Doing that ID List exercise I mentioned in my last post has already paid off. One item I came up with was “the ditz goes steely,” which is when a frivolous or comic relief character gets serious. I noticed how much I liked this kind of thing when I was watching Wicked: For Good and got such a thrill out of the moment when Glinda took charge. That movie has a two-fer, with Fiyero doing something similar (though he was already getting serious in the first movie, so it wasn’t so abrupt). You also see that in Legally Blonde, and it’s what the whole Barbie movie was building to. There’s just something about a seemingly shallow goofball getting serious and putting the startled villain in his place that makes you want to cheer.

And what that boils down to is a character transformation. It’s really satisfying when you can see a character change, and it’s more dramatic when a character makes a big change, like from ditz to badass. It’s even better when it’s not just the audience who sees the change, but the other characters are also taken aback when the fluffy lap dog growls and bites them.

Then I realized that I don’t really write this. My main characters usually have it more or less together even at the beginning of the book, and their growth is more subtle, bringing out hidden parts of them or just a bit of increased awareness. I seem to resist or be afraid of letting a character be a bit of a mess at the beginning of a book. But the book I’m currently working on is one where it fits. The heroine isn’t actually a ditz. She’s quite brainy, but she is naive. She’s also a big chicken who wants to be braver but hasn’t figured out that to get braver you have to be in situations that require bravery, and she recoils from those. Only I wasn’t really writing her this way. She and other people accuse her of playing it safe, but the first moment she’s required to be brave, she has no problems with it. I’m writing her at the beginning the way she should be at the end.

So I’m regrouping and doing some rewriting, and I can already see that this is lighting a spark to the story. It’s funnier and it’s more interesting with more internal and external conflict, and I suspect that the moment when she finds her courage and takes a risk is going to be even more satisfying when I get there.

But this does mean going back to the start and doing a fair amount of rewriting because it changes most of the scenes, and each change means more changes later. It’s good that I figured this out before I got halfway into the book.

I took a dive into a new project yesterday, so I’ll be in first draft mode for the next month or so. That means I will have little brain for anything else. I’d actually already written the opening scene. I got an idea for how it should go a couple of months ago and wrote it to get it out of my head. Today I revisited it and revised it to fit the outline I eventually came up with, then moved on and wrote more of the scene.

That worked pretty well. Usually, starting a book is kind of scary. It feels like standing on the high dive, knowing you’re going to have to jump and plunge in. But when I wrote out that opening scene months ago, it didn’t feel like I was starting a book because I didn’t even really have a plot yet. I was just playing around. But then when I started working on it today, that didn’t feel like I was starting a book, either, because I was editing something I’d already written. It took all the scary out of it. It was more like easing in via the pool steps after sitting on the edge of the pool with my feet in the water than like jumping off the high dive.

There’s still a lot of unknown ahead of me, even though I have a detailed outline and synopsis. My synopsis is more than 4,000 words, which would be about 20 pages in manuscript format. I was worried I had too much story for a book. But then when I started breaking it out into scenes to outline the scenes, I worried that I didn’t have enough scenes. It’s likely that some of these scenes will be broken down into multiple scenes, and I may come up with ideas along the way that will be inserted. My outline isn’t so rigid that it doesn’t have room to adjust as I write. It’s more of a framework to make sure I have everything I need to cover the story and character arcs.

I’m not going to try to do a full writing schedule for the rest of this week with the kind of word count I usually expect. I’m still testing the waters and getting a feel for the characters. I also need to do some prep work around the house so I have less to worry about once I get into the book. I need to do some cooking to have meals ready to go and I want to do a good house cleaning so it’ll be easier to maintain while I’m focused on writing. Starting this week without considering it official writing time should give me some momentum to get on a good pace next week.

At this point, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything on social media, but I was astonished recently to learn that a big hot take in book circles on social media is people who refuse to read books written in first-person narration because they don’t like being told what they’re doing and don’t like reading about doing things that they don’t agree with. It seems someone is confused by what first-person narration means.

I’m sure most people reading this are okay with first person, since most of my books are written that way, but I need to get this off my chest, and maybe this will give you some ammunition if you run into someone talking like that.

First-person narration is when the narrator is a character in the story, so it uses first-person pronouns like “I,” “me,” “we,” “my,” etc. This does not mean that you are the “I” in the story. It’s someone else telling you a story about what happened to them. It’s like if a friend sent you an e-mail about the crazy thing that just happened to her. You wouldn’t think those things were happening to you because it was told from the perspective of “I.” You are seeing things through that character’s perspective because they’re the one telling the story, but you, yourself, are not becoming that character. I like that conversational and confessional tone to this kind of narration, that sense that you’re sitting with a friend, hearing the story, or else reading a letter. In fact, a lot of early novels were written in first person because they were in the form of letters. I’ve joked about 19th century Inception with the layers, where the book is a letter written to someone about a story someone told that narrator, who learned the story from a letter they received.

For the stories in which you do become the narrator, that’s second-person narration, the “you” books. You see this in the “choose your own adventure” type of stories, where you’re meant to take the role of the main character and aren’t given many details about who this character is, then the story unfolds based on choices you make. It also shows up in more literary stories that are meant to immerse you in a particular setting and type of person so that you experience it as the character as you read.

Third-person narration is probably the most common style of narration in genre fiction. That’s the books that describe the action with words like “he,” “she,” and “they.” Most of the current books are in third-person limited perspective or “close third.” This is very similar to first-person, aside from the pronouns, because you’re in the head of the viewpoint character and the narration may even reflect their voice. If the perspective switches to another character, it’s usually in a different scene or chapter. It’s generally called head hopping if the story switches close perspectives within a scene because it forces the reader to rapidly move from one character’s head to another.

The main difference between first and close third, aside from the pronouns, is the narrator character’s awareness. The first-person narrator knows they’re telling a story, so they choose what to tell and how to tell it. That’s why first person is commonly used for unreliable narrator stories in which the narrator selectively leaves out or skews information so that the reader has an inaccurate view of events. The close third-person narrator doesn’t know they’re a character in a story. They’re just going through their life, and the reader is hitching a ride in their brain, so they’re privy to the character’s feelings and secrets, even if that character wouldn’t choose to tell anyone.

You may also see third-person omniscient narration, in which the narrator sees and knows all and can dip into all the characters’ heads. I think of this as “storyteller voice” because the narrator may not be an active participant in the story, but they have a viewpoint and opinions. It’s almost like first-person, except the narrator isn’t involved in the story. Jane Austen’s books are like this. They’re very much told from Jane’s perspective, so we get her views and opinions on all the characters as she tells us what’s going on in the heads of many of the characters. Terry Pratchett also used this kind of narration, even with footnotes to explain things. He was telling us this story, and he knew what was going on with everyone.

So, if you’re worried about being forced to become a main character you don’t agree with when you read “I” books, you can relax. You aren’t the main character. You’re listening to someone else’s story.

The hardest part of most books for me is the ending. I’m seldom entirely satisfied with the way my books end. Some of that is because I’m usually getting tired and eager to just get it over with by the time I get to writing the last couple of chapters, so I tend to rush through them. The first draft is often just at the level of “and then they beat the bad guys, the end” so that I can be done. And that’s if I even know what the ending is at all.

I used to have a bad habit of outlining up to a point, and then when I wasn’t sure how to end the story, I’d give up and start writing, with the idea that I’d figure it out by the time I got there. I usually didn’t, which meant I spent a lot of time rewriting once I did figure out an ending because I needed to set up the ending. Writing series makes it even harder because I need to decide how much to wrap up and how much to carry over to the next book.

When I do know the ending before I start writing, when that scene is clear, it’s so much easier to write the book and I do a lot less rewriting, so I’m forcing myself to work on the outline until I know the ending before I start writing. Or even figure out the ending before outlining the rest of the book. That’s where I am now with a book I’ve been developing. I had no idea where to end it, which made it nearly impossible to outline the rest of the story. Without knowing the end, I didn’t know the characters’ goals or what they would do to achieve them that would lead to that point. Earlier this week, I finally figured out an ending I love, so now I’m working to outline the rest of the book in a way that leads to that ending.

But what makes a good ending? I’ve been trying to think of my favorite endings, the ones that make me close a book with a sigh and a smile, maybe wiping away a few tears or else trying to get my heart rate under control. I’ve joked about the George Lucas ending, which has a 1-2-3 format — usually a big, cathartic moment (like blowing up the Death Star), then hugs (the reunion when Luke and Han make it back to the rebel base), then some kind of concluding moment (the medal ceremony). It’s not in all the movies, but it does seem to show up in the ones that end triumphantly.

There’s a popular romance writer who indulges in a bit of emotional manipulation. Her books leave you with a tear in your eye, which gives you the sense that this was a really good book that hit you emotionally. But once when I was reading one of her books on an airplane and had to put it in my bag before I got to the end, when I was at a point I otherwise wouldn’t have put the book down until it was done, I figured out her trick. Just before the romantic happy ending when the hero and heroine get over their issues and declare their love, there’s always something sad that happens — usually an older person dies, a kid gets sick/injured, an animal almost dies (but not dies because killing an animal in a romance novel can kill your career) — or else something good and emotional happens — the sick kid or animal miraculously recovers. This incident usually has very little to do with the main plot, aside from involving a character who’s been around during the book. This big, emotional scene means you have tears already in your eyes for that romantic ending and when you finish reading the book, which makes you feel like the book was great. When I had to stop reading just after that emotional part and didn’t pick the book up again until I got through the airport and made it to my destination, so the emotion was gone, the romantic happy ending hit differently and I had a much flatter impression of the book. Normally, you’d be close enough to the end that you were definitely going to read it straight through, but it didn’t work when I was forced to stop reading. I looked back at her other books and realized she did this all the time. I started thinking of it as the “throw the kid under a bus ending.” I don’t think I’m going to try that in my writing, but it’s an interesting idea to make sure readers end the book feeling really engaged with it.

I mostly want to feel like the main character has been transformed in some way or has achieved something. I want the villain and any other annoying characters to get some kind of comeuppance. For a series, I prefer to have at least something in the story wrapped up while enough is left hanging to make me want the next book right away. For a standalone book, I want that sense of “ah, this is just the way things are supposed to be.” But even while I like things wrapped up, I also like a sense that these characters will go on with their lives and do more stuff, even if I don’t get to see it. If my imagination has something to work with, the book is more likely to linger in my mind. I don’t want all the details about their future, so I’m not a fan of those romance epilogues in which the wedding happens or the baby is born. I’d rather imagine that for myself.

What kind of endings do you like?

I’ve been developing a story idea, with a goal of starting to write after Easter. I don’t know if that will happen. I’ve got the main characters figured out and a good sense of the world, but I seem to be lacking a plot. I have a general sense of the main character’s inner growth arc and a big-picture goal, but I have no idea how to get there. I was feeling like I had a lot of the book figured out, but when I wrote down the scenes I knew, it was basically the first act before the story really gets going. The rest is a blank.

This is not a new problem for me. I don’t know how many first chapters I wrote before I actually managed to finish a book, but it took me more than ten years of playing at writing. I was great at coming up with situations and characters, but once I got the characters into those situations, I didn’t know where to go from there. There was a huge empty space between the character getting a mission or assignment and them succeeding in triumph.

I did manage to finish a few books before I started really learning how to plot, mostly because I was writing category romance, so there was a strictly defined structure built-in. It was all about the characters and situation. The conflict was built into the characters and situation, and you just had to go back and forth between attraction and conflict until they overcame the conflict. There wasn’t a lot of external plot.

I finally had an Aha! moment when I saw a workshop on the Hero’s Journey, and it started to make some kind of sense. Just knowing those major turning points helped me considerably. I was able to write Enchanted, Inc. based on that structure.

Since then, I’ve been kind of obsessed with learning about structure and figuring out the ways to put a plot together, but it can still be something of a challenge. Some books fall together easily. Some take a lot more work. Usually, the less focused I am to begin with, the harder it is to figure out a plot. I used to just work out the beginning (the part I usually know best) and have a vague outline and figure the rest would come to me as I started writing, but I’ve learned the hard way that it doesn’t work well for me when I try that. That’s when I have to do major rewrites of the sort where I scrap half the book and start over, or when I write the whole book, am never entirely happy with it, and my agent tells me it’s not something she thinks she can sell. I was the worst of both worlds between a “plotter” and a “pantser,” in that I couldn’t start writing without an outline, but the outline was so vague I didn’t have a lot of structure and got very lost, so I had to write the book to figure out what it was about, and then I had to rewrite it.

I’ve learned that the more detailed an outline I have and the more structure there is to that outline, the better the book ends up being for me. I can write it faster with less frustration and procrastination and I don’t have to do major revisions. I may still need to make changes, often adding or removing scenes, but the structure still mostly holds together. I do all that figuring out what the book is about and scrapping it and restructuring that in the outline rather than in the actual book.

That’s why I’m forcing myself to really think through this book and work out what the plot needs to be before I let myself start writing (well, I have written the first scene, but just because it came to me and I wanted to grab it before I forgot it). The more specific I get up front, the better the book ends up being. I still get ideas as I write and I can go with the flow, but I need that structural framework to begin with or it ends up being just a mess. So, that will be next week’s fun, in between choir rehearsals and services. If I have a good outline by the Monday after Easter, I’ll start writing. If not, then I’ll keep working on plotting.

This week I’ve gone back to my draft of Pottery & Peril (tentative title, but I suspect it will stick), book 5 of the Tales of Rydding Village, to review it and develop a revision plan. It’s been about a month and a half since I finished the first draft, so it’s ready to look at again. I went through scene by scene to analyze what was happening and what needed to be added or deleted and to spot patterns. I made a plan for revisions, and now I’ll make the major revisions (anything that affects the plot or character arcs) and let it rest again before I start tinkering with the words. I like to let it rest between drafts so it’s less familiar and I’m coming to it more as a reader would, without all the knowledge that was in my head as I wrote it.

I don’t think the revisions will be too extensive. I mostly need to play up the emotional arcs and make some character motivations clearer, but the plot seems to hold together pretty well. Doing an extensive outline and really making myself think through the specifics before I start writing is paying off in that it allows me to write the first draft more quickly and easily and I don’t need to take the whole book apart when I’m revising.

I’m currently in the outlining stage for another book, so I needed this reminder. Whenever I try to tell myself that I have a good idea of where it’s going and I can figure the rest out as I get there, I remember that it never works well when I do that. It’s a lot easier to revise an outline that isn’t working than to do multiple versions of the same book, trying to get it to work. I’m impatient to start writing (and I even wrote the opening scene last week), but the book is nowhere near ready to be written. Maybe by the end of the revisions on this other book this one will be ready. I’ve been working on revisions in the morning and brainstorming in the afternoon and evening.

I got my pieces from the pottery class I took to research Pottery & Peril, and they look rather like a kindergartener’s art project. Pottery is definitely something that takes a lot of practice to get good at, and while I enjoyed it, I’m not sure I enjoyed it enough to want to put in that kind of time (and expense) in order to master it. I did learn a lot that will be going into the book during this round of revisions, little details about how the clay feels, how rough your hands get after working with clay, and how long it takes to do things. I had to adjust the book’s timeline so that a character could start making a piece during the book and have it finished before the end, since it turns out that pottery has to dry completely before it can be fired, and that can take weeks. I’m cutting it close, as it is.

It definitely feels like there has to be some magic involved, especially when dealing with the glazes, since the glaze colors look nothing like the result after the glazed pieces have been fired. There’s a chemical reaction, and glazes drip in the kiln and merge with other glazes. The red pieces looked pink before they were fired. The dark blue came out almost black. The light blue turned more grayish. We had sample tiles showing what they’d look like, but there were still some differences.

One thing I tend to get praised for in my books is my characters. I seem to write characters that readers fall in love with and like spending time with. I have to admit that I like my own characters. I could spend time with most of them without them having to do anything (in fact, there are a lot of scenes that end up getting cut because they aren’t needed for the plot and are just the characters hanging out). I don’t have one particular process for creating characters, but there are a number of things I may do.

Sometimes a story idea starts with a character and I try to find a story to fit them into. Sophie in the Fairy Tale series was one of these. She’d been living in my head for a long time before I figured out where to put her. But most often, I come up with a story concept first and then figure out what characters I need to tell that story. Usually there’s a character who comes up first, who may or may not be the main character, and then the other characters build outward from there. In the book I’m currently developing, I knew something about who the main character would be, but they were pretty vague still. It was another character who came to life first, and then from there I was able to flesh out the main character, and as I developed the setting and the story more, other characters started coming into focus.

There are a few tools I use to find the characters. I’m fond of the Enneagram, which sorts people into personality types. Generally I can read through these and one will jump out as a good fit for a character, and then as I go through the descriptions, the character will start to come to life in my head. At that point, I start adding other details and usually don’t refer to the Enneagram again. I may also play with archetypes. At this point, I can do the usual character worksheets to get physical description, goals, needs, key things from the backstory, character traits and quirks, personality, likes and dislikes, etc. I try to throw in at least one thing that’s a bit unexpected so that the character isn’t a stereotype. Just one trait that’s the opposite of what you’d expect for that kind of person really brings a character to life and makes them feel more three-dimensional.

If a character hasn’t solidified during this process, I may “cast” the character, thinking of an actor who might be a good fit. Then I can usually start hearing their voice in my head, and once the character has come to life, I can ditch the casting.

A big thing about creating a character is what the character wants, and that comes in layers.

There’s the story goal, which is usually an external, concrete thing. You could write a movie scene (so no introspection) showing them getting this thing. It’s something that comes up during the story, mostly for the protagonist, but other characters may have their own goals for subplots, or they may support or oppose the protagonist’s goal.

Then there’s the personal goal. This is something the character already wants at the beginning of the story. In musicals and Disney movies, there’s often an “I Want” song at the beginning, and this tells you what the character’s personal goal is. Think “Part of Your World” in The Little Mermaid. She wants to be human at the beginning of the story, before she knows the prince even exists. It’s only later that she gets the story goal of getting the prince to kiss her so she can stay human. There may also/instead be a need, something the character needs in order to be their true self or be happy but that they don’t even know they need. They think the thing they want will make them happy or change their life, but the need is the thing that will really work. The personal goal may either conflict or dovetail with the story goal. The personal goal can be somewhat abstract, so you may not necessarily be able to write a movie scene of them getting it, but it will be clear that they have it.

Then there’s what I call the drive, the need deep down inside that causes the character to make the kinds of decisions they make. It’s a need that can never truly be met because they’ll always either need it or fear losing it. These drives are basic things like the need for love, security, power, control, etc. Yeah, everyone needs these things to some degree, but the drive is the one that powers the character, and it doesn’t change unless the character goes through a transformation so profound that they’re basically a different person.

Once I know these things about a character, I can develop a plot that forces them to change and grow and that will be driven by them making choices that are consistent with their character. But as I plot I may come up with ideas for the characters, so it tends to go back and forth. Characters drive the plot, which alters the characters.

I generally know a character is ready to write when I find myself imagining them in scenes that won’t be part of the plot, just them in normal life before the story begins, doing things like their job or hanging out with friends. I can see how they’d react to various events and what they do when there’s no crisis going on. Then I feel like I really know the character, so it’s time to throw them into the story.

I’m documenting my process as I start work on a new book, in part to give my readers a glimpse into how a book comes to life and in part to have as evidence in case anyone ever tries to accuse me of using AI (I don’t even know how to get to an AI to use it and have zero interest in learning).

I’m developing a story idea that isn’t ready to write yet. This one’s been on a long, strange journey. I remember the moment I first got the germ of the idea. I was making my bed (I actually have two ideas I came up with while making my bed — is that the new shower for idea generation?) when it struck me. I developed and wrote a whole book based on it, but it didn’t really work. I sent it to my agent, and she agreed that it didn’t work.

But then sometime last year (I think it was actually while I was making my bed) I came up with a different approach to the basic idea, aiming at a new audience and going in a very different direction. That was when things started coming together. I read some books and watched some movies and shows that were in roughly the same genre, mostly as a way of stimulating my brain along those lines. I thought about what I liked about those things and what didn’t work for me and what I would do differently, plus I knew what I needed to steer away from to make my take on it unique.

I also tried to find some real-world parallels to some of the things in the idea. Sometimes this is an excuse for me to read history, but I think using real events as a skeleton to a story idea gives it some degree of plausibility. It’s something that could happen because it has happened. This particular book has a bad king who’s a mix of a lot of bad kings from history — it’s interesting how many kings followed approximately the same pattern, and that pattern keeps repeating in other leaders. I think of this as the idea-generation research phase, as opposed to the fact-gathering research (how does this work, could this happen, etc.). It’s about sparking plot ideas. I give my brain a lot of input and then it breaks it up, mixes it together, and a story comes out.

At this point, I could have written the book description (the text that goes on the back cover of a paperback or that you see in Amazon listings), which makes it feel like I have the book all ready to write, but it’s still really vague. I only know the big-picture general things, but I don’t know what the world looks like or who the characters are as people, and though I know what the story goal and main conflict are, I don’t have a plot.

Over the years, I’ve put together a worksheet of things I need to know to create a character, and I’ve worked through those for the main characters. I’m starting to get a sense of who some of the secondary characters might be, but they aren’t really formed yet.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to develop my world. I had a vague sense that part of it might be based on a place I’ve visited, but more to do with an area that feeds into that place. I found some videos about the region I was thinking of, which I haven’t visited, and that clicked things into place. I can suddenly picture the world, and some things about that gave me ideas of how the magic might work.

The looking for images is one of the weirder parts of my process. I find that it really helps me to find a reference image, to mentally “cast” the people and places. Once I have those concrete images from reality, the characters and places come to life for me, and then they immediately diverge from the real images and take on a life of their own so that if I could take a photo of what’s in my head it would no longer be recognizable from the source. I was looking through some files for an older book and found the pictures, and I didn’t even recognize what characters and places those pictures were supposed to be of, even though they inspired what was in the book that I wrote.

This whole process feels like I’ve got a lot of mist swirling around, and bits of it might start taking more concrete form so I can see images, and then it gets clearer and clearer as people appear and their setting becomes clear. I don’t think I’m yet ready to start working on the plot, though. When I try to work through the main plot beats, I don’t get any farther than the first act, so there’s a lot more work to do.

I do all this work by hand. I do have some character and setting sheets on Scrivener that I’ll fill out to have handy for checking details as I write, but my brainstorming is done by scribbling in composition books. Some of it may be formal, like going through my character worksheets or story beat sheets, but sometimes I’m just journaling as I think of ideas. I’ll start a page on a topic, like setting or villain, and then when I get an idea on that topic, I’ll add it to the page. I’ll ramble about magic systems or the history of the world. It’s all basically just capturing my thinking so I can remember all my ideas.

The issue of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs, like Chat GPT) continues to cause turmoil in the writing and publishing world. There was recently a writer profiled in an article who claims to write hundreds of books a year, published under a variety of names, using AI, though it doesn’t seem as though any of them sell very well and the way she makes her money is by teaching other people how to generate books using AI and selling AI prompts and even complete AI books that the buyer can edit and customize. There have been authors caught leaving in the AI prompts, so it seems they used AI to write at least part of their books and just pasted in the result, and somehow no one actually proofed the final book to notice that the prompt was included in the pasted passage.

On the other hand, there seems to be a bit of an AI witch hunt going on among some reviewers, with hours-long YouTube videos analyzing books as to whether or not they may have been AI-generated or reviews calling out books for having hallmarks of AI — even though they were published before AI existed. Sometimes it’s more a case of AI imitating existing books and writers’ styles, since that’s what they were trained on. I have a number of my books included in one of the lawsuits against an AI company, since they trained their AI on pirated books. That means there’s a chance some AI writing could sound like me — and vice versa.

What some artists are doing to counter possible accusations of AI use is documenting their process. If they get accused of having used AI to generate a piece of art, they can show the pencil sketches and the various phases of the work. Authors are starting to do the same thing, documenting and discussing the process so that if someone accuses them of using AI, they can show how the book developed. The reviewers on the AI “witch hunt” do seem to check authors’ social media and other writings to see if there’s been any discussion of how the author feels about AI and of the process of creating a book. I suppose you could create AI prompts based on the kind of work authors can talk about, since we can’t really show the pencil sketches the way an artist can unless we publish every draft of a book, but showing that there was some thought that went into the writing can help counter some accusations, or at least shed doubt on them.

The tricky thing for me is that I don’t really like talking about a book while I’m writing it. A book in progress is a really fragile thing for me. To use a metaphor from my recent pottery class, it’s a lot like when you’re shaping something on the pottery wheel. If the thing you’re making gets jolted in any way, if your hands move in the wrong way, what you’re planning to be a vase may end up being a pitcher (true story). I’ve found that I can’t even talk in specifics to my agent. I thought it would save me a lot of time to hash out the idea with my agent before I start writing so that I know I’m on the right track, but when I did that and had an idea she approved of, I found that I couldn’t write the book. I didn’t care about that story anymore and when I tried writing it, it came out dull and lifeless. It wasn’t really my story anymore because someone else had been a part of shaping it. I may brainstorm with someone when I’m well into a book and need to work out a plot twist or an ending, but the book has to have taken shape by then. I can’t talk about it in the idea stage.

There’s also the issue of spoilers. If I talk too much about a book, I might give readers more info than they want before they get to read the book for themselves. Or it could make people think they’ve already read it. I could probably give more specifics in my newsletter because those are my most devoted fans who will be buying the book based on my name or the series. But if someone’s just scrolling through social media and sees something without registering who it is, there’s a chance that if they ever come across the book they might think it sounds familiar and figure they already read it.

And there’s what I think of as the Rogue One trailer effect. Between the time the first trailer for the movie Rogue One was released and the time the movie was released, the movie had been rewritten and in some cases even re-shot, so most of the scenes that were in the trailer weren’t in the final movie. There were even bits in the trailer that were never meant to be in the movie. The camera crew wanted to make the most of some of the locations they had for a limited time, so they shot things that weren’t in the script if they saw something that looked cool, and those cool bits were used in the trailer. The final movie was great, but the first time I saw it, it was disconcerting because I kept waiting for the trailer moments that never came. My books go through a lot of changes in the revision process, so there’s a good chance that if I talk about a scene I’m working on, that scene either won’t be in the final book or will be drastically different in the final book.

But I may try to document some of my process in a general sense without talking in specifics about the book. That can help readers know the kind of thought that goes into a book, and I hope that will show anyone wondering about AI use that my books are entirely artisan and organic. I’m in the development stage of a book so may have to catch up, but otherwise I’m starting at the beginning of a project.

For the record, I don’t knowingly use AI for anything. I feel like using AI to write would be like taking a forklift to the gym. Yeah, I could make it lift huge amounts of weight, but I wouldn’t get anything out of it, and it would probably cause damage to the gym. I write to get stories out of my head, and I can’t see how feeding a prompt to AI would do that for me. The story would still be in my head, and the result wouldn’t be the story in my head. I wouldn’t become a better writer by having a machine churn things out for me. I don’t trust it for research because it doesn’t give you facts. It gives you something that sounds like a report of facts, and the facts may or may not be true. I can’t imagine using it for brainstorming because it’s giving you the synthesis of what’s already been done. You’re going to get boring, generic ideas. And then there are the ethical issues. They were trained without permission on work stolen from other people (including me) and they have a huge environmental cost. The reason I say “knowingly” is because they keep trying to add AI to everything. I do use spellcheck, and while that technology has been around for a long time, they’ve started using AI for that (and making it worse). I’m not great at spotting AI art, so while I try to use artists and designers who avoid AI, people can lie and I might not know. I try to track images I use for promo that come from the image library of the applications I use back to the source to see if they were AI-generated, but it’s hard to tell sometimes and I may miss something.