NaNoWriMo - Creating a novel using an AI Ghostwriter
Here's my plan to do Novel November / NaNoWriMo with an AI assistant
It’s almost that time again: the National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) or Novel November (#NoNo —> can we come up with a better acronym?) and I’m getting back in the game.
Hosting author events over the past few years with Books and Beverages UK, interviewing science fiction authors on the Alternate Futures podcast (and there are still many great interviews coming this year —> including an election special at the end of November!) and running my assisted self-publishing company (QuantumDotPress), has not left much time for my own writing.
But speaking with those many authors has been a source of inspiration. So, recently I’ve taken steps to structure my schedule so I can focus more on my own books and to giving birth to some of the visions floating around my head.
And, as I have so many ideas either floating around in embryonic form or half-written, I’m hoping that I can speed up my workflow by integrating artificial intelligence into it in various ways, allowing me to complete many of these books faster.
How am I currently using AI?
At the moment, most of my AI use has been regarding image generation. The most straightforward and common way, like most people, has been to create images for blog and video thumbnails. I also use it to generate characters and settings for stories, to better help me visualize them.
Additionally, now that character and style referencing have seen significant upgrades, my second children’s picture book (to be published under my pseudonym Harry Redhouse) uses AI-generated images. To be fair, I’m still developing an optimal process for this, but it is going well, nevertheless, and the book nears completion.
I’ve also played with music generation, but haven’t yet created anything I really like.
Of course, on this substack, I’ve shared some attempts at using ChatGPT and Claude to mimic other genre- and author-styles for short written passages, with limited success. The general consensus having been that the AI is a good wordsmith, but it falls easily into using tropes and cliches, and doesn’t know how to develop a longer story.
Enter: SudoWrite
SudoWrite is an AI platform that has been developed specifically to serve authors. It is already useful even when just using the free version, without substantial AI credits (although you get 50,000 free to trial it), as it is structured for aiding and compiling character, plot and setting information. But with the use of AI, each of those becomes enhanced.
If you’re drawing a blank on details about a character, setting, technology, or bit of lore, just input a few words or phrases about what’s in your mind and see what the AI generates. If you don’t like it, you can go again.
In fact, that interative nature of SudoWrite is the way it’s commonly used. Instead of the general ideal of ‘put something in and get a story’, serious authors that use it take great care at each stage of the planning, to ensure everything is to their liking before continuing to the next stage. Many authors use Sudowrite to generate a first draft that is to their liking, and then rewrite the entire novel themselves in the second draft.
As a writing platform, instead of being its own LLM (Large Language Model, i.e. generative AI), SudoWrite allows the user to select which, of many, models to use for each generation, including various versions of both ChatGPT and Claude as well as others. This allow the author to tweak both the input (story data) and method of generation (the LLM), to get something that fits their vision.
That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a fast process, and there is what can be a long learning curve — made easier by the free courses and videos created authors working with SudoWrite. But it’s not necessarily a fast process to learn to create good stories from scratch either.
After having played with SudoWrite for a few weeks, I have realized a few things:
I still have lots to learn and much experimenting ahead
I’ve become much more conscious of the phrasing I use to describe character information, settings, ideas, etc, to the AI. The AI is still fairly simplistic and can easily misunderstand certain common phrasings - especially when pronouns are involved. As I have this problem myself sometimes, maybe that’s why I like working with AI?!
These AI are tools that can enhance productivity for some people, when used well, just as they can create horrible stories when used poorly. But at the moment, at least, they are still tools and as such, require skilled use to produce a quality product.
To reiterate, AI should be considered as another tool in the author’s toolkit. They should be used to compliment weaknesses in your skill set or workflow, but should not be used to replace the creative human entirely. For now, at least, that’s not possible anyway, and when it’s attempted we get stories filled with cliches and overused tropes.
The next format for stories is almost here. First oral, then print on paper, then radio and movie, then video game, then e-book, then audiobook, now ‘reader-directed’.
The Next Stage of Storytelling
This entire process with SudoWrite has led me to believe that a new development in storytelling may be on the horizon. For now, I’m calling it Reader-Directed Storytelling (ReaDi-made Stories?). And it will be a boon for the plotters out there! But I’ll give more information on that in an upcoming post.
My Ideal, Moving Forward
Ultimately, my hope is that I’ll be able to train the AI on my own work, so that it writes like me. Although it’s interesting to play around mixing styles of famous authors with genres they never wrote in, ultimately that’s just a fun diversion or a bit of fun experimentation into learning the abilities of the AI.
My personal goal is to be able to speed up the process of creating my own books written as close to how I would write them as possible.
Why do I need AI for that? Because I can’t write fast enough to keep up with my ideas. And even after collating various ideas into novels, then trilogies, then sagas, I still come up with new ideas exploring different directions. And they all become equally as interesting or important as the others.
While this feature isn’t available yet to any significant degree, Sudowrite has mentioned that it is a feature they are developing.
On a side note to any lawyers reading this: you may want to start preparing the legal structures and paperwork for the inevitability that will come surrounding the inheritance of self-trained AI models. That is, the various ways individuals will create digital clones and the passing of them down to offspring.
And that will, of course, eventually lead to discussions of the ‘rights’ of those clones as unique entities, even though they are not self-aware entities (at least not yet). But that’s the science fiction writer in me jumping ahead…
NaNoWriMo 2024 (#SudoNoNo)
So, as I write this, NaNoWriMo 2024 starts tomorrow - unfortunately, a very busy day in what has been a very busy period. But I’m sure that’s not much different than for most of you.
I currently have almost all of the characters names input and many key parts of their personalities. I’ve also entered many of the settings, organizations, and some technology and lore. I still have to add the ‘braindump’ - a section where the author writes short phrases describing events of the story, and to generate the outline, before I can start exploring the story.
I intend to keep you updated on my progress with regular *short* posts. The NaNoWriMo challenge when using an AI ghostwriter is less about the word count and more about being able to get the AI to generate some kind of quality within that word count. And not breaking the bank to do it — I’ve found, unsurprisingly, that I like the output of the more expensive models better. That could, however, be something to do with the genre I’ll be writing in. More on that in my next post.
Until next time…
Good health. Good friends. Good fortune.
Edwin