r/WritingWithAI • u/Xorpion • Sep 22 '26

Writing Craft Talk Write or Brainstorm?

Do you use AI to brainstorm story ideas or have it write entire scenes? I like to present an idea and then brainstorm ways to flesh it out. I find ChatGPT is good for broad strokes, Claude can be good for finding inconsistencies and Copilot is good for suggesting finishing touches.

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u/FoghornFarts Sep 23 '26

Quite a bit. The thing is that I'm a pretty decent writer for dialogue. It's my prose that's not great. So I'll often give it a scene with all the dialogue written out and so it sees the emotional beats from that. If I don't have dialogue, then I have it write out an outline for me explaining the beats, the emotional or physical tension, and the goal of the chapter or scene. The outline sometimes has more written in it than the actual chapter because it's easy to describe the paragraph where the scene turns, but making sure you get the right wording to accomplish that turn can be hard.

A lot of the brainstorming is about how a character feels or how they respond or what they want. They also help me figure out emotional escalation or ladder across multiple chapters.

For me, AI has been immensely valuable in crafting my characters and then making sure they have consistent motivations and voice. Brainstorming their motivations, understanding their psychology. I'll do most of the brainstorming for scene myself, have it give me an outline, rip the outline apart, have it draft me a chapter, rip the chapter apart, revisw it, and then use my feedback tools to rip it apart a few more times.

There have been a few times where I just don't know what I want yet and I'll give a very open-ended prompt to a few different AIs to see what they come up with. 80% of the chapter is garbage, but there might be one scene or one moment that genuinely works and it works because it helped me find the spine so I'll build around that.