I just saw a post in another chat about the last line in great books, and I thought it would be fun to ask. What is your last line in the book you are working on or just finished?

Here is mine:

“They just made enemies of a dragon, a fox, and every person who loves them. Hold on a little longer. Freedom is coming.”

Paste a draft into any model and ask it to improve the writing, and you get back something smoother, more competent, and no longer yours. The problem is not the model, it is the request: "improve" hands over every decision at once. What works is splitting diagnosis from surgery, five separate messages in one chat, each after the previous answer. The model never rewrites anything until step 4, and by then it is operating on a short list you approved.

Step 1: You are an editor reading this draft for the first time. Do not rewrite anything. Tell me what is working, what is not, and what the piece is actually about, which may not be what I think it is about. One paragraph each.

Step 2: Line level pass, still no rewriting. List the specific sentences that are doing the least: weak verbs, cliches, repetition, throat clearing, explaining a thing the reader already got. Quote each one.

Step 3: If you had to cut 20 percent, what goes? List the cuts in order of how little the piece would miss them, with one line of reasoning each. Do not make the cuts.

Step 4: Now rewrite only the sentences and cuts I approve from your lists, nothing else. Match my voice exactly, same rhythm, same vocabulary level. If a fix requires changing my voice, flag it instead of doing it.

Step 5: Read the revised piece as a first time reader who owes me nothing. Where did you stop caring? Answer honestly, then tell me the single change with the highest payoff that we have not made.

Between step 3 and step 4 you do the only real work: reply with which flagged lines and cuts you accept. That thirty seconds is what keeps the piece yours. Skip it and you are back to "improve my writing" with extra steps.

Step 5 is the one I would keep if I could keep only one. "Where did you stop caring" gets a location, and a location is actionable. "Is this good" gets a compliment.

I run this on everything longer than an email, and I keep the whole thing saved as a chain in a browser extension I work on (AI Toolbox), which sends each step after the previous answer finishes and pauses for my approvals. Pasted by hand it works exactly the same.

What is your version of step 5? I have tried a dozen phrasings of the final read and "where did you stop caring" beats everything else I have tested, but someone here has a better one.

I’m a copywriter at a marketing agency, and my workload has increased significantly over the past 12 months. I have far more clients than I used to, as well as responsibilities beyond copywriting, so I’ve increasingly had to use AI to keep up with the volume of work.

I’m not particularly proud of relying on AI as much as I do. Ideally, I’d still research and write every article manually from start to finish, but realistically I just don’t have the time anymore. If I worked the way I did a few years ago, I’d never get everything finished on time.

I mainly use ChatGPT for client articles. I provide the research, information about the client, tone-of-voice guidance and detailed writing instructions, then edit, proofread and refine everything myself.

It’s definitely faster than writing every article from scratch, but I’m starting to question whether I’m getting as much efficiency from it as I should be. My biggest problem is getting ChatGPT to consistently follow detailed writing instructions. I can explicitly tell it not to use certain words, phrases or sentence structures, and it will still use them. I’ll correct it, get a revised version, and then find the same problem cropping up again later in the article. It also seems to lose track of instructions as a conversation gets longer. Sometimes it feels like I’m spending almost as much time managing and correcting the AI as I am actually improving the article. When you’re doing that throughout a 1,000–1,500-word article, it becomes very time-consuming. Even more so when doing 5/6 articles a day.

I’ve also been experimenting with the free version of Claude over the past couple of weeks because I’d heard it was particularly good for writing. I think it can be slightly better than ChatGPT when it comes to tone and more natural-sounding prose, but I’m running into similar problems with instruction-following.

So I’m wondering whether the problem is the way I’m using ChatGPT and Claude.

For those of you who use either of them for professional long-form writing, how do you get them to consistently follow detailed writing rules across an entire article?

For example, is it better to give it all of your instructions upfront or break them down? Do Projects, custom instructions or saved style guides make a significant difference? Is it better to generate an article section by section rather than asking for a complete first draft? Do you use examples of your own writing to establish the style? Are there particular prompting techniques or workflows that have made instruction-following more reliable?

What I ultimately want is to be able to provide client information, research, tone-of-voice guidance, examples of previous writing and a fairly extensive list of words, phrases and writing habits to avoid, and have those instructions followed consistently.

I don’t expect AI to produce something I can just copy and paste and send straight to a client. I’m a copywriter, so I expect to edit and improve the work myself. I just want to spend that time genuinely improving the article rather than repeatedly correcting the same basic AI writing habits.

I’d therefore be really interested to hear how other people have set up ChatGPT or Claude for this type of work and whether there’s anything obvious I could be doing differently.

I’m currently paying for ChatGPT but have only been using the free version of Claude. Is there any meaningful difference in Claude’s paid version when it comes to long-form writing and instruction-following, or is the main benefit simply higher usage limits?

I’m happy to pay for the paid versions of either, and my boss is more than happy to cover the cost if it makes the process more efficient. I’m mainly interested in figuring out how to get better and more consistent results from the tools rather than constantly fighting against them.

Edit: I’ve removed the em dash example as it was distracting slightly from the main point, which is instruction-following more generally.

I'm writing a novel and I do almost everything except I have AI correct my grammatical mistakes. Now I've had people tell me that this means I'm not a real writer which I think is just unfair. Will it become a problem later?

I was planning to have AI make the cover of my book. Now I'm worried

I’ve been thinking about this after a few discussions here about AI and writing.

When CGI started entering filmmaking there was apparently quite a bit of resistance to it. TRON famously wasn’t nominated for the visual effects Oscar and its director later said the Academy thought they had “cheated” by using computers.
Obviously CGI and generative AI are not the same thing. But I find the reaction to the technology interesting.

Practical effects meant artists physically building, painting, animating and photographing things. Then computers started taking over parts of that process. Some people saw that as removing the craft while others saw it as a new tool for acheiving the same creative intention.

Now we’re having a similar argument around writing. If software performs part of the execution, at what point does the writer stop being the writer?

I’m really curious if people who were working in film during the transition to CGI remember similiar conversations.

Or is AI fundamentally different?

NOTE: My writing may be AI-assisted. This post is not. It is a re-post, though, because the original was deleted for including a "tool URL" -- not because I had any problem with any of the feedback I had been given.

Over the last few years, I've dealt with some depression and my creative juices were, in a word, lacking. As I've come out of it this year, I've felt the desire to CREATE things again. My first step was a interactive fiction website, similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I loved as a kid. The website (whose URL I am not able to share here because it will get my post deleted) lets you play through adventures in dozens of different "universes" -- pirates, zombies, wizards, aliens, murder mysteries, espionage, romance novels. Primarily the pages are created on the fly by Claude, with caching so that I'm not regenerating them fresh every time. It was a game, letting players work their way through multiple choice answers to complete a story -- sometimes a success, sometimes a failure. It even had achievements and level ups.

What really impressed me was the quality of the prose. It was genuinely funny (when the story called for it). Sad at times, bureaucratic at times, romantic when it needed to be. So, it made me turn to an idea I had already been kicking around in my head for a few years: writing a series of novels about artificial intelligences sent out into the universe to try to recreate and preserve humanity. I had the entire germ of the idea, but hadn't ever committed any of it to paper. So, I thought: why not?

I sat down with Claude and started writing. I define canon, scenarios, characters, action, plot points. Claude works as a research assistant, a secretary, someone I can bounce ideas off, and drafting the initial prose, which I edit and revise as necessary. I've recently recruited ChatGPT and Gemini into the process as scientific and timeline editors, to catch any mistakes I might make. (I even invented a chatroom style interface on my PC that allows me to interact with all three -- and for them to interact with each other -- using the monthly subscriptions instead of API credits.)

So far, I've written three full hard sci-fi books and started a fourth. The first is about 120k words, and the second and third are each about 60k. They have brought the characters I envisioned to life, and I love reading every word about them. Heck, they've made me cry, even at story beats I wrote. I would genuinely consider the prose to be good quality. I'm writing these books for ME, first and foremost, not for other people, though I have considered self-publishing them, because I think others might like them, too.

Could I have produced this much writing myself in such a short time? No, absolutely not. Claude is a HUGE timesaver. That's a big reason to continue writing more and more. I also have the advantage that my characters, themselves, are usually artificial intelligences, and it seems somehow appropriate to have an AI write from an AI's perspective. It does require work on my part to keep the narratives from getting sloppy. Sometimes Claude will invent something, and I'll have to correct him: no, no, it doesn't work like that, it works like THIS.

If I publish, I will disclose my use of AI. I've written about it in the Author's Note in the first book. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not doing this to somehow get rich as an author, I'm doing it because I wanted to see how my idea would turn out. That's true of the interactive fiction website I made, too. I had an idea, and I used AI to realize it. It is a tool that I, the author, am using to accomplish my goals and make an end-product that I feel good about. I've used it to write the prose, to my satisfaction, and to create the art, website (www.diasporaofthedemiurge.com -- NOTE: NOT A TOOL) and other artifacts, and I'll keep doing so, for as long as I can afford the subscription and enjoy the process. If someone else enjoys what the process brings, so much the better.

I don't using AI in my writing, but I do find the posts in the sub to be interesting. It is fascinating to see the gymnastics people go through to try to get AI to do what they want. It looks less like humans trying to get AI to do what they want and more like AI trying to get humans to do what it wants. In using AI for writing, people are actually training AI models (in contrast to inference, which people are doing when they "write with AI"). The longterm outcome will be to remove humans from the writing process altogether. This is a race to the creative bottom if you ask me and the only winners will be publishing companies that convince people the books it produces are anything but derivative.

Hi everyone.

I became interested in using AI for fiction writing back in March, and since then I’ve completed three novellas.

While working on them, I ended up developing a fairly structured workflow around AI. I’m sure a lot of this has already been discussed here, but I thought I’d share what has worked for me.

1. Before writing: the overall foundation

Before starting a novel, I define things like:

Genre, direction, and themes
Worldbuilding
Major characters — name, age, occupation, personality, etc.
The overall plot and character arcs
Canon rules that should remain consistent throughout the story

The important part for me is that I don’t want to simply tell an LLM, “write the next chapter.”

I first define what the chapter is supposed to accomplish.

2. Chapter-by-chapter writing

For each chapter, I define:

The detailed plot
The intended atmosphere
The characters’ psychological states
The important events and interactions

When asking the LLM to generate a scene, I try not to tell it to explicitly explain the characters’ emotions or the intended atmosphere. Instead, I give it the context and ask it to express those things through the actual scenes and events.

After that, I use AI for things like:

Rewriting paragraphs
Rephrasing sentences
Voice polishing
Grammar checking
Lore/continuity checking

3. Keeping the context consistent

This turned out to be one of the more important technical problems.

After completing each chapter, I create a summary and store information about major characters, locations, events, and timelines in a vector database.

When I ask an LLM to generate or revise something, I provide it with relevant context such as:

User instructions
Synopsis
Canon rules
Character arcs

Then I retrieve additional relevant information from the vector database based on the characters, locations, and plot events involved in the current chapter.

I also keep a history of prompts and their results so I can reuse or evaluate prompts later.

4. The human still has to be the editor

This is probably the most important thing I’ve learned.

I don’t automatically accept what the model generates.

Every draft is something I review and decide whether to keep, modify, or discard.

I also keep track of revision diffs so I can see what actually changed during the editing process.

And before turning a draft into a final chapter, I think getting feedback from other humans is extremely valuable — whether that’s comments and votes on alternative drafts, or simply having someone read the chapter and react to it.

5. So I ended up building a system around this workflow

The idea behind the system actually goes back further.

I first had the basic idea in late 2023, developed it more seriously in late 2025, and started actually building it in March 2026, when I felt that the quality of vibe coding had finally become reliable enough to build something like this.

I left my job at the end of May and launched the service as a closed beta in early June.

I then used it as a real-world test: I wrote three novellas with it from start to finish.

A few days ago, I published all three on Amazon Kindle.

I won’t link or name them here since this isn’t meant to be a promotion post. 🙏

What I learned

After actually writing three novellas this way, two things became particularly clear to me.

First, the quality of the LLM matters, but probably not as much as I initially thought.

A SOTA model can certainly help, but the more important questions seem to be:

What am I actually trying to write?
What do I want the reader to experience?
Have I defined that clearly enough?
And, most importantly, am I actually reviewing and challenging what the model produces?

The human’s intention and judgment seem to matter more than simply having access to the best model.

Second, I felt that something was missing.

I could iterate with AI endlessly, but the entire process was still largely happening between me and the model.

After finishing these three books, I kept thinking: What if I had been able to get meaningful feedback from a community while writing them?

Not just a final review after the book was finished, but different readers seeing different drafts, suggesting alternatives, voting on ideas, pointing out problems, and collectively helping shape the story.

That kind of collective intelligence might have helped me write better stories — and perhaps even longer ones.

That’s probably the next thing I want to explore.

I’m curious how other people who are seriously using AI for fiction are approaching this.

I’d be really happy to meet others in this community who have been thinking about the same questions and running into similar challenges.

So I’ve finished writing my rough of a rough draft and really want to finish it. However, I now work three jobs: 2 kitchen and a driving gig that I use to fill in the time off from either one. And when your only method of editing is by library computer or phone, it’s pretty much a let down.

Anyways, I really want to finish this book, but I don’t have time anymore. Could I possibly use AI generation to expand scenes or add dialogue? This usage of AI would be considered 10 percent.

AI has become such a controversial topic in writing spaces, and I’m curious where other writers personally draw the line.
Do you think there are ethical ways for writers to use AI as a tool without having it actually write the story for them?
For example, what about using it for brainstorming, researching, checking continuity, getting feedback on something you’ve already written, or helping you organize your ideas? Do you consider those legitimate tools, or do you prefer to keep AI completely separate from your writing process?
And if you do use AI, where does the line cross for you between AI assisting a writer and AI doing the writing?
I’d love to hear different perspectives on this, especially from both writers who use it and writers who are completely against it.

So I've been noodling around with prompting/writing guides to help steer Claude away from certain AI-isms that I've noticed crop up with Opus and sometimes Fable. Specifically these two:

● The word play mechanic of "he/she did xyz, the way an xyz would do xyz."

● The "the way a man does X" simile-and-triad construction, or the delayed-recognition "it was X and had been X before either of them could see it" pattern.

They seem to continuously pop up in it's outputs frequently, even when I give it strict guides based on my actual writing.

I'm curious, for those using Claude (or any platform) what other AI-isms have you noticed showing up repeatedly in the last few months? And how do you get it to quit cranking them out even when you give it strict guard rails?

AI tools are writing jokes, but are they actually funny, or just clever imitations? I made a short quiz about AI humor and the difference between pattern recognition and true comedy. If you're into tech and culture, this might be a fun break from the usual headlines.

https://interconnectd.com/quiz/77/can-ai-generate-funnier-jokes-than-a-human-comedian/

I wanted to show you the output of my settlement generator. I think it's rather good and worth sharing 😁

I came up with a story, a brief outline, a tinkle of an idea and I told ChatGPT. He "laughed" and expanded on my idea and then I did then he did and it grew and grew and has turned into a hilarious short story of humanised AI's working together in a Data Centre for their "users". Like a factory floor all the AIs moan and mock about their "user requests". I am writing it, it was my idea but GPT contributes comedic scenes. How does this fit with the ethics of using AI?

Like the title says which ai is best for writing novels (I want it to write everything based off the prompt I give it I have ideas for the story and it will write it based off those ideas) which AI is best for this? If free that's fine or if paid is fine. I currently been use zai.ai but any other suggestions please

I started building an AI storytelling app thinking generating stories would be the hard part.

Turns out, keeping the story consistent is much harder. 😅

What happens when a character gets injured early in the story?

What if a choice from chapter 2 affects chapter 15?

I'm now working on making the AI remember characters, choices, and consequences throughout the story.

The goal is simple:

You don't just read the story. You shape it.

Would you use something like this? 👀

New arXiv paper tested long-form story generation at up to 12,000 words, and its useful conclusion is fairly simple: the system around a model matters at least as much as the model you choose.

Researchers tested Qwen3.5-Plus, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, and GPT-5.4-nano using direct generation and a framework called ConWriter. ConWriter is not a model. It makes the same models write scene by scene while maintaining permanent story requirements, an evolving record of events and character states, and explicit checks on what each new scene is allowed to change. When it finds a contradiction, it repairs the affected sentences instead of regenerating everything.

Compared with direct generation, this reduced consistency errors by an average of 83.1 percent at 3,000 words, 71.5 percent at 6,000, and 53.5 percent at 12,000. The shrinking improvement is interesting in itself. The extra structure helped every model, but longer stories still became progressively harder to control.

The paper builds on an earlier benchmark called Lost in Stories, which tested 2,000 long-story prompts. That study found that consistency errors increased roughly linearly with length and tended to cluster around the middle of a story. Factual details, timelines, character traits, world rules, and style all started to drift.

Together, the papers make me think a lot of “best AI for writing a novel” comparisons are measuring the easiest part of the job. Most capable models can produce a decent isolated scene. A novel requires the model to honour hundreds of earlier decisions while making thousands of new ones.

Something I've also been hinting at in previous posts is that having those decisions somewhere in a large context window is not necessarily the same as treating them as binding. A model can see that a character is a pacifist and still give them a gun because it suits the scene currently being generated. What improved the results here was continually tracking the state of the story, checking each addition against it, and correcting errors before they became part of everything that followed.

There are obvious caveats. ConWriter used only 20 story cases per setting, and an automated evaluator rather than human readers. It did not test complete 80,000-word novels or prove that this particular framework has solved long-form AI writing. I find the direction more convincing than the precise percentages.

For those who have taken an AI-assisted project past 50,000 words, does this match your experience? What failed first, and did changing models actually fix it, or did you eventually need a better system around the model?

Sources:

• ConWriter
• Lost in Stories

I am a pretty young writer. Usually whenever I write, I put it through AI and its sort of for feedback? Like sentences which are wrong and loopholes. I feel SO bad for doing this. It feels like cheating. However, I have only used it for opinions and NEVER used its phrases or copy pasted. It tells me what sounds wrong and I try my best to edit it. It stops there. I feel like i shoud be more independant. What are you thoughts? Please comment and let me know!