Trying a new workflow with AI

I finally started a new writing project, for which I am experimenting with a new method made possible with modern AI technology: keeping an overall plot structure in mind with AI as I “discovery write” (writing without plotting) the scenes themselves. The idea is that the scenes remain fun and intriguing to write as I don’t know exactly where they’re going while writing, but then feeding them into AI and brainstorming with AI to make sure the overall plot is still sound, so that I don’t write myself into a corner (or the opposite of that, meandering so much that it feels like the story is not progressing anywhere).

Writing-wise, I generally prefer discovery writing, which is when you write without plotting stuff in advance, so you yourself don’t really know where you’re story is going.

But while I can write much more productively with discovery writing, it has only ever lead to failure as eventually I write myself into a corner, with no satisfying way to resolve the many plot threads I enjoyed creating along the way. Either that, or the plot meanders so much that the overarching story just starts feeling like it’s going nowhere… because it is.

So I need to plot to some degree. And that’s quite enjoyable too, so I don’t mind at all. My problem then becomes that I easily over-plot, afraid of failing if I leave too many uncertainties, so that when the plot is done, I lose all desire to actually write the story. The story loses it’s magic, and I become more interested in plotting out a new idea rather than dramatizing what I have.

So clearly there’s a delicate balance between the two that I have not yet quite found.

I got lucky with Son of a Dark Wizard as my initial plot helped me write the first part of the story, and then I was able to replot the second half such that was able to stay interested in writing to the end. (And the replot ideas just came out of nowhere as I approached writing the midpoint; I didn’t plan on replotting the second half, but it was much more interesting than whatever my initial plot was, which I forgot.)

Granted, Son of a Dark Wizard was also relatively short at only about 40k words, and it was meant to be the first of a series (which I still intend to continue), so not all the plot threads had to come to a conclusion. Which, as George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss know, is kinda cheating.

So I’m experimenting with adding AI to the workflow:

The AI Workflow

Step 1: A Foundational Plot Arc

I have an overall plot in mind, providing a general direction to aim for. While there’s no set path, I do have foundational plot points along the way, specific events that need to come to fruition at certain points that shape the overall narrative into specific acts (think Save the Cat beats), so the path can’t meander too much and there remains a sense of progress.

Step 2: Brainstorm with AI

Then I brainstorm scene possibilities with AI. What sort of progress do I want to see next? What sort of situation do I want to see the characters in? The AI is quite good at brainstorming, though you have to experiment with how best to prompt it, and continually dismiss its initial ideas, which are generally cliché. Fortunately AI never gets tired of you saying, “Can you think of some more ideas?” or upset when you dismiss its ideas. It’s got no ego or preferences of its own. And, of course, as the writer, your own ideas naturally become part of the brainstorming too.

Step 3: Write a Scene

After settling on an idea for the scene, I then write it, which now remains fun and interesting because there will be elements I had only just considered during the brainstorming step directly preceding it. That is, the idea for the scene is still “alive” and fresh in my mind.

Plus, I can drop little plot threads or new ideas in here and there to see what the AI will think of them when planning the next scene.

Step 4: Return to Step 2 with Newly Written Scene

Feeding the new scene into AI (thank goodness for long context windows!), I can ask it what it thinks of the new scene. How does it progress the story in the overall plot structure? Where might the new little threads I planted go, and how will they tie in to the overall plot? What sort of scene might come next?

Step 5: Finish First Draft and Edit!

I haven’t gotten here yet, but clearly there will need to be a second draft, as so much is being discovery written. For now, I’m trying to keep momentum going by merely adding comments in the first draft, such as “He can’t actually say this, as it’s too on-the-nose” or “Insert description of room here that shows he is disorganized“… or sometimes simply “Bleh!” when I write something I don’t like, but want to move on.

So after about a week of work, I’m at 17k words! Which is only about 2.4k per day (about a single scene), but that’s still pretty good for me, especially with how insanely rusty I am.

Granted, I am also only at the beginning of the story, which is always the easiest part to write, so we’ll see whether or not I can keep the momentum going and how this workflow with AI will manage the generally trickier second act.

About the book

What’s this new book about, you may ask? It’s a fantasy mystery (less action, more dialog and contemplating). Here’s a tentative plot blurb:

Born during a total solar eclipse, 13-year-old prince Damian finds his magic difficult to control, at least until he’s taken under the wing of the castle’s most elusive wizard. Finally making some steady progress, he’s excited to learn more.

But his world changes in one terrible instance when his father, the king, simply blips out of existence one day. Not only does the king vanish, but so does all memory and trace that he ever existed, save for in Damian’s mind.

Unwilling to use magic to erase his own memory to make himself compatible with this new reality, Damian is determined to find out exactly what happened to his father, and whose powerful magic was behind it.

Was it the Aetherians, the mysterious race of winged humans whose strange magic is said to allow them to see into and interact with alternate realities? Was it the dragons of the borderlands, whose chaotic magic has been known to break people’s minds and warp their perceptions? Or perhaps the king did it to himself, meddling with strange magic he didn’t understand…

Whatever the case, solving the mystery seems the only hope of getting his father back.

That may end up changing. At 17k words, I am still two or three scenes away from the pivotal catalyst: the disappearance of the father. (By the way, I do have the mystery’s solution and story conclusion as part of the foundational plot arc, so I’m not discovery writing that.) My prediction is that the final novel will be 250-300k words long. But that will just be a first draft. And I can always split it into multiple volumes if needed.

On a side note, one may notice the similarities with Son of a Dark Wizard… another wizard prince whose father has been un-alived! Although this one’s quite different in tone.

Not sure what the title will be yet. Stay tuned!

Insane Fantasy begins July 7th

Insane Fantasy: The Crater Lands

I recently finished creating the cover for the first episode of Insane Fantasy. Considering my lack of artistic skills, I think it turned out pretty well. I would of course have preferred to commission an experienced artist, but couldn’t afford that. Also, it took me a little over two weeks to create, which feels like too long to me. But a good chunk of that time was spent just learning how to use Krita to draw vector art, figuring layers and masking and the art of Bézier curve editing. So hopefully the next cover won’t take so long, but who knows?

Assuming nothing drastic interrupts my editing over the next few days, I plan to release Insane Fantasy: The Crater Lands exclusively on Kindle this Thursday, July 7th!

As stated before, this is a 29,000-word episode, an installment of a larger serialized story. I’ve already started work on the next episode, and it will be my focus of attention after this first episode is released.

Moonblessed, update 3

I have finally finished the first draft of part one of my next novel. I wrote in my last post that I was hoping to release the novel in parts, each part being between 20K and 30K words, before releasing it as a full novel. Part one comes in at 29,300 words. Granted, it’s a first draft, but I don’t expect it to change drastically. I’ve been calling the novel Moonblessed, but I think I’m going to change that now. Moonblessed doesn’t really work for what’s going on in part one, nor is it general enough to work as the series name. I plan to call the series Insane Fantasy, and part one will be Episode 1: The Crater Lands.

The description for this first episode goes something like this:

Thirteen year old Coptivon lives a dull life growing up in a crater in the Crater Lands, apprenticed to a lazy innkeeper. So when a strange owl appears half-dead near a crater’s edge, Coptivon is more than happy to take him in. But he soon learns that the owl is a Spirited one, and he’s on an outlandish quest of his own to end the Storms of Insanity that have been ravaging the lands, stealing people’s sanity and turning them into empty-eyed airheads. Though the owl is adamant about rushing off on his own, Coptivon sees this as an opportunity to escape the doldrums of the Crater Lands once and for all.

Episode one actually follows three characters, but I think it helps to keep story descriptions to the main protagonist. For the sake of this blog post, however, there’s no harm in revealing a bit more, I suppose. Aside from Coptivon, the other two characters are Moonwing the owl (mentioned but unnamed in the description) and Krockallatus, another thirteen year old boy in another part of the world.

Moonwing is an old owl who’s found “the Moonblessed”, a legendary sorceress who he believes has the power to restore sanity to all who lost it. He’s also trying to refound the Night Sages, a small group of people dedicated to finding and fighting the Stormgiver, a mysterious sorcerer thought to be conjuring the Storms of Insanity. Moonwing feels responsible for the deaths of a number of children twelve years ago, after which the Night Sages disbanded, so when Coptivon begins asking questions about his mission, he’s very reluctant to say anything.

Krockallatus is a sort of evil version of Coptivon. He too is an orphan growing up in a dull place he loathes, working in a tavern in the slums of a city called Paraville. But rather than being grateful for any companionship he can find, he kicks puppies. When Krockallatus finds a parchment dropped from the pocket of a mysterious traveler, he becomes convinced that it’s a recipe for a potion that will give him the power to turn into a dragon. Seeing this as a ticket out of his directionless Paravillian life, he sets out to steal the necessary ingredients to make the potion.

I still need to work on a second draft while I create a Kindle cover for the episode. I’m too broke to hire an artist at the moment, so I’m going to try to come up with something myself. I’m not much of an artist, and most self-drawn covers on indie-published books look atrocious, but financial necessity necessitates that this is the road I must take, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

I hope to have the episode released sometime in the next week or so… but, as I was writing this post, our dishwasher broke and sent hot water spewing across our kitchen floor and raining into the basement. So that’s nice. The great dishwasher disaster of 2016. And our air conditioning is still broken.

Moonblessed, update 2

It’s been some time since I’ve updated this blog; my job has weird hours which prevent me from getting into a regular writing routine, and so I just haven’t been writing very much at all. (I’ll also admit that I have an addiction to watching movies in my free time, which isn’t helping.) But I’m slowly making progress on my next fantasy novel, tentatively titled Moonblessed. Just yesterday I finished the rough draft of the fifth chapter, bringing the overall word count to about 16,600 words. The pace of the story is certainly slower than that of Son of a Dark Wizard, but I’m having fun with it, and I hope the slower pacing won’t translate into less fun reading.

Because I’m only about a tenth of the way through my list of planned scenes, I’ve been thinking about serializing the novel, releasing it in parts of about 20K to 30K words each. Serializing a longer work of fiction of course has a rich tradition in the novel’s history, with its advantages for both readers and writers, and I’ve been wanting to try it for a while now. My hope is to price each installment at $0.99 for Kindle, but the real purpose would be to try to attract readers on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which is a bit like Spotify for books, where subscribers could read each installment at no extra cost. (Writers are paid a small amount for each page read.) At the very least, I’m hoping it will help me stay motivated to write as I look forward to being able to release new installments much quicker than having to wait until I finish an entire novel.

So if I do this, I only have a few more scenes to finish before releasing the first installment and seeing if anyone actually checks it out, or if I only get demotivated by the sounds of crickets…

Moonblessed, update 1

So the novel I’m working on (which is the start of a new series, probably a trilogy) is tentatively titled Moonblessed. There’s at least one other title I’m considering, but for now I prefer Moonblessed. I’m not sure what I’ll call the series itself yet. I finished the first draft of the opening chapter today, so that’s one chapter down and forty-seven to go! The wordcount is currently at 3,300 words. I hope I can keep at least some momentum going this week. Balancing my bizarre sleep schedule with my bizarre work hours can sometimes be a hassle, but I should still have free time if I can be disciplined enough to use it wisely.

This will be another middle grade sort of book. (Though, like Son of a Dark Wizard, I hope it will appeal to older readers as well.) Though there is some violence, there’s also a healthy dose of humor, at least if my corny sense of humor counts as humor. It makes it fun to write anyway, and I just have to get through a first draft. If I go too far with the humor, I can always reign it in with the second draft. I sometimes go out of my way to setup a stupid joke that doesn’t move the story forward and only clutters things up. On the other hand, I usually enjoy my own stupid humor a lot when I read back over my work.

Writing update

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been having lots of trouble getting another writing project started for a variety of reasons. (New job, time management issues, insanity.) 23 Dragon Teeth is on hold for now due to plotting problems. And I’m now cancelling the epic fantasy for which I had only written 6,000 words because I just finished completely re-plotting it (which took a few weeks). Changes are quite drastic. It’s now no longer anywhere near the scope of the previously estimated 400,000 wordcount. It’s 48 scenes. I’m guessing it will end up somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 words, though that’s tentative. I am not yet sure what the title will be, but definitely not Death of Ash, as the main arc of that plot-line is completely out the window. Anyway, this will be my next writing project. I should start writing sometime this week. Since it’s all plotted and I know where everything is going, only work, fatigue, and the random elements of life itself can get in the way (all of which can be formidable foes). There are only a few little details in the outline that need to be filled in first, but that shouldn’t be too hard.

Starting an epic fantasy

So my first draft of 23 Dragon Teeth currently sits at about 7,500 words, but this week I couldn’t resist starting on the epic fantasy idea I mentioned I’d been plotting in my last post. My outline for this epic fantasy is over ten times as long as my outline was for the 40K-word Son of a Dark Wizard, which means I estimate this epic fantasy will wind up reaching at least 400,000 words. Big word counts aren’t really that hard to reach, though; it’s very easy to write loads of bloated crap, it just takes time. The pacing is what’s difficult to get right. I’ve never tried something on this scale before, so we’ll see how it goes. I at least want to see how far into it I can get before my excitement for it fades. I’m currently only 2,000 words in. Not sure what I’ll call it yet, but for now I’ll call it Death of Ash.

23 Dragon Teeth, update 2

My first draft of 23 Dragon Teeth is now at around 5,800 words, and I’ve just started the catalyst scene. I’m not yet sure if I’m on track for the 45K-ish-word wordcount I’m aiming for or not, but I’m guessing I’ll go over it. Which is fine, I guess. I’m still writing slower than I’d like to be, but my creative energy has, for the last week, been partly stolen by interest in an idea for a long epic fantasy saga, so I spent quite a few hours daydreaming and plotting that out. Still a lot of planning to do on that project, but I may start writing it later this year; it’s been giving me the new-idea-excited-obsession-feel lately.

23 Dragon Teeth, update 1

I’ve finally started writing the first draft of my next novel, which I just finished plotting last week. It’s not the Son of a Dark Wizard sequel; it’ll still be quite some months before I start that. I’m starting another series, which will be three or four books in all. I’m not sure what the series title will be, but the first book will be called 23 Dragon Teeth. It’s about a teenager who’s descended from a mysterious family who have mind-control power over dragons, which he uses to try to save his village from intruders. Intruders who just happen to be… his family. Or what’s left of his family anyway. So there’s dragon magic, family drama, and sky dragon battles! A great recipe for a thrilling fantasy novel, I hope. I just finished the opening chapter this morning, so the first draft is officially underway.

It took me some four and a half months to finish the 40K-word rough draft for Son of a Dark Wizard. Since I’m officially going the indie-author route at the moment, I’m hoping I can be more disciplined about writing and finish this rough draft within a month. (I’m not going to stress it, though. Quality > Speed.) I’m again aiming for somewhere between 40K and 45K words; that wordcount seemed to work well for Son of a Dark Wizard; I think it’s a nice sweetspot for the sort of stories I want to tell.

Stormground, update 4

I still haven’t finished plotting this thing! But I’m getting closer. I’ve plotted the ending, so I’m now working backwards and forwards to connect the end and the middle. Writing will commence whenever I finish. (I’m currently focusing more on a sort of freelance programming project.)

While I still haven’t finished plotting, my friend and I did finally finish our co-authored short stories (one turning out to be a novelette). I’m really pleased with how they came out; they are definitely not stories I could’ve written on my own. Our co-writing process took a bit too long (almost eight months for two stories), but they are much more polished than anything I’ve written on my own.