How to Write an AI-assisted Novel

There’s a lot of videos about how to write books with AI.

Most are bullshit.

Hayden Academy Collective (HAC) Studios: Backstage is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

They’re hyped up demos promising insane profits offering little guidance about how to make use of the technology. This has turned many away from AI.

But if you’re someone who seriously wants to develop an idea into a novel, then AI tools can be insanely helpful.

You can outline, visualize your world and characters, make progress when the words aren’t flowing - the uses are only limited to your imagination.

Yet this comes with a new set of problems. How do you reign in the options? How do you decide what to use and what’s refuse?

By showing you my AI-assisted novel writing process, these are skills I hope to help you develop.

I’ve been experimenting with AI for writing for a year and a half. I’ve used it to write blog posts, social media content, notes, music, and even whole books.

The fact is, writing with AI is misunderstood. Most think it’s entering a prompt and having the AI write everything for you. While that’s a way to use the tool it’s not very effective (on it’s own AI doesn’t produce writing specific to you).

Most think this is a question of quality. I read accounts daily of how AI “has no soul” or how “it can’t do what a human does”.

These people are in denial. I’ve witnessed AI produce emotionally compelling writing many times. It’s only gotten better since I started experimenting with it back in 2022. As far as not having soul…that’s a highly subjective measure.

Something that has “soul” to me may sound flat to you.

What concerns me more about AI generated writing (or anything else) is the lack of specificity.

Prompting it to generate a story about a happy boy who gets lost on the way to school, is much different than asking it to write a story about Enrique, the Mexican kid in South Texas who wears a green backpack that gets caught up in an adventure in Waco on the way to school.

The more you have a pre-existing idea, the harder it is to make use of AI because without human intervention, capturing those specific details is very hard.

That brings me back to this video. I’m documenting my process writing an original novel in my flagship series to show you that there are no instant specific novels with AI. Only a series of interactions that over time build to something worth reading.

I hope you find it helpful.

Hayden Academy Collective (HAC) Studios: Backstage is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.