It only took about a month, but it would have been much faster if I’d used Story Engine. Honestly, I probably could have generated the text in a week if I’d used that tool, or perhaps even an afternoon. Instead, I outlined the project myself, wrote the first couple of paragraphs for each individual scene, and wrote / generated the rest.
Most of what I used Sudowrite for was on a sentence and paragraph level for this draft. Typically, I would write a bit, get to a point where I wasn’t sure what to write next, generate some text, and then either 1) use it as-is, 2) use it, but run it through a couple of rewrite filters first, 3) use it, but tweak it myself, or 4) throw it out entirely and keep writing. Because the AI didn’t have an outline to work with, it often took the story off in weird and non-useful directions, but there were a couple of times where it surprised me in a good way, and I decided to keep it in.
One of the things I found was that Sudowrite is terrible for magic systems, world-building, character arcs, foreshadowing, unresolved sexual tension, or anything else that happens on a macroscopic scale, especially if that story element changes over the course of the novel. For example, he AI engine wanted every scene involving both my male and female leads to culminate in the climax of their romantic subplot. Likewise, it was very difficult to get the AI to hit the right beats for their character growth; that was something where I really had to babysit it.
But for those microscopic, word / sentence / paragraph level story elements, I was pleasantly surprised with how Sudowrite performed. It felt a bit like I was riding in the front of a tandem bicycle, instead of writing alone. When I hit stretches that required a lot of uphill effort, I could rely on the AI engine to do most of the work while I steered. Of course, riding a tandem is no fun unless both people are pedaling, so I still had to do my part, but the hills and the rocky parts felt a lot easier, which was nice.
This Sudowrite draft isn’t anywhere near publishable, but that wasn’t what I was going for. Instead, the goal was to get it good enough to use as a starting point to rewrite the entire thing myself. Rough drafts are pretty hard for me, but rewriting and revising comes much easier after I have something to work with. Even if I end up throwing out every word, I expect that I can power through this “humanized” draft in a fraction of the time it would take me to write the novel from scratch. I may even finish it this week!
But perhaps the area where the Sudowrite draft did the most was with helping me to be productive even when my attention was being pulled in multiple directions by small children. A significant chunk of this book was written in the BYU Library’s family study room, with one eye on my three year-old daughter as she played with the other kids. Even after I had to step in to referee a bit, or to take her for a snack or a potty break, the AI tools enabled me to jump right back in and keep writing.
The amount of focus it takes to write with AI tools is much, much less than what it takes to write without them. At least, that has been my experience. Granted, my goal with this draft was not to make it publishable, but to make it good enough for the next phase, which is more like 95% human effort and 5% AI, as opposed to 40% human effort and 60% AI, which I used for this draft.
But I doubt there are any AI tools right now that can get a book into a published state with minimal human effort. In general, I’ve found that these AI-assisted writing tools are great for getting a book from terrible to passable, but not as useful for getting a book from passable to genuinely good—and as for getting a book from good to genuinely great, you can forget it with our current set of AI tools. Much better to rely on human efforts for that.
To use another analogy, it’s kind of like using a two stage rocket to get to orbit, where the booster rocket is the Sudowrite draft and the second stage rocket is the humanized draft. The booster won’t get you to orbit on its own, but it will get you through max Q and send you high enough that the second stage can finish the job. And since you’re going up in two stages instead of just one, it doesn’t take nearly as much fuel to get there.
Another advantage of doing it this way is that the final draft will be almost 100% human-written. There’s no copying or pasting in the humanized draft—every sentence and every word is typed out by hand, and while some of it may come verbatim from the Sudowrite draft, most of it is going to be changed in some way, sometimes quite substantially. For example, today I “humanized” a scene that was about 750 words in the Sudowrite draft, but ended up at around 1500 words.
What I’ll probably do is pick a few scenes from this novel and post the before and after, to show how substantially it’s changed. But even the Sudowrite draft isn’t totally AI generated, at least with the way I’ve been using these tools. Like I said above, it’s much closer to 60/40.
The Sudowrite draft of The Riches of Xulthar clocks in at about 33.2k words. That still falls short of the 40k word minimum threshold for a novel, but it will get longer with the next draft, and I expect it to end up somewhere between 40k and 45k words. With luck, I’ll finish the humanized draft by the end of this week, and the revisions before the end of this month.
