I don’t let AI anywhere near my writing. Not for fiction, not for non-fiction, not for texting my dad–even though Google would really, really love me to use Gemini next time I can’t figure out how to reply to:
“do u want to come over for dinner sunday”
Gemini, help!
I’m definitely not part of Team Publish A Book Every Week With ChatGPT. AI has written zero words in my book.
Yet I have 5 megabytes of chat logs with Claude Opus about my novel.
The reason why is very simple…
Even with robust writing tools like Scrivener, I cannot for the life of me remember all the amazing ideas and lines of dialogue I want to shove inside this book. I’m not going to open up my laptop at 2:37 am to write down the cool set piece I dreamed up.
Rather than letting good ideas slip away into the night, I command a Claude project to file it.
I’m essentially building a gigantic, digital filing cabinet of potential gold so it doesn’t accumulate as dirty Post-It notes on my desk.
I was writing a scene a couple days ago where I couldn’t remember a very specific detail about the geography of a certain cul-de-sac I mentioned in Chapter One. Instead of hitting Control F or manually flicking through the entire chapter, I just asked Claude to read the chapter and tell me if my orientation was right.
(I was.)
The best thing about Claude, compared to ChatGPT and other AI tools, is that it takes an almost aggressive stance against my time-wasting BS.
It knows I like to brainstorm and record ideas for sequels and prequels and side novellas instead of writing the book that’s in front of me. If I tell Claude to file away too many plot twists for Book 3, it’ll hit me with:
“Great idea. Filed. Now go write the next scene IN BOOK ONE.”
…Instead of offering to WRITE the scene, and do it horribly, like ChatGPT would.
Or in another chat within the same project, where I had Claude conduct research on monetization pathways for a self-published author. After successive rounds of interrogation, Claude threw its hands up and said:
“Yes, you can self-publish. It’s hard. But people have done it. But this is all theory right now since in order to self-publish a book, you need a book. Which you don’t. So go write the book instead of asking how to sell it before it exists.”
OK, fine…
Now, can’t I mostly do this with Scrivener? The database stuff?
Probably. Scrivener has loads of tools for organizing novels.
But the problem is that Scrivener…has loads of tools for organizing novels. There’s a steep learning curve. Right now it functions purely as a text editor for me. (Far better than Google Docs, but still a text editor.)
So I’ll keep pelting great ideas at cranky Claude while it tells me to go write. For now.
Speaking of writing…
This week kinda sucked again, although it was better than last week. We did about 1,100 words, compared to 500 last week. Gotta pump those numbers up!
I don’t see me getting anywhere near 5,000 per week again until we get back from Japan at the end of May, but like I said last week…I’d rather write 50 words every day for the next month than nothing.
That’s 50 words more than I had yesterday.
Now, I’m curious…why are you reading this?
Are you writing a book or thinking of writing a book?
Subscribe below and watch me write this thang.
If you’ll excuse me, my daughter Nora is throwing wooden blocks at my dog.