How Does That (AI-Assisted Writing) Even Work?

A reflection about using AI-assisted writing after about 6 months...

When I started, it looked a lot like editing AI-generated stories so that they made sense.

Then it looked like better prompt-engineering. Telling the AI more about what the story should be in the first place.

Every week I find new things that AI might be good for, and a few that I’m better off just doing for myself.

It’s a work in progress… and no two stories are the result of the same process.

Today, I sat down—with no AI or any other kind of assistance—and just wrote for about 20 minutes. It was a stream of consciousness kind of thing. “Vomit Writing.” No stories. Not with a particular theme or prompt. Just trying to capture what’s on my mind.

Then I turned to one of my GPTs (more a “personal coach” than a writing assistant) and dumped those raw thoughts in to be sorted and analyzed. After that I started asking, is there anything here that could be used to write fiction?

Not happy with the “story seeds” that came up, I gave it more. “Here’s my current WIP… can we use this to improve the outline, especially relating to the “messy middle” parts…”

This was a bit more promising, although you have to wonder about what goes on in those data centers when it give you ideas like:

• One of the drones (MERMAID units) shows coral rewriting itself—creating new glyphs, rerouting nanite pathways.

• Perhaps the coral algorithms detect a “fracture of intent” in her—she’s torn between legacy and intuition, and the city refuses to obey her signals.

• She’s been partially altered—healed by coral, synced to Atlantean nanites, maybe even semi-merged with the Observer signal.

• Nobody knows what it means— (Oh, wait, that was a suggestion for the plot, not an analysis of the other suggestions…)

So I asked it to format the ideas in a list of questions for each of the main characters. FINALLY, I got something I felt could be useful as I work on the next revision of this outline:

🧭 PARKER

• What happens when the pursuit of truth costs someone else their safety?

• Can love exist without control or belief?

• What is the cost of obsession masquerading as purpose?

• If I’m the one who survived, what does that say about who I was to her?

• Can I be trusted to hold sacred things—or do I always break what I reach for?

👑 AMARA

• When does silence become complicity?

• What does it mean to lead when belief and tradition are hollow?

• Who do I betray by choosing truth over legacy?

• If I speak, who will be hurt—and is that my responsibility?

• Can I be sovereign without the crown, or does it own me now?

🔧 MIGUEL

• How do I reconcile human decency with systemic failure?

• When is it right to abandon the mission for a single life?

• Is it better to protect people from what they’re not ready for—or reveal everything?

• Can I justify lying to protect fragile hope?

• Am I a builder, a keeper, or just another witness to collapse?

🌊 RACHEL

• What happens when I see what I wasn’t meant to see?

• Can I forgive being brought into someone else’s dream?

• Where is the line between rescue and sacrifice?

• Do I get to choose what I become, or does survival choose for me?

• If I let go of who I was, do I betray the ones who loved me?

Okay, thanks for reading. I’m off to spend some time away from the computer working on this outline in the sun. Because AI can translate my handwriting into text I can copy and paste!