How to Write a Great Novel in the Age of AI
Writing is easy! To quote sports columnist Red Smith, “You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.” This is why, as Terry Pratchett said, too many people don’t want to write, they want to have written.
But still people want to read novels, and, yes, people want to have written novels, too – great ones, preferably. So how do you get to have written a great novel? There’s a lot of advice out there. Some people even suggest letting an artificial intelligence application write it for you – then all you have to do is polish it up a bit. Not nearly so hard, right?
What, in fact, is the best way to get to that finished work of genius? And how much can AI do? Let’s look at some common bits of advice for aspiring writers.
1. Read a lot
Everyone agrees you need to read a lot, so you have a good sense of what works and what other people have done. And then, having read, you can produce something that adds to that same genre. This is rather like what LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT do – only they do more of it than you ever could. This means they’re good at producing things that imitate the styles of well-known authors and genres. And if you’ve written something that is meant to be like someone else’s work, or to fit in a certain genre, an AI application that draws on that kind of data can help you make it more like that.
But if you want to create a staggering work of genius? Something new that comes from the heart? Machines have no hearts; they just know what the established patterns are. And, as creativity guru Edward de Bono said, “Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” So, you have to do your own reading, and your own writing.
2. Write every day
A common bit of advice is that you need to write every day. On the other hand, you don’t want to get like Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s The Shining, whose writing habit produced one sentence, over and over: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It’s good to have momentum; it’s not good to spin your wheels.
Still, if you don’t write, you won’t have written. Most great novelists have had daily writing routines. And the more you write, the more you write – that is to say, it’s easy to write more at a time once you’re in the habit. Which also means, of course, that you have to do the writing yourself. Writing an AI prompt every day is like ordering food delivery every day – you’ll never learn how to cook, or even how to improve the food you get delivered.
3. Start with an outline and stick to it
If there’s one piece of advice that’s beloved of people who have to grade students’ work, but that is by no means universally followed, this is it. Yes, it’s good to have some idea of where you’re going with a book, but a novel is a living work you draw out of yourself. “I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it,” Terry Pratchett said. On the other hand, John Irving doesn’t start writing until he knows all the key details that will happen, right down to the last page.
Writing a novel can be like going on a trip. If you don’t have a plan at the outset, you can waste a lot of time just figuring out where you’re going next. But if you stick too rigidly to your plan, you can miss some wonderful discoveries. Charles Dickens took an approach like good trip planning: he plotted out key points and characters while allowing some departures and keeping track of who had done what. You, however, are not Charles Dickens, or John Irving, or Terry Pratchett. You have to find what works for you. Which you will do by writing and writing and writing some more.
4. Rewrite, and rewrite again
If writing is good, then writing more must be better, right? Why write just once if you can rewrite the book five times? It is a generally accepted truth that writing involves a lot of revising. If you write a full draft of a book and think you’re done, well, you had better be an extremely good writer. Lee Child does that, but you are not Lee Child. Charles Dickens had a strict schedule with delivery dates for instalments of his novels, which were always published serialized, and so he didn’t rewrite heavily, but you are also not Charles Dickens.
Assume that once you’ve written a draft, you will – after letting it sit for a while to get perspective on it – need to go back and revise the heck out of it. And if you are working with an editor (which, if you get a publishing contract, you will be), the editor will cause you to make even more revisions.
Some of the rewriting will be big-picture structural stuff, and there’s no substitute for an expert eye. But some of it will be thorny little issues of smooth phrasing, clarity, and style. This is where you might also get help from an AI application, which can give suggestions – they won’t be flashes of creative brilliance, but they can help you avoid any awkward phrasing.
Oh, and a lot of the rewriting will be cutting. Which is hard. But there’s more good news on that: AI-based applications can be pretty good at looking at passages and suggesting shorter ways to put them. You don’t need to use their exact wording if you don’t want to, but it can certainly break the block on how to cut effectively.
5. Show, don’t tell
This is one of the great common pieces of writing advice. Instead of giving lengthy descriptions of people and things, show them in action and let the reader see how they are. Instead of writing “My uncle Joe was a gruff and abstemious man,” write “I was nursing a beer when my uncle Joe strode in, picked up my glass, and hurled it against the wall. ‘Never drink,’ he growled, and strode out again.”
This is one area in which another pair of eyes on your writing can be immensely helpful – expert eyes, preferably. It’s also an area where AI is not so likely to be helpful. That’s not just because its suggestions for actions to show might not be right for your book; it’s because, as Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer science researcher at Columbia University, points out, AI-generated writing tends to have “very long, exposition-heavy sentences that contain lots of stereotypes.”
6. Create great characters
This should be obvious, but not everyone thinks of it – if you have what you think is a remarkable story idea, you may be so focused on the action that the characters are nothing more than cardboard cutouts and stereotypes. The fact is, though, stories are made greater by interesting characters: people with complex problems, internal contradictions, things you really like, and things that upset you. And a really great character can let you get away with a story in which not all that much happens (Virginia Woolf knew that).
Time spent creating characters is never wasted. It’s something AI can’t replicate, because it doesn’t understand people; it just comes up with plausible combinations of words, and sometimes they lead to characters doing things that don’t make sense motivationally. So, the characters are all up to you.
7. Get your facts straight
If your book gets a geographic detail wrong – such as a subway line where none exists, penguins at the North Pole, or a person taking a day trip from Jamaica to Bora Bora – or it muffs some other point of fact (whether novel-internal or not), such as technical details on a car, or the colour of a character’s eyes, perhaps not all of your readers will notice. The ones who do, though, will not be pleased, and they may even hurl your book across the room and into the trash can. You need to get your facts right.
And by “you need to” we mean you need to. AI applications have no concept of truth and falsehood; they only know about statistically likely arrangements of words. Many people have been burned relying on LLM-based programs for citations or statements of fact. And some AI-written books have been found to have advice that could literally be lethal if followed – in matters of health care and food safety, for instance. Let the AI do what it does well: tell you what a good-looking, readable arrangement of words is. The fact-checking is on you.
8. Use good grammar
This seems like a reasonable baseline, but is it? First of all, not everyone agrees on what “good grammar” is. Jonathan Franzen used one of his ten rules for novelists just to inveigh against using “then” as a conjunction, a prescription that is by no means universally held (the Chicago Manual of Style calls this use “perfectly acceptable”) and cannot possibly make the difference between a good novel and a bad one. Other writers have scorned semicolons, adverbs, and the passive voice, none of which are, intrinsically, grammatically wrong.
In truth, there are many varieties of English grammar, and the most popular weaponized “rules” – such as “don’t split infinitives,” “don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” and “don’t start a sentence with a conjunction” – aren’t real rules at all and never have been. Many of the best, most revered writers have actually “broken” them to great effect.
Beyond that, there’s the matter of deliberately not being grammatically “proper.” Mark Twain wrote in a small-town vernacular (several kinds, in fact); Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in an invented slang; James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake in… well, it’s English, Jim, but not as we know it. But of course, they all did that deliberately, and in a perceptibly consistent way. And that’s the important thing: make sure your “errors” are clearly intentional.
For the rest, it sure doesn’t hurt to have some help in avoiding errors that will distract the readers – or cause the agent or publisher to put your precious book in the “No” pile. Editors can help with that, and so can AI applications (though watch out for the ones that insist on “rules” that aren’t real rules).
9. Know your genre and write in it
“But I don’t want to write genre fiction!” Sorry, all fiction belongs to a genre, even if that genre is general literary fiction. Every genre has its own expectations of style and subject matter.
It’s true that some great authors have played at the edges or intersections of genres – Margaret Atwood has brought science fiction into many of her novels, even though few stores would shelve her books in the Sci-Fi section. But such writers were generally already well-established within their genres, and they could still find a place on a shelf and, thus, in a publisher’s catalogue.
And that’s a key thing. If you want your book to be read, people have to be able to find it and publishers have to know where and how to sell it, and to whom. “Genre-bending” often means “unsellable.” So, situate yourself clearly within a genre, and make any genre borrowings intentional and comprehensible. Which means have appropriate characters, appropriate settings, appropriate plot, and an appropriate writing style.
Know your genre and know it well. Don’t come bouncing into a genre you haven’t read much and think you can come up with something fresh and new – you’ll more likely come up with the same ideas that hundreds of others bounced in with. You also have to like and respect the genre; if you don’t, it shows – so if you don’t read romance novels, don’t try to write romance novels.
10. Have a novel idea
Oh yeah – you can write all day every day and it won’t matter much if you don’t have anything interesting to write. Now, you can certainly write a book that is very like many other books out there; some people read books in quantity and are happy to get the same thing with variations. But if you want to write a great novel, well, it’s not going to be just like everything else. And this is where being human makes the biggest difference.
Text generated by LLMs is always going to be patterned after other text. It can give fresh ideas, but only in a way similar to rearranging Scrabble tiles to find new words. Researchers Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauer found that writers who are overall less creative can be aided by AI to make better stories (writers who are already highly creative don’t get the same boost), but “generative AI–enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone.”
As Marcus du Sautoy, author of The Creativity Code, wrote, “No machine is driven to express itself creatively. It is prompted by the intention of the human.” Let the AI tell you how to do the predictable things, like grammar and genre style. It can’t tell you how to do the unpredictable ones.
11. Get the right help from the right places
Writing is often viewed as a solitary activity. The truth is that you’re writing for other people to read, and so your own perspective isn’t the only one that matters. Get other eyes on your book. But get the right kind of help from the right kind of readers. If you’re running your book past ordinary people who are in your general audience, believe them when they say they liked or disliked something, but don’t trust their recommendations on how to fix it – they probably don’t really know.
Experienced professional editors can help you a lot with all the different levels of editing. But of course, they cost money, and so you don’t want to waste their time on basic things – you may want to take the same approach as someone who tidies up the house before the cleaning person comes. This is where an AI-based application like Draftsmith is especially useful. It can:
help you tidy up your phrasing and make it more concise.
help you aim better at the particular readers you want
give you rearrangements that will spur your further thought processes.
It’s a great adjunct to a writer. Just don’t expect it to do all your writing for you.
If you’re not familiar with Draftsmith, give it a free trial. But first, write something. It won’t do that for you.