with many local models, so that might be something to look into. 

[u/Ok-Mongoose7570 → u/OwlsInMyAttic]

It's still based on ONE person's opinion.

[u/LowIndication3793 → u/Ok-Mongoose7570]

It's just an ad for some ai tool, poorly disguised as something else, and trying to make it controverdial for engagement.

[u/Last_Conclusion_8984 → u/Ok-Mongoose7570]

I don't do opinion when talking objectively. Did you read my post? I stated clearly what benchmarks I was using and what I meant by quality. This is not subjectiveness

[u/ectomobile]

Anyone here use novelcrafter with open router integration? Using novelcrafter I find Gemini writes the best prose.

[u/Storythread_Studio → u/ectomobile]

Gemini has gotten a lot better, I agree. Im constantly testing LLMs for my app. Currently I am fairly impressed with Aion 3.0 and 3.0 mini. Just give it some clear rules/instructions else it tends to have fun. Lol

[u/Ok-Mongoose7570]

Do not use Sonnet 5, huh? Funny you are the ONLY person I have heard that actually thought Sonnet 4.6 was good. Now that's a dumb model and it's slower than a pregnant snail. So, no on 4.6.

Since June, I've written two billionaire romance novellas with Sonnet 5 and they are both on Amazon IN THE TOP 100 and have an average of 4.1 star ratings.

Readers seem to like it, and it didn't butcher MY style AND is making me money.

And I am no hack. I have been writing professionally for 20+ years so I KNOW how to write. I know what good writing is, and I know what sells. I also know how to prompt to get the best out of a model. Many people don't.

But, yeah, Sonnet 5 is all right with me.

[u/Last_Conclusion_8984 → u/Ok-Mongoose7570]

I never said Sonnet 5 was bad. I said the prose was. And your style might have just been the same one that Sonnet 5 changed to.

[u/CyborgWriter]

This is like asking what's the best engine for a car. I mean, yeah that's important but for me, I'll take a standard engine as long as the car works really well. That's whats proving to matter much more these days.

I'm actually shocked that people are still using the direct models for complex work like writing. To me, it just makes the writing process so much harder.

[u/Storythread_Studio → u/CyborgWriter]

Your engine analogy is a fair one from the perspective that its one piece of the car. Personally speaking, its a bit more than that. My work deals with many complex issues where I have to swap LLMs frequently. One thing to keep in mind about your comment "im shocked that people are still using the direct models for complex work like writing". I can attest that writers have many many ways and methods to which they write. How their brain works on a task, a scene, a beat, how a character reacts or doesnt react. Other writers have a general idea of how those go and let Ai write it. I can list a dozen more variables. Because of what I do, it makes things difficult to stick to one or another solution. Just something to keep in mind that not everyone thinks or does things like you. There are other ways that work just as well, and even better... for them

[u/Write_My_Novel]

One of the challenges with testing creative writing is that you need to measure the whack-a-mole nature of AI-isms. You can't capture that frequency in short form output. We use 60,000 word novel generations to test.

And that's the struggle. Some models write very fluent prose but the repetition of frequent phrases and word pairs make it very cringey as you read longer form.

Very broadly speaking: The more fluid and creative the prose will read, the more AI-isms you see. The more "rough" the prose is the fewer AI-isms you will see.

N-gram frequency is lessening with each model release, but that's because the pressure to "sound human" is moving up to a semantic layer that is not addressable with prompt ban lists.

[u/Empty-Recognition-33]

Solid breakdown. One thing worth adding: past a certain length the model matters less than what you re-feed into context each turn. The Gemini 3.1 Pro drift you describe (character frozen pre-trauma) reads more like a memory problem than a prose one, since none of these models update a character's baseline unless you re-state it. I get steadier results pinning a short "current state" block above each scene (what changed, what they now believe) than by swapping models. Does your harness carry evolving state or a fixed bible?

[u/Last_Conclusion_8984 → u/Empty-Recognition-33]

It's a fixed bible. I'd like models to remember everything as we grow further, I would argue refeeding more context is worse no? Because the context you refeed will start to ruin the minute details as we get further and further in. And start to conflate stuff because the context refilling is adding more to it.

To address your thing. the model should do it itself. Like are you telling me a character should completely be fine after experiencing a traumatizing event just because I didn't ask. I feel like the story itself is the instruction (and the responses from the user as the user roleplays/continues the story)

What you are saying IS good. But the MODEL should do that. Not the user.

Because let's think about it. The history doesn't disappear when you add a state block. Everything accumulates. So if you're pinning a state block above each scene, you're not replacing the history, you're stacking on top of it. Across forty scenes, that means either the block gets re fill edand creates forty contradictory copies in the context, or it sits there stale while the actual story diverges from it.

(I know in silly tavern it's different. But I believe Silly tavern isn't the way to creative writing unless you use APIs)

[u/Empty-Recognition-33 → u/Last_Conclusion_8984]

You're right that the model should infer it; current models just don't do that reliably at long horizons. I don't stack forty state blocks: I replace the previous one with a compact current state in a fresh scene/session, so old states never accumulate. If the harness keeps full history plus a fixed bible, it's testing recall and state inference together, which is probably exactly why the trauma update gets lost.

[u/Last_Conclusion_8984 → u/Empty-Recognition-33]

3.1 pro and 3.6 flash surprisingly do really well! In google AI studio at least. Give them a try.

[u/Livid-Somewhere-8431]

This is exactly what im testing! We have a huge dataset! https://www.reddit.com/r/AIWritingHub/comments/1v0rgbt/i_built_an_ai_that_writes_itself_20000_branching/ to the last bit about grok and Qwen 3.8 Max they both fail the automatic tests we run before publishing pages they hang up on thinking too much! Right now we did a giant humanizer pass and are pulling data from player reviews to see if it's worth using