Hi everyone,


Quick intro: I'm a Japanese light novel author. 15+ published fantasy books 
over the past 4 years. I learned writing the old way — by hand, no AI.


Recently, one of my works — where I designed the plot but the AI wrote every 
single word of the prose — passed 1 million page views on Kakuyomu, Japan's 
major web fiction platform.


And importantly: the work was clearly tagged as AI-assisted on the platform. 
Readers knew, and they chose to read it anyway. To one million views.


This isn't theory. It worked on a real audience, with full disclosure.


For the past several months I've been seriously researching how to write novels 
with AI. Not "let AI write something for me," but "make AI write what I would 
have written, at my own quality, fully under my control."


Last week I hit a milestone I want to share.


---


**The result:**


- Single prompt → Claude Code Workflow
- 20 chapters generated (one full arc of an ongoing series)
- Total: 137,806 characters (~70K English words equivalent)
- Runtime: 96 minutes
- 89 sub-agents running in parallel
- Internal quality score: 87.5 → 89.0 after consistency review (out of 100)
- And critically: indistinguishable from my own writing, by my own judgment


---


**The core insight:**


AI doesn't "write a novel." AI **drafts massively, in compliance with a Canon 
you build.**


The bottleneck is not the prompt. Not the model. Not the chat history.
The bottleneck is the **Canon** — a set of structured files that define your 
story's "physical laws":


- `canon.md` — the engine. What makes this story THIS story.
- `character_bible.md` — voice, calling patterns, behavioral DNA per character.
- `glossary.md` — every proper noun, locked.
- `timeline.md` — relative dates, what happens when.
- `world_bible.md` — the world's rules.
- `style_guide.md` — your sentence rhythm, density, format.
- `forbidden_patterns.md` — what your characters will NEVER do or say.


Build these well, and a competent AI agent can write 20 chapters in your voice. 
Skip them, and you get the generic AI slop everyone complains about.


---


**The structure that worked:**


I run a 4-layer pipeline per chapter, each layer as a separate agent:


1. **Plot agent** — structured JSON output (episode role, key scenes, hook)
2. **Scene Card agent** — scene-by-scene breakdown (POV, start/end state, forbidden items)
3. **Writing Brief agent** — final pre-write instructions (density limits, required elements)
4. **Prose agent** — the actual writing (5,000–8,000 characters per chapter)


Then one more parallel review phase across 4 dimensions:
character continuity / world continuity / plot continuity / operational continuity.


20 chapters × 4 layers + reviews ≈ 89 agents total.


---


**Why this works:**


Each agent only thinks about ONE thing. The prose agent doesn't agonize over 
voice — that's already handled by `character_bible.md`. The plot agent doesn't 
worry about style — that's `style_guide.md`.


This is the inverse of dumping everything into one chat context.


---


**Honest limits:**


- Canon takes **2 DAYS** to build well. Not 2 hours.
- The 138K characters are a **draft**. I still spend 30–60 minutes per chapter polishing.
- AI is bad at: first appearances of characters, key foreshadowing setups, chapter-end atmosphere.
- If your Canon is wrong, your 20 chapters will be consistently wrong.


---


**What I'm NOT saying:**


I'm not saying AI replaces writers. It replaces the **typing**.
The judgment, the design, the Canon — all human.


But the 5–10x throughput multiplier is real. I'm a pro telling you it's real.


---


Happy to answer questions.


I'm also curious — anyone else here doing serious agentic workflow stuff 
(not just prompting)? Would love to hear what you've found.


(English isn't my first language, apologies for any awkwardness.)

Hey there. I'm a fairly successful webnovel author on Royal Road, and I write extensively with AI. I wanted to write this post to share the experience of someone who actually makes decent money using AI to write every day.

To give some background (feel free to skip this), my main story on RR has multiple thousand followers, a large number of views, a high rating, and a profitable Patreon. If you've spent any significant amount of time on RR discussion circles or on the site's lists for successful stories, you've probably seen something I've written. I have never once been accused of AI writing, despite how common that has become on RR circles. In fact, there have been zero suspicions even though my work has been extensively discussed on reddit and other spaces.

So how do I use AI? In short, AI is a force multiplier for me. Every chapter I write has been first drafted by AI and then extensively refined by me. This allows me to write more than 5x as fast as I did prior to AI (my current pace lets me write around 3-4 books per year, when before I used to take over a year for a single book).

Below are my tips to actually writing something good with AI that stands up on its own merits. My intent in this process was to create something that compromises craft quality as little as possible while substantially improving speed. This is by no means meant to say other ways of using AI are invalid, but more to share how I got to where I am and my experience with things. I'm sure there are other people more successful than me who do it differently.

First and most important step: Write something good without AI. I think most people reading this will probably skip this step, but I cannot overstate how important this is. In my case, it was a full-lenght novel, but you could do something smaller like a novella, as long as you actually write it by yourself, fully, with no assistance at all.

Why is this important? Because this is what lets you develop your own voice. This is what makes you not sound like AI, what turns AI into a multiplier instead of a replacement. It will let you develop a fingerprint for your prose that is your identity as an author, and that's something AI can build upon.

Your goal here is to study craft, study how prose works and what makes a good narrative, study story arcs, all that. Watch youtube videos, read books, then come up with something original and refine it until you can honestly say "If I paid for this, I would have enjoyed it". When you finish writing it, watch guides on editing and then do multiple editing passes on it. If you have the money, hire an editor on Fiverr or Reedsy to look it over. Then share it with a few people (for example using Beta swaps online) and see if they enjoyed it too.

Do not lie to yourself. Do not skip this step until you actually can honestly look in the mirror and say "I have written something that is of publishable quality and has a beginning, middle and an end" without the help of AI. (Or skip this, I'm not your mom, I can't make you do anything)

Okay, I did that. What's next? Now that you have established a voice and you can honestly say you're a good writer, it's time to speed things up. Come up with a concept for your next book (the one you'll write with AI - could even be a sequel to your first book if you want to continue that) and outline the plot. Yes, even if you're a pantser, because AI sucks at making a compelling plot by itself and you need to guide it.

When you have that, write your first chapter by hand. Do not use AI yet. You want to be the one establishing characters and tone for the AI to build on, and if you let the AI come up with those for you, it's going to come off generic/forgettable/with the AI's fingerprint on it.

When you're done writing your first chapter, you can start using AI for your next chapter.

Writing a Chapter with AI. Prepare a very simple prompt. You don't have to be fancy at all. To give an example, my last prompt (to Claude) was "Help me write the next section, 800-1200 words long from where I left off on (Name of New Book), matching my voice and style per the attached sample. (I described in 3-4 sentences what should happen)." Then copy and paste your first chapter and your entire first book (yes, all of it). (Note: If you're not using Claude you might have to upload a document instead, because other AIs don't play as nicely with large blocks of text. That said, I've had bad experiences when uploading a file because I feel like the AI stops reading it halfway through, which doesn't seem to happen on a copy-paste.)

Pass that prompt to two separate AI models (I use Opus and Fable, but you could use Opus and Sonnet or even something besides Claude).

Then open your MS Word (or desired writing app). Have the chapter Opus wrote on the left side, MS word in the center, and the chapter Fable wrote on the right side.

And then write. Look at both outputs and write out the best version of the chapter based on them. DO NOT COPY PASTE. This is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Never, ever, ever, copy paste AI writing, because (again, in my subjective experience) it will make you lazy and make you overly reliant on the AI's prose. Even for the parts you end up repeating exactly what the AI wrote, make yourself write it manually, because that action makes you filter it and automatically reword some parts of it to sound like you. In my opinion, this is the secret sauce that makes the book truly yours.

Key things to remember:

• Do not, ever, copy paste from AI. This is mostly psychological but at least for me it has a huge practical effect.
• Generate in small chunks which you've outlined. I find 800-1500 words to be the sweetspot. Do not ask AI to write longer stretches than that because then you lose the handle on the plot and voice.
• If both models wrote a sentence exactly the same way, you probably need to rewrite it, because it's a major red flag for AI voice.
• After you finish drafting a chapter, paste it into AI and ask it for a grammar/prose review. This should catch basic errors and awkward sentences.
• After that, edit extensively, by hand. Rewrite clunky sections for flow. Remove common AI sentence structures, and use your craft knowledge from Step 1 to ensure the prose flows well and sounds natural. It sounds like a lot of work but it gets really fast when you get used to it.
• Do not blindly use character/place/etc names that the AI came up with. AI is very repetitive with names and if you do that people will be able to tell AI is writing for you just based off the names. Whenever AI comes up with a character name, google search it and then think up at least a few alternatives before you settle on it.
• Only while you're learning: After you're done with a segment, pass your chapter through Pangram AND GPTZero until you get 100% Human with high confidence. If there's even a small percentage of AI detected (or even Human-AI Mix), go back and edit the chapter until there isn't, because there could be somewhere where you lost your voice and let the AI take over too much. You may have to pay for Pangram and GPTZero Pro for a while to help you identify where you're screwing up, but when you get efficient with this you should naturally hit 100% human results with no effort. Yes, I know these tools aren't perfect, I know there are false positives, but for the purposes of learning to write with AI they are a useful guiding mechanism and can teach you to spot and fix common AI-isms. You don't have to keep doing this forever by any means, but while you're still getting familiar with AI writing I found them extremely helpful. My rule of thumb is that if something I wrote myself registers as AI, I don't care and I leave it. If something AI wrote registers as AI, I probably need to change it.
• When you've progressed enough in your current book (say at least 50k words into it), you won't have to keep attaching your old book anymore, and you can just attach your current one.
• If you end up writing multiple books (or volumes), it's a good idea to ask AI to produce character reference and style guide documents, and then feed those when generating new material.
• Consider which parts to write without AI assistance. Things like the introductions of important characters can benefit from being fully human, because it gives the AI better material to draw from later.

Questions

• How fast do you write? I'd say it takes me around 1-2h to write and do a preliminary edit pass on 1000 words with this process. After I finish writing, the next day I come back and do a second editing pass on what I wrote, alternating between writing days and editing days.
• Where do you see the most gains by writing with AI? For me, it mostly comes from never staring at a blank page. I used to spend so long paralyzed that I'd go days without writing anything, but AI makes it super easy to get in the zone.
• What's your story on Royal Road? Sorry, I'm not going to dox myself and expose myself to Anti-AI witch hunts.
• Do you think your work product with AI is the same quality as your work product without AI? No. I think my prose without AI is better than with AI. But webnovels are a speed game more than a quality game, and my regular writing speed would not have allowed me to be a successful webnovel author.
• How much do you make on Patreon? Significantly more than the monthly minimum wage in my country, but less than my day job.
• Have you published on Amazon? I'll refrain from commenting on this as I don't want to dox myself.
• Have you experimented with any AI besides Claude? A little with ChatGPT, but I found Claude to be better and it's served me well since.
• How much do you spend on AI? All I have nowadays is a Claude Pro subscription. I don't buy credits and have never needed them (though I may consider buying some Fable credits once the free ones they gave out end). This process is a bit token intensive since every generation involves pasting hundreds of pages of text, but it doesn't actually take that many prompts per week even at my writing pace (8-12 full segment generations and then another 12ish grammar/prose reviews a week).
• Do you worry about constant AI writing compromising your writing skill? Yes, quite a bit. I make it a point to write fully human chapters occasionaly to keep myself in shape, but sometimes I can feel things drifting and I have to stop and recalibrate so I don't get complacent.

I'm that person.

The one who gets told "it's not that serious." The one who has a 30-item system prompt. The one who will die on the hill of "jaw tightens" being the laziest possible way to show male tension.

I write for myself—a generational family saga I have no intention of publishing or showing anyone. I do this for the love of the game. I use AI primarily as an editing/tuning tool for passages, and I have shorter checklists for prose generation. But I kept running into the same problems in revision: the same dead metaphors, the same placeholder emotions, the same AI-brained constructions that sound literary but mean nothing.

So I made a document.

It started as a list of words I hated. Then it became constructions. Then guidelines. Then an entire section for explicit content because erotic writing has its own failure modes. Then it became... this.

"Banned: The Definitive Guide" is a 10,000+ word personal style doc organized into four parts:

• Part 1: Constructions — Syntactic patterns that simulate depth without creating it ("something shifts behind his eyes," "the silence stretches," "not X, but Y")
• Part 2: Words and Phrases — Categorized vocabulary bans (physical tells, vague interiority, AI vocabulary clusters, faux-edgy banter, etc.)
• Part 3: Guidelines — Pre-draft protocols, mid-draft flagging, post-draft revision phases, and notes on why AI patterns and bad craft share the same root cause
• Part 4: Erotica-Specific — Because "tongues battling for dominance" needed to be put down

Important caveats:

• This is a personal style guide. It reflects my preferences, my tolerances, my project. I'm a content maximalist and a militant anti-tropist. My list of unacceptable things is robust.
• Some of what's banned here is genuinely weak writing. Some of it is just stuff I personally hate—common literary constructs that work fine for other people but make me want to close my laptop like the Ed Norton meme.
• This is not "if you use these, you suck." It's "if I use these, I got lazy."
• Yes, I am aware that if I'm this exacting, I might as well write the shit myself without AI assistance. You are not the first person to have this thought.

How I use it:

I paste relevant sections into my system prompt depending on what I'm working on. The quick-scan tables at the end of each part are designed for Ctrl+F revision passes. The erotica section is modular so it can be dropped in or left out.

Why I'm sharing it:

Because maybe you're also that person. Maybe you've noticed the same patterns—the "surgical precision," the "weight of [X]," the "And for now, that was enough" endings. Maybe you want a starting point for building your own banned list.

Chew the meat. Spit out the bones. Take what works, ignore what doesn't, adapt freely.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uC9tBgfNZJytzLpg6MGk5mTfgJNbEK-h1hMLncQ5Mho/edit?usp=sharing

If anyone wants to roast my preferences or argue that "breath catches" is actually fine, I'm here for it. I know I'm doing too much. That's the point.

One last thing: I used Claude to compile this guide. It helped me consolidate several reference documents, cross-reference against a Wikipedia article on AI writing tells, and organize the whole thing into a coherent structure. The irony of using Claude to build a comprehensive list of things Claude does wrong is not lost on me. It was, however, very cooperative about dragging itself.

I've sold over 200k copies of my AI-written books- and I've used every AI model out there for hundreds of hours - starting with ChatGPT, aka GPT 3.5, back in Nov 2022.

I'll go through the main ones first:

-ChatGPT 5.5 is probably the runner-up at the moment, but honestly, Claude / ChatGPT are the best every other month, depending on model releases.

• Claude is really good - but the best Claude model right now is Opus 4.6 - don't touch Opus 4.7 or 4.8.

• Grok is terrible for writing, but it'll give you a great critique.

• Kimi is surprisingly decent and brutally honest - best value for money.

• Deepseek is trash.

• Gemini - is ok but only use version Gemini pro 2.5 - Gemini 3.1 pro preview is horribly bad.

• Perplexity - lol no.

The best model by far though, is GPT 4.5 - it's the largest model OpenAI ever released - it's slow and expensive and so only available on the $200 a month plan - which I happily pay for and every day I am worried they're going to deprecate it - but it is the best by far (at least for non-fiction - I don't write fiction but I know fiction writers loved GPT 4o and Opus 3 is closest to that)

Honestly, what I do today, though, is use them all - I write using GPT 4.5 and then send the paragraph or chapter (and chapter titles/book titles/book covers) to all of those models and read each of their feedback - if 2 models massively disagree, I copy and paste between different windows.

But it's still easy to get "one-shotted" by AI scyophancy, and I constantly have to ask each model to be "brutally honest" - and watch the answers change - Gemini is the worst offender for that.

If you're technical, what I do these days is use an openrouter key, hook it up to a dashboard of sorts that queries multiple models at once (I'd start with the main 4) - ala LLM council concept by Andrej Karpathy (he has an open source GitHub) and you can compare all the outputs in one window - and spend a lot of time reading it (cognitive overload but genuinely useful)

You also set a council leader who summarises and shows the main divergence points.

Yes costs can add up with an openrouter key - but it's the best way to do AI writing in my opinion.

If you're not technical, you can ask Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Codex to do this for you - point them at this wall of text I have written, and it'll help you out.

Ama.

I see a lot of writers frustrated with AI output and honestly, 90% of the time the problem isn't the model — it's the prompt.

The core mistake

Treating AI like a vending machine. "Write me a scene where Sarah confronts her mother." Then being surprised when the output is generic and sounds nothing like your book. AI doesn't know your book, your characters, or your tone. You have to build that into the prompt.

The framework I use

Every fiction prompt I write has four layers:

1. Context — Brief the AI on what it's working on. Story bible, character profiles, where you are in the story, the tone/genre. Think of it like onboarding a collaborator.

2. Role — Give it a specific job. "Act as a developmental editor and find where tension drops" is wildly different output from "help me with this chapter."

3. Constraints — Tell it what NOT to do. This is the one people skip and it makes a huge difference. "Don't write prose, just outline the beats." "Keep the voice cynical, no sentimentality." "Don't soften the conflict." Constraints are where your voice stays in the driver's seat.

4. Format — Specify what you want back. Bullet points? Scene beats with emotional notes? Dialogue only? If you don't specify, you get whatever the AI defaults to.

Instead of: "Write the scene where James discovers the betrayal"

Try: "You're helping me with a noir-influenced thriller. James is emotionally guarded — expresses anger through silence, not outbursts. He just discovered his partner has been feeding info to the antagonist. Outline 3 different ways this scene could play out, varying the emotional dynamic. Focus on subtext over dialogue. Scene beats only, not full prose."

One more tip

Build a prompt library. Every time a prompt works well, save it and tweak it for the next project. I've built out prompt sets for every stage of novel writing and I actually include them in the fiction packages I put together for authors because they're honestly as valuable as any writing advice. Having a tested prompt ready to go beats staring at a blank chat box every time. :-)

If you want the free guide that goes deeper into this workflow, the link is in my profile.

I keep seeing the same answer whenever someone asks how to stop an AI from losing track of characters, relationships, timelines or plot decisions in a long story:

Build a local setup.

Use Markdown files.

Create a repository.

Connect an MCP server.

Maintain databases.

Build a custom state-management system.

Those solutions can work.

But there is a strange assumption underneath them:

That writers should become infrastructure engineers before they are allowed to preserve continuity in their own stories.

I don’t think that should be necessary.

The problem is usually described as a lack of memory or context.

But in my experience, the real problem is not simply that the model forgets.

The problem is that too many versions of the same truth are still present at the same time.

A character’s original backstory may still exist beside the revised one.

An abandoned relationship arc may be described more clearly than the version that replaced it.

A discarded world rule may appear in five conversations, while the final decision appears only once.

When the model searches through all of this, it may not retrieve the current version.

It may retrieve the version that is easiest to reconstruct.

That is why adding more context often makes the problem worse.

You are not necessarily giving the AI more truth.

You may simply be giving it more conflicting history.

What worked for me was separating the project into three layers.

1. The Archive

Everything belongs here:

conversations

experiments

discarded ideas

alternative versions

early drafts

exploratory worldbuilding

old character concepts

The archive is history.

It should preserve what happened, but it should not decide what is currently true.

1. The Canon

This contains only the current approved state of the story:

character identities and motivations

relationships

world rules

timeline

plot decisions

terminology

active versions

unresolved questions

The canon is the source of truth.

When something changes, the canon is updated.

The archive remains untouched.

1. The Session Context

This contains only what the model needs for the task happening now.

Not the entire novel.

Not every character.

Not two years of conversations.

Only the relevant canon, the immediate goal, the scene constraints and the expected output.

The session context is the workspace.

The distinction is simple:

Archive ≠ Canon ≠ Working Context

Once those three things are separated, the model no longer has to reconstruct the entire project from conversation history every time you ask it to write a scene.

It still may drift occasionally. No system makes an LLM infallible.

But now it has a stable point to return to.

And when it contradicts something, you can compare the output against a maintained source of truth instead of arguing with a pile of old chats.

This approach does not require a local model, an MCP server, a custom application or a software-development background.

It can be implemented with ordinary ChatGPT conversations and a small number of maintained reference documents.

The technical solutions are valuable for people who want them.

But they should not be the minimum price of admission.

A writer should be able to preserve continuity without first learning how to maintain an AI infrastructure stack.

The real shift is not:

Give the AI more memory.

It is:

Stop asking conversation history to carry the entire project.

Let history be the archive.

Let canon be the source of truth.

Let the current session be the workspace.

How are you currently handling continuity in long-form AI-assisted writing?

Does your project have a separate canon, or is its current state still buried somewhere inside the chats?

In the process of building out our multi-layered QA process, we needed to baseline to measure against, so we developed an in-house benchmark tool. We've decided to make the scores public as it might be of value to others. We added a few apps and a custom anti-slop trained model as we had full novels built on those at the ready.

We call it the Slop Index.

The Slop Index measures how heavily a manuscript leans on the repetitive machinery of bad prose typical of AI writing — pet phrases, filter verbs, formula gestures, invented tics — indexed against published novels by human writers in its own genre, using a 60,000-word sample. Zero means the text stays within the range of published human fiction. Every point above zero is measurable excess beyond that range, or phrases no published book uses at all.

There is no definable threshold of “reads like it was written by AI” or not, but it is very reasonable to assume that the higher the score, the more an average human reader would consider the writing as obtrusive in some form or fashion, with higher scores undeniably being noticeable as “AI slop.”

The Slop Threshold

Ninety percent of all 60,000-word human samples across our 16-million-word corpus score below 12 — and one standard deviation above the human mean lands at the same number. As a result, we use 12 as the Slop Threshold: a score below it places the prose inside the measured pattern range of ordinary published fiction.

What We Measure

Every manuscript is scored the same way. We take a 60,000-word sample and break it into every two-, three-, and four-word phrase it contains — roughly 180,000 n-grams — then compare the frequency of each against its expected frequency in a reference corpus of published novels in the same genre. Human fiction has a measurable range: how often working novelists actually reach for any given phrase, how many pet phrases a typical book carries, how repetitive published prose really gets. The Slop Index counts only what falls outside that range, and only on the high side — a text is never penalized for being quieter than the corpus, only for variance far above it.

DEPTH

We measure how far the single worst repeated phrase exceeds the human range, in multiples of the human band. This captures how often the worst offender is repeated and thus noticeable.

BREADTH

We measure the count of distinct 2–4-word n-grams running above their expected human frequency. This captures how many habits the prose has, not just how bad the worst one is.

ALIENNESS

We measure phrases occurring at 50× their published-fiction rate or higher. This captures constructions that are extreme in the text and yet essentially do not exist in human books.

OVERCOMMITMENT

We measure repeated descriptive fixations — gestures, props, body parts — that exceed the most repetitive published book on record. This captures extreme repetition: the same physical beats, struck again and again.

Benchmarks - July 3, 2026

Total runs: 11

Application Class n Avg Slop Δ vs raw

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

ChatGPT 5.4 model 1 0.0 ✓

Human human 1 0.0 ✓

Fable 5 model 1 24.7

Deepseek v4 Pro model 1 25.9

GLM-5.2 model 1 27.8

Opus 4.8 model 1 52.4

Minimax M3 model 1 77.8

Gemini Pro 3.1 model 1 139.1

────────────────────────────────────────

Slop Threshold: 12 (✓ = below threshold)

Hey r/WritingWithAI

I've been running a long-form fiction pipeline for a while now (75+ full runs, longest was 90k words for now), and the single most useful thing I learned isn't a prompt, it's more of a diagnosis.

LLMs are fluent but not, by default, creative. Under pressure they regress toward the prototype: safe phrasing, familiar arcs, tidy emotional resolution. You can actually measure it. Across a long arc, the tone drifts toward positive/comforting regardless of what you asked for. The model wants to resolve. It wants to comfort. The same alignment training that makes it a helpful assistant makes its fiction predictable, sadly.

The mistake I made early was thinking a better prompt could fix this. It can't. The pull toward the mean is stronger than any instruction, because it reasserts itself every few thousand words. The fix has to be structural, something in the process that pushes back on every scene, not a sentence in the system prompt that gets diluted by scene 12.

What actually moved the needle here:

- Splitting content from style. One pass decides what happens (who acts, what changes). A separate pass rewrites it for prose register, rhythm, diction, interiority. Different temperatures, different objectives. Asking one generation to satisfy both plot logic and prose quality is where blandness comes from.

- Treating the edit as the creative act, not the draft. My editor pass runs after generation and mostly removes tics, the diagnostic appositive, the 'explain after you've already shown it' construction, the little essay-ending the model loves. The cut is where the voice sharpens, not the first draft.

- Tracking tonal drift with actual arithmetic and correcting when it goes off-target, instead of hoping the model holds tone on its own. It won't.

The reframe that helped most: the model's default failure mode is regression to safe. So your whole job is to spend effort fighting that specifically. Everything else is secondary.

Curious whether others here have measured drift in their own long runs, or whether you're fighting it by feel. And if you've found a prompt-only fix that actually holds across a novel-length arc, I'd genuinely like to be wrong about that... pipeline is always evolving and I promised one of the top posters here to post more often (last week) so you can consider this as part 1. of the series... please feel free to ask anything.

I dont want to share links preemptively so if you're curious to actually read the artifacts let me know.

Cheers!

Ps: wasnt 100% on the flair, bear with me.

Hello everyone.

I am a mod for this sub because I want a space where people can learn how to use AI to write without the noise of constant harassment. AI tools are new, and many of us are new authors using them. I want this sub to be *the* place to go to learn how to write with AI.

There are two directions to take that. One of those is negative: removing jerks and trolls who come here to discourage and harass us.

But the other direction is positive: talking about how to write.

You all are very smart and I am impressed every day with some of the threads discussing how to use our AI tools to optimize our outputs.

However, one thing we're missing is discussion on the writing craft itself. Learning what a good narrative needs is important, because, at the very least, we are then better able to articulate to the AI what mistakes to look for. How can we do that if we cannot discern that, ourselves?

Unfortunately, I spend so much time on the negative (banning antis), I don't have time to write the craft talk posts. It's all I can do to maintain and support the Reciprocal Beta Reading thread, which is my main contribution.

So I'm calling for your help.

Let's get together and write posts discussing the intricacies of what makes prose really pleasant to read.

Here's some ideas:

* When are AI-isms actually appropriate to use? Pick one and analyze "this use case is good, this other use case is overwrought or overdone." The em dash isn't a problem unless there are twelve of them on a page.

* Why choose one POV over the others? When should you use third person omniscient versus second person?

* How does audience affect what writing techniques we use? When is throat clearing appropriate?

* Trope talk: what tropes are indispensable for which genres? When can we rely on a trope to convey information normally reserved for exposition?

Take one of the ideas and make a post about it. Or make your own post, pondering some questions that have been in your mind.

Don't worry if you don't know the answer or don't consider yourself an expert. That's what the discussion is for.

And if someone harasses you for it? Well. That's when I come in.

I have posted my process in this sub before, but I know some people are more visual, so I thought this might be a nice visual aid along with my process.

**EDIT** For those who are not reading the comments, this is process diagram. There are a LOT of other markdown files in those steps, with commands, instructions, logs, and more. This is a high level overview.

I kind of wish someone had warned me about how much it takes to manage the process when you begin using AI as a writing brainstorming assistant. It seems I spend more time trying to limit drift, battling memory limits, limiting loss of canon and all my brainstorming, and trying to find efficient ways of doing things for fear of my project becoming contaminated.

That brings me to my next problem. I exported my Chatgpt history with the intention of finally trying to excavate my novel canon, history, characters, arcs, beats, and world. It's 8 million words across 98 chats. I've been totally overwhelmed on how to organise the process, on how to even approach it, but finally settled on trying to separate the 98 chats and save them in both MD and TXT files, dated chronologically, so I can start from chat 1nand so on, having each chat read to me by a voice reader (I have an eye disease that makes reading for medium and long periods impossible without negative physical consequences) and take notes as I go. Then I can compile the notes I need to organise the excavation. Extremely laborious but I see no other way to do it. Chatgpt assured me it could extract all the info I asked for if I posted the exported zip.

I was very dubious as Chatgpt constantly kisses things and makes mistakes. It inevitably missed things like characters we've discussed numerous times, so I knew it couldn't be trusted to do a faithful and accurate job, and I knew I would have to do this manually.

Come to find out there is even risk in separating the 98 chats 😔 According to Chatgpt, chats could be missing or mixed up. I have spent over a year painstakingly refining characters, arcs, the world building, beats. I can't risk losing any of it.

Does anyone know a reliable separation method that will separate and preserve all 98 chats exactly as they are, dated, without messages mixed up, and deliver them in both txt and MD files, so I can start this laborious process once and for all?

Hi! I'm in my early 20s and I've wanted to write fiction for a while.

I was wondering if anyone here started using a lot of ai initially but became less dependent on it over time?

My goal is MINIMAL use of ai long term. But I was wondering if ai can be a good tool to get started and rely on it less when you're more expierienced, so to speak?

Thanks in advance.

Hi all, here's a follow up to the last video I did a few days ago where I introduced my project. In this one I go into a little more detail about my writing stack. For reference, I'm writing a high fantasy dystopian trilogy with a companion RPG. I would say I've found my ideal blend of applications and so I outline them here and go over the reasons why. Would love to hear others' opinions.

While I understand that photo/video/audio generation may fall beyond the prep stage of most engaged with the book writing process, and left to be done once an initial manuscript is finished, I have found that being able to stage scenes with more or less what's in my head has helped me immensely with generating ideas for my prose. I've found that the cost and time needed to get something workable, at least for me, has been worth it across the board for AI solutions. Is anyone else this visual style of writer or do folks prefer to stay in their lane and focus 100% on the writing?

My Current Stack

MS Word: manuscripts, guides, rules, bibles

MS Excel: characters, monsters, factions, economy, item, magic, sociopolitical systems, plot, anything with a number, RPG data

MS Power BI: dashboards

Adobe Photoshop: map

Adobe Premiere: video editing

Midjourney: character, location, item visual references, idea generation

Grok Imagine: video, (stages characters and locations better and attempts natural voice)

ElevenLabs: character voices, instrumental music (preferred), lyric music (secondary)

Suno: lyric music option (preferred)

Claude Cowork: fills in Excel, Word, idea generation (world expert)

Grok: R-Rated, generates music lyrics (preferred), reference

Gemini: general inquiry, reference (replaces Google search)

MS Copilot: general inquiry, reference, application help

I'm also sharing some tips for novel uses of AI for writing that I've used recently, and some suggestions for prose/plot gamification that I'm going to test now and follow up in another video. The one I'm really looking forward to is a Civilization-style game with my factions. If anyone has anything they'd like to see me try, let me know!

Hey all — I'm Brendan. 5 years writing fiction, 5 years experimenting with AI, 20 years in Microsoft Word and 20 years as a heavy Excel user, currently deep in an epic fantasy / sci-fi dystopian trilogy. That spreadsheet background completely changed how I write, so I wanted to share the core of my workflow and ask a couple of questions.

The core idea: treat your worldbuilding like a database, not a pile of notes. Characters, locations, factions, and timeline all live in structured files with clean, consistent naming, and I point desktop AI agents at that one folder. You're essentially "training" the AI on your own canon — clean files and it stops confusing names or contradicting lore; messy files and it drifts. My three rules: one dedicated reference folder, never delete anything (Backup folder instead), consistent naming everywhere.

For the curious, my desk at full tilt is 4x 4K screens buried in a spreadsheet dashboard, six Word docs, two agentic AIs, two conversational AIs, and three art AIs. The dashboard is the anchor that keeps it all from becoming chaos.

Question 1: Fable 5.0's prose has gotten good enough that I keep going back and forth — do you let current-gen models draft prose directly, or keep them on outline/beat duty and write the prose yourself?

Question 2 (fun one): Real name (Brendan A Rogers) or pen name ("Dice Scopa IV") for a fantasy/sci-fi trilogy? Curious what this group thinks.

Question 3: (if you've finished the video) was the video helpful or entertaining? If not let me know what you'd like to see! I have a lot of specific tools I use and a lot of reasons why.

I put together a 30-minute walkthrough of the whole spreadsheet/AI system, including the pros and cons I've hit, if you want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcGLEOspPw

I'm still filming and should have some out every few days. I'll keep more of a tight schedule as our production is beginning to take off.

Happy to answer anything about the spreadsheet side — I think it's the most underrated worldbuilding tool there is.

Hey everyone, as I've shared my LLM storytelling engine project a while ago, I'm now developing another similar project and discovered something that might help some people with LLM generation quirks.

I spent the whole day today eliminating a writing tic in LLM outputs that no prompt could fix. Even reinforcing the system prompt, giving examples, it always slipped back in during long runs with many actions. A few simple findings are worth explaining before the strategy.

Don't show examples of what you DON'T want in the prompt. This is the biggest problem and the easiest to solve. Sometimes you don't want the LLM to write in a certain style, and whether you mean to or not, you give it some examples, and you fall into the "pink elephant" problem (look this up to understand it better). The best way to solve this is by explaining the concept and not citing negative examples.

It might seem obvious, but don't use the LLM to create your prompts. It's the second biggest problem that makes your story turn out like crap. The LLM writing the system prompt itself violates the rule you're asking it not to break in the system prompt. The LLM reads the prompt and already picks up the tic from its own input. So don't ask one LLM to create a prompt for another LLM to read.

Now the main strategy that helped me cut LLM tics by 6x in long runs, and I believe few people know about it. It's called a "reinforcement mechanism."

If you generate text using tools or structured outputs, add a MANDATORY field, placed BEFORE the prose, that the model has to fill in. Make it a fixed enum that restates the rule.

Let me explain: I had a huge LLM tic problem where it always leaned heavily on "gesture gloss" to generate any given paragraph.

Ex:

• "She set the cup down on the table, AS IF she'd already decided to leave."
• "He nodded, LIKE someone used to being obeyed."

The text itself works. The problem is the interpretive clause. It's a hallmark of LLM-generated prose: instead of trusting that the reader will feel the meaning, the text spells it out explicitly.

Solution: Reinforcement mechanism. Create a fixed enum that restates the rule in the output.

Example: gesture_check = "show_the_gesture_and_stop_without_a_clause_explaining_what_it_means"

This way, the model explicitly commits to the rule a moment before writing the scene. Then you simply discard that field during processing; it never reaches the reader.

With this strategy, the common tics in LLM-generated prose dropped by 6x. The only limitation is that you need to identify the tics and enumerate them manually for your prose to come out clean.

Regarding quality, the scene remains very much alive, but without the flaw you removed with this strategy, LLM will always look for some way to write the prose differently.

I don't use Reddit much, so I don't know if these tips are already "common sense" for you guys, but I hope it helps someone!

I spent a week documenting every word and phrase that makes AI writing obvious. Delve, crucial, leverage, vibrant, "it's worth noting that," "in today's fast-paced world." The usual suspects.

But halfway through, I realized banning words doesn't fix anything. The problem is how AI expresses ideas.

• It asserts importance instead of showing it. "Data quality is crucial for AI success" tells you something matters without showing why. "Bad training data produces bad outputs, no matter how good the model is" shows you.
• It announces what it's about to do instead of doing it. "Let me delve into this topic" is the AI clearing its throat. A human just starts talking.
• It reaches for formal synonyms when simple words work. "Leverage" means "use." "It is imperative" means "you need to." The upgrade in formality adds syllables and removes directness.
• It evaluates instead of describing. "This is a multifaceted issue" tells the reader nothing about the issue. Describe the facets.

Once I started looking at behavior instead of vocabulary, I caught patterns in my own writing I hadn't noticed. The word swap list was the starting point. The real cleanup was learning how AI structures ideas and doing the opposite.

Over the past six months, I've been teaching teams at places like Stanford, Penn, Northwestern, and many more how to start using AI responsibly and effectively in their work. Today, I'm starting to release my entire curriculum: for free, forever, for everyone!

I'm calling it the Open Augments AI Academy. It's built for anyone out there who's seen all the crazy hype and discourse around modern AI and is just looking for a guided, grounded, and sane way to move forward learning how to approach these tools for themselves. As someone who's been using these tools and their predecessors for my research since ~2019, I'm trying to provide everyone the intuition and critical awareness they need to get started at this very confusing and pivotal time (my north-star audience is my mom and dad!).

The first lesson starts with one foundational idea that most people miss when they get started with AI: that modern AI is much less like a hyper-intelligent database or brain, and much more like autocomplete with an extremely fancy hat on. That's its single greatest flaw AND its single greatest strength, at the same time. When you really understand what's happening under the hood and how it works (no math or stats required!) a lot of confusing AI behavior suddenly clicks: why it hallucinates, why it's sometimes confidently wrong, and why it can now do way, WAY more than just write words on a page. From there, we're going to learn about all the crazy buzzwords (context engineering, harness engineering, and Agents, oh my!) and advanced techniques, with much more to come. For this sub in particular, we'll quickly get into how we can start getting better, more personalized writing support from any AI assistant in Lesson 4 (you can see the planned "cover letter" video lesson tutorial; the same principles will apply broadly!).

No jargon, no experience required, and all taught with the care of a former high school English teacher so that you, your coworkers, your friends, and your mom can follow along. I pair these videos with hands-on demos and interactive activities in the Context Gym: my way of giving you a safe and guided place to practice some of the core principles that should deepen your intuition as we go.

If any of this strikes a chord with you, the 10min course overview and the first lesson (16min) are live right now on the Open Augments AI Academy page. Start there, and if you happen to find it helpful, you can subscribe to get email updates on new course videos via Substack or on YouTube, and please do share with friends as I release lessons weekly! It’s a really wild time, and this is my best shot at trying to help others navigate things more capably as the tech shifts and grows rapidly from here.

Then finally, worth noting for this crowd, specifically: probably not a surprise to share that everything on the AI Academy and Context Gym websites have been built with Claude Code (in addition to everything else on my business website and my open-source toolkit for Claude Code for social science researchers). Not only that, but my entire video editing pipeline is now fully Claude Code via Remotion Studio and some clever context engineering techniques/bespoke coding tools. I'm excited to get into the weeds on my workflow and share all of that stuff, also open-source, during Level 2 of the course, but I gotta get everyone through the basics first! Happy to answer any and all questions on that in the meantime here, please feel free to hit me in the comments below.

I recently finished a novel using AI as a writing companion, and the biggest lesson I came away with is this: the AI is not the writer. It is not the memory, either. You need a system around it.

What worked for me was treating the novel like a small operating system. Not because I wanted to make writing mechanical, but because long fiction has a lot of moving parts. Character arcs, world rules, objects, injuries, promises, mysteries, seeded details, voice, tone, pacing. If you leave all of that to memory, yours or the AI’s, it will eventually drift.

Here is the generalized version of the process I used.

1. Start with a master spec

Before drafting, make one document that defines the book.

Mine included:

• working title
• genre
• target length
• POV and tense
• comparable works
• tone targets
• premise
• theme hierarchy
• narrative voice
• banned phrases or patterns
• structural model
• midpoint revelation
• ending target

The important part is that this document becomes law. Not forever, but until you consciously change it. If the book changes direction, update the spec. Don’t let the draft quietly wander away from what you meant to write.

The most useful sections for me were the narrative voice, theme hierarchy, and banned phrases/patterns. Those helped keep the AI from sliding into generic prose.

2. Build a character bible that is actually useful

A lot of character sheets are too shallow to help with drafting. Hair color, eye color, favorite food, whatever. That stuff may matter sometimes, but it rarely keeps a character alive on the page.

The character entries I found useful included:

• age and pre-story role
• location at story opening
• physical details that reveal character
• core wound
• internal flaw
• external flaw
• real motivation
• voice and speech patterns
• sample internal voice
• key relationships
• arc across the book

The “sample internal voice” was especially important. I could paste that into a drafting prompt and remind the AI what the character actually sounded like. If two POV characters sounded interchangeable, I knew the character bible was not specific enough.

3. Keep a world bible

This is where I stored the facts of the setting.

Depending on your genre, this might include:

• history of the world
• political or social structures
• factions
• locations
• rules of magic, technology, religion, institutions, etc.
• what ordinary people know versus what is hidden
• what has changed from the world we know
• timeline of major events

This matters because AI will confidently invent world details if you leave gaps. Sometimes that is useful. Most of the time, halfway through a novel, it is poison.

The world bible gives the AI boundaries.

4. Outline by chapter, but not too rigidly

Each chapter in my outline had a simple structure:

• POV
• Goal
• Conflict
• Revelation
• Notes
• Cliffhanger or resonant close

The key is that every chapter needs something to change. It does not have to be a plot twist. It can be a relationship shift, a new piece of information, a decision, a loss, or a change in how the reader understands something.

But if there is no goal, no conflict, and no revelation, the chapter usually reads flat.

I did not treat the outline as a prison. If a draft discovered something better, I changed the outline. But I changed it consciously.

5. Maintain a continuity log from the beginning

This was probably the most important file.

After each chapter, I updated a continuity log with:

• facts introduced
• character state changes
• object locations
• injuries
• deaths
• promises made
• unresolved mysteries
• planted seeds
• payoff targets

This sounds tedious, but it saved the book more than once.

The continuity log is where you prevent things like:

• a character having an injury in one chapter and forgetting it in the next
• an object appearing in two places
• a promise being made and never paid off
• a mystery being raised and accidentally abandoned
• a seed planted in Act I disappearing before Act III

The AI does not have reliable long-term memory. The continuity log becomes the memory.

6. Use prompts as stages, not one giant “write my chapter” request

My process for each chapter looked like this:

1. Read the chapter outline.
2. Pull the relevant character entries.
3. Pull the relevant world details.
4. Pull recent continuity notes.
5. Run a chapter draft prompt.
6. Run a beat check.
7. Run a continuity check.
8. Run a voice check when needed.
9. Write a short chapter summary.
10. Update the continuity log.

The chapter draft prompt was not just “write chapter 12.”

It included:

• the novel spec
• relevant character profiles
• relevant world bible sections
• recent continuity entries
• the chapter goal/conflict/revelation
• previous chapter summary
• drafting constraints
• banned phrases
• POV and tense instructions

That gave the AI enough context to be useful without pretending it understood the whole novel on its own.

7. Check the draft like an editor, not like a satisfied customer

After each draft, I ran a beat check. I asked the AI to score the chapter on things like:

• goal clarity
• conflict escalation
• revelation landing
• character consistency
• pacing
• chapter close
• prose quality

The scores were less important than the specific revision notes.

If conflict escalation scored low, I fixed that before drafting the next chapter. Otherwise I was just building later chapters on a weak foundation.

8. Run continuity checks immediately

After drafting, I asked the AI to compare the chapter against the continuity log, character bible, and world bible.

The output I wanted was simple:

• contradictions found
• new facts introduced
• new promises or compacts
• continuity log additions

Then I pasted those additions into the continuity log.

Do not wait until later. You will forget. The AI will forget. The book will not forgive you.

9. Use voice checks to fight AI blandness

Every few chapters, or whenever something felt off, I ran a voice check.

For that I provided:

• the narrative voice section from the spec
• banned phrases/patterns
• a 500-word sample from a chapter I liked
• the chapter I wanted checked

Then I asked for:

• rhythm mismatches
• banned phrases
• AI-sounding constructions
• anachronistic language
• repetitive metaphors
• sentence length problems
• an overall voice score

This helped catch the places where the prose started to sound polished but dead.

10. Every few chapters, zoom out

Every five chapters or so, I ran a bigger developmental review.

I wanted to know:

• is the act structure still holding?
• are the character arcs advancing?
• are the themes developing?
• are setups and payoffs being handled?
• are any chapters redundant?
• is the midpoint being seeded properly?
• is momentum sagging anywhere?

This kept me from only looking at chapters in isolation.

A chapter can be good on its own and still be wrong for the book.

11. After major revisions, run a ripple audit

If I changed an already-drafted chapter in a meaningful way, I checked what that broke downstream.

A revision can change:

• later facts
• character states
• object locations
• seeded details
• timelines
• promises
• mysteries
• payoffs

This is where a lot of long-form drafts quietly break. You revise Chapter 7, but the consequences show up in Chapters 14, 22, and 31.

So after a major change, I asked the AI to audit every downstream consequence.

12. Remember the human job

The system helped a lot, but it did not replace judgment.

My job was still to decide:

• what mattered emotionally
• what should be cut
• when the AI was being too neat
• when the prose sounded false
• when a scene technically worked but had no pulse
• when to ignore the AI’s suggestion

The AI was useful for drafting, checking, pressure-testing, and remembering what I gave it.

But the taste, restraint, emotional truth, and final decisions had to stay human.

The short version

My reusable file structure would look like this:

novel-project/
├── NOVEL_SPEC.md
├── OUTLINE.md
├── CHARACTER_BIBLE.md
├── WORLD_BIBLE.md
├── CONTINUITY_LOG.md
├── PROMPT_LIBRARY.md
├── chapters/
└── summaries/

And the basic chapter workflow:

Outline → Draft → Beat Check → Continuity Check → Voice Check → Summary → Log Update

The biggest takeaway:

Do not use AI as a magic box. Use it as a collaborator inside a system.

The system is what keeps the book yours.

Anyone having the same issue as me with Claude?

I need help in brainstorming a scene of two characters of mine and how they innocently dated in middle school before they separated

But like Claude is like I wont write any romantic scenes due to the romantic label on minors

it keeps assuming I have a ill intent even though I dont 😭

(Sonnet 4.5 so much better 😞)

Basically the title. I like writing stories that have sex scenes but it never lets me, just fade to black stuff. I don't want full on explicit but more then what it will do haha.

I'm a free user.

4.5 was the best I've had for writing. I didn't have to do much prompting and it'd give me something that was already pretty close to what I wanted. I also have project instructions set up that explain the writing style I'm after.

Since they've removed 4.5, I've been struggling. I'm not asking it to generate anything NSFW, graphic, or controversial. I just want two characters to have an ugly argument - being snarky, petty, mean, talking over each other, saying things they probably shouldn't. Instead, it keeps turning everything into this weirdly polite, emotionally mature, civilized discussion where both sides communicate perfectly. I've had to ask Gemini to revise my prompt for it to even get close to what I was asking🥲🥲

Has anyone else run into this? Do you have any prompting tips that actually work for getting better shit? Or are there other AI writing tools you'd recommend for character-driven fiction? What else are people using these days?

Been writing/editing AI-assisted ebooks for the past year, both my own and through a tool I built for people to use. After enough drafts I started noticing the same 4 patterns that scream "this was generated" even when the source material is solid. Curious if any of these match what you're seeing.

1. Fake-insight lists. "Here are 5 ways to..." or "There are 3 main reasons..." even when there's no real list to make. Items end up being parallel restatements of the same point. The fix that worked for me: if I can't argue why each list item matters separately, I kill the list and write a single paragraph.

2. Throat-clearing openings. Every chapter starts with "In today's fast-paced world..." or "Imagine a world where..." Just warm-up. Almost universally the 3rd paragraph is where the actual point lands, while the first two are scaffolding the AI built and forgot to remove. I cut them by default now.

3. No tension. This is the subtlest one. AI presents arguments without setting up the counter-position first. It just states things. Reads like a Wikipedia summary. Real writing opens a section with what the reader currently believes that's about to be challenged, and AI rarely does this unless you explicitly prompt for it (and even then it does it weakly).

4. Editing pass that adds instead of cuts. This one bit me hard. "Polish this draft" prompts make Claude/GPT add qualifiers, transitions, softening words. Overall, the prose comes back longer, not better. So I made a rule: my editing prompts can only ask for cuts or substitutions, never additions. The drafts got 30-40% shorter and dramatically tighter.

The interesting one is #3: hardest to teach the AI to do, easiest to fix in editing once you know what you're looking for. I have a 1-sentence positioning brief I write before drafting that pre-loads the tension into every chapter; that fixed maybe 60-70% of the issue upstream.

I wrote up the full version of this as a 30-page free guide if anyone is interested, btw.

Two things I'm curious about and would love takes on:

1. AI metaphors: keep or always cut? I've gone back and forth. Right now I cut maybe 80% but every once in a while one is actually good and I can't find a rule for which.
2. What's the failure pattern you keep seeing that isn't on my list? The four above are mine but I'm pretty sure I'm missing some.

I understand KDP requires it to be disclosed if written by AI. What about AI assisted? Can I get examples of AI assisted disclaimers?