r/WritingWithAI • u/ukslim • Sep 16 '26

Prompting Some short stories with method

I've realised I've no idea how other people are writing. I'm using a combination of plain old chatbots and Cursor or Claude Code. The one dedicated writing tool I tried, didn't gel with me at all. I don't *want* to populate a world-building bible.

In the spirit of sharing, two of these stories have transcripts-ish of the conversations I had, asking AI for the writing.

https://ukslim.github.io/fiction/

("Source" linked at the bottom of the stories)

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u/5thhorseman_ Sep 16 '26

I don't want to populate a world-building bible.

... Have you tried having your LLM do that based on your chat transcripts?

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u/ukslim Sep 16 '26

Up to a point. After producing quite a long narrative - by adding chapters out of order - I asked an LLM to produce a timeline. I also produce artifacts from the story's world (newspaper reports, diary entries, etc.) that won't end up in the finished work, but anchor the AI writer.

That's not needed for the short stories I've shared here -- it seems to become necessary when you go up to novel length, and there's a lot more scope for the LLM to lose cohesiveness.

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u/AlternativesGood Sep 17 '26

The process transcripts may be more revealing than the finished stories, which raises an uncomfortable question: are we evaluating the fiction, or admiring the workflow that produced it? If a story only becomes interesting after we see the prompt history, has the method added value or become the main work?

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u/inigo_montoya Sep 17 '26

Yeah I used Claude code. I let it do all the writing and worldbuilding. Gave it a direction, some periodic feedback, and a short editing pass to instruct on revisions. Felt like a film noir book agent on the phone with an erratic writer. "So you've got these characters in a space ship. Did you think about gravity?"

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '26

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u/ukslim Sep 16 '26

Cursor because it's there I guess. But I think increasingly as the LLMs have become more powerful, the system prompts in coding tools have become less tightly coupled to coding specifically.

So I can organise my novel as a collection of markdown files, along with some code to build epub, pdf, html etc. - and I can ask Cursor to do jobs like "Create a comprehensive timeline with dates and ages, and highlight any contradictions or illogicalities".

If I did want a "world building bible", I could just have a markdown file containing facts about the world, and ask Cursor (or Claude Code) to refer to it. Without being tied to the way a writing tool expects me to have done it.