AI, Writing and Me

The story is mine

Let's start with the easiest part.

The plots of my novels are mine.

The characters are mine.

What happens to them is my decision. How they behave, who they love, what they fear, what they get wrong and what ultimately happens to them are all decisions I make.

AI doesn't have creative control over my books.

I do.

That's actually become one of the most important distinctions for me when thinking about AI and authorship.

Who pressed each individual key is perhaps less important than it initially appears.

Traditionally published novels can pass through developmental editors, structural editors, line editors, copyeditors and proofreaders. Editors can suggest different dialogue, cuts, additions, structural changes, alternative sentences and even changes to characters and their motivations.

Nobody suggests that the author therefore didn't write the book.

My process is different, but there is an interesting similarity.

I use AI as an editor, researcher, critic, brainstorming partner and sounding board. It can tell me something isn't working. It can suggest a different sentence. It can propose cutting a scene. It can suggest adding one.

But it cannot make me do any of those things.

Nobody edits my finished manuscript except me.

Every word that survives into one of my published novels is there because I decided it should be there.

Sometimes AI suggests something and I immediately accept it.

Sometimes we spend half an hour working through an idea before I decide the original was better.

And sometimes my response is considerably simpler:

Maggie wouldn't do that.

That's the end of that idea.

Because I know Maggie.

The AI doesn't.

What do I actually use AI for?

Quite a lot.

I brainstorm chapters and scenes with it. I discuss plot problems. I ask it to find holes in my reasoning. I ask whether a character's reaction feels believable.

I use it for research.

My novels are set in the early 1980s, which creates an endless supply of questions.

What day of the week was a particular date? What time did the sun set? How much might something have cost? Would this technology have existed? What terminology would the police have used? Would someone have been able to make a particular journey in the time I've allowed?

Twenty years ago I might have researched many of those questions in books. More recently I would have typed search terms into Google and opened half a dozen websites.

Now I can ask a question and then interrogate the answer.

• "Would that have been true in Britain?"
• "What about in 1983?"
• "Are you sure?"
• "She's eighteen. Would she actually have called it that?"

That doesn't mean AI is always right.

It isn't.

Sometimes it's spectacularly wrong.

If something really matters, I'll verify it elsewhere. At other times I'm happy with "close enough" because I'm writing fiction, not an academic history of Britain in 1983.

The story always comes first.

Sometimes I ask AI to edit my writing

This is probably the part that causes the most controversy.

Yes, I sometimes give AI something I've written and ask it to improve it.

Sometimes the difference is tiny.

It might notice that I've repeated a word four times. It might spot an awkward sentence. It might suggest moving something. It might tell me that a conversation isn't carrying the emotional weight it should.

Sometimes it rewrites considerably more.

Then I edit its edit.

I remove things I don't like. I restore things it removed. I rewrite sentences. I argue that a character wouldn't say something that way. Sometimes I take one sentence from an entire suggested passage and throw the rest away.

Occasionally it produces something and I think, yes, that's simply better.

So I use it.

I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

I listen to my books too

Another AI tool has become an important part of my editing process: synthetic speech.

I use ElevenLabs to turn my chapters into audio, and I spend hours listening to them.

I listen in the car. I listen through headphones in bed. I listen while walking the dog. Sometimes I listen to the same chapter repeatedly.

It's remarkable how different writing can sound when you're no longer looking at the words on a screen.

A sentence that looked perfectly good suddenly sounds awkward. Repetition becomes obvious. Dialogue that seemed natural when I read it can sound forced when I hear somebody say it. A paragraph can drag. An emotional moment I thought was powerful can turn out not to land at all.

So I change it.

Then I generate the audio again and listen again.

Before synthetic speech, doing this properly would have been impractical. I could have read the entire novel aloud myself, of course, but repeatedly recording a book of this length while it was still changing would consume an extraordinary amount of time. Employing a professional narrator for constantly changing drafts would be financially absurd.

AI lets me create what is effectively a temporary audiobook of my work whenever I want one.

The voice isn't deciding whether the writing works.

I am.

It's simply allowing me to experience my own writing in another way, and very often I hear problems that I didn't see.

The time I tried to cut 66 pages and almost put them all back

When I finished Reckoning, the manuscript came to approximately 766 printed pages.

I wanted it closer to 700.

So I began an extensive editing process using AI to help identify material that wasn't earning its place.

And it worked.

We removed almost 60 pages.

Repetition disappeared. Some passages became tighter. Things moved faster.

If AI were simply following my instructions, that should have been the end of the story.

Except the process of examining the book so closely exposed something else.

There were places where the novel didn't need less.

It needed more.

Emotional consequences needed room. Some moments were happening too quickly. Characters needed time to react to things that had happened to them.

So after cutting nearly 60 pages, I added more than 50 pages.

My objective had been to make the book shorter.

I abandoned that objective because the story mattered more.

That's perhaps the best example I can give of who is actually in control.

AI didn't decide how long Reckoning should be.

Neither did a publishing company.

I did.

And sometimes AI couldn't possibly have invented the important bit

Chapter 40 of Discovery contains one of the most extreme scenes I've written.

A man attempts to force two young women to perform sexual acts on him.

It doesn't end well for him.

One of the girls bites off his genitals.

Yes. Really.

It's not written like that though. There's a lot of blood and a lot of swearing, and a fair bit of violence too. It's pretty harrowing.

That scene is particularly relevant to this discussion because it predates my use of AI.

I had already partly written Discovery several times before AI became involved in my writing process. When I finally rebuilt the novel into the version that became the published book, I threw away material I didn't like and retained things I knew had to remain.

Chapter 40 had to remain.

It became fundamental to what followed.

AI didn't give me that idea. I rather suspect it wouldn't have suggested it in a million years.

I did.

For better or worse, you'll have to blame me for that one.

What about the character images?

The images on this website are AI generated too.

And I'm proud of them.

Maggie doesn't exist.

Neither does Beth.

There isn't an actress somewhere who happens to look exactly like the person I've imagined.

So how else am I supposed to photograph her?

I could hire models, photographers, makeup artists, find locations and somehow attempt to find a dozen people who resemble fictional characters that previously existed only in my imagination.

That's clearly unrealistic for me.

Instead, I use generative AI.

But that doesn't mean I type:

Create an eighteen-year-old girl with red hair.

and accept whatever appears.

I've worked on those characters. I've generated versions, rejected them, altered things and tried again. I'm the person who eventually looks at an image and decides:

That's Maggie.

I've also experimented with turning some of those still images into short pieces of video.

Why?

Because it's fiction.

These people are made up.

Seeing a character I've lived with inside my head suddenly move can be extraordinary. And if it helps a potential reader imagine that character or become curious about her story, I think that's wonderful.

I'm not pretending I've filmed real people.

I'm using a creative tool to visualise fictional ones.

AI is maths

This is a deliberately enormous simplification, but I think it's an important one.

AI isn't a little person sitting inside my computer writing stories.

Underneath everything, we're talking about mathematics, learned patterns and probability on an almost incomprehensible scale.

The system doesn't care about Maggie.

I do.

It doesn't desperately want Beth to make the right decision.

I do.

It doesn't lie awake wondering whether a particular scene is going to work.

I sometimes do.

AI can analyse patterns in language and storytelling and use the enormous breadth of its training to suggest possibilities I might never have considered.

But possibility isn't intent.

I bring the intent.

But hasn't AI learned from other people's writing?

Yes, and this is one of the complicated questions surrounding generative AI.

I'm not going to pretend there aren't legitimate debates around training data, copyright and how these systems should be developed.

There are.

But there's another aspect of learning and creativity that interests me.

I adore Agatha Christie's Poirot stories.

I've read them, watched adaptations of them and absorbed so much Poirot trivia that I'd probably consider him as a specialist subject if I ever appeared on Mastermind.

That has inevitably influenced me.

Everything I've ever read has.

But when I write a mystery, I don't reproduce an Agatha Christie novel.

Influence isn't the same thing as reproduction.

Humans and artificial intelligence don't learn in identical ways, and I'm not claiming they do. But AI gives me access to an extraordinary breadth of patterns, concepts, structures and ideas far beyond what I could consume during one lifetime.

There are only so many books I can ever read.

Used properly, AI can widen my horizons rather than narrow them.

I don't want it to write like another author.

I want it to help me become a better one.

I'm also a software developer

This gives me an unusual perspective on the argument.

I've spent much of my working life developing software.

Software development is also one of the industries being transformed most rapidly by AI.

And yet I haven't stopped being a developer.

The job is changing.

I spend more time describing what I need, discussing architecture, reviewing code, testing solutions, rejecting approaches and solving higher-level problems.

And because of AI I can attempt projects that would once have required far more people and far more time.

One of those is PlotDirector.

PlotDirector began because I wanted software designed around the way I actually write novels. It has grown into something vastly more ambitious, including tools intended to understand scenes, characters, relationships, timelines, locations and what different characters know at different points in a story.

Without AI, the idea of one person developing something on that scale would be daunting.

With AI, it becomes possible.

Did AI create PlotDirector?

No.

I did.

But AI changed the scale of what I could realistically attempt.

I see my writing in much the same way.

AI slop exists

I'm not going to pretend every criticism of generative AI is nonsense.

It isn't.

Someone can ask AI to generate a story, put a cover on it and upload it with minimal involvement.

People can produce enormous quantities of mediocre material incredibly quickly.

I don't particularly want a world drowning in one-click novels either.

But that isn't how I write.

I spend months and years with these characters.

I obsess over their motivations.

I rewrite scenes because something feels wrong.

I reject perfectly competent suggestions because they're wrong for the person I've created.

I worry about whether something happened on the right Tuesday in 1983.

I remove chapters.

I add chapters.

I change my mind.

I argue with my AI.

Quite frequently.

The existence of a "Generate" button doesn't tell you anything meaningful about the creative process that happened before or after someone pressed it.

What about editors?

Professional editing is expensive.

There are also different kinds of editing, from developmental and structural work through line editing, copyediting and proofreading.

For a novel of the length I write, paying professionals for every stage could cost thousands of pounds.

I simply couldn't afford to do that.

So there's another question I think is worth asking.

Should someone who can't afford thousands of pounds of professional editorial assistance simply not tell their story?

AI doesn't magically replace an experienced human editor.

But it gives me access to a form of editorial assistance I otherwise couldn't have.

It gives me a tireless second pair of eyes.

And unlike an editor working for a publisher, it has no authority over my manuscript.

It can suggest.

I decide.

We've always used tools

I'm not brilliant at spelling.

I'm considerably worse at typing.

I can write novels while occasionally having to remind myself exactly what grammatical label applies to something.

It doesn't matter.

I use spellcheck.

I use grammar tools.

I use dictionaries.

I use search engines.

I use word processors.

And now I use several forms of AI for quite different purposes.

Language AI helps me think, research, challenge ideas and edit.

Image generation helps me visualise people who exist only in my imagination.

Synthetic speech lets me listen to my writing and evaluate it in a completely different way.

Coding AI helps me build tools such as PlotDirector that would otherwise be vastly more difficult for one developer to create.

Nobody expects a modern novelist to write 150,000 words longhand, look everything up in a printed encyclopaedia and submit a manuscript containing every spelling mistake they originally made in order to prove its authenticity.

Tools change.

AI is clearly a much more powerful tool than spellcheck, and pretending they're equivalent would be silly.

But I see them as part of the same continuing story.

Technology changes what an individual is capable of creating.

For me, AI has dramatically expanded that capability.

So where is my line?

Other writers will draw their lines somewhere else.

That's fine.

I'm not interested in telling another author how they should write their books.

This is simply how I write mine.

And there's one rule that sits above everything else:

I retain creative control.

AI can suggest absolutely anything it likes.

Nothing enters one of my books unless I decide it belongs there.

The final test

After all of that, I think there's a wonderfully simple way to judge my use of AI.

Read one of my books.

Forget AI detectors.

Forget percentages.

Forget trying to calculate who physically typed which sentence.

Read the story.

Do you believe in Maggie?

Do you care about Beth?

Do you hate the people I wanted you to hate?

Did something make you laugh?

Did something hurt?

Did you find yourself saying "one more chapter" when you knew perfectly well you should have gone to bed?

Did you think about one of the characters the following morning?

If you did, then I've done my job.

If you didn't, then I haven't.

And knowing whether AI suggested an adjective on page 347 isn't going to change either answer.

These are my stories.

These are my characters.

AI is one of the tools I use to help me tell their stories as well as I possibly can.

I'm proud of the books I've created with it.

And I'm excited to see what I'll be able to create next.