How to Write Fiction with AI Assistant Sudowrite
Why AI?
As a writer, I've always had the mindset to make the most of digital tools. Websites like a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a site for conjugations were just a click away on my browser's favorites bar while working on my manuscript. I even wrote a book about Scrivener in Scrivener. That is until I started writing in English.
In English, resources like Google Translate, dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, theconjugator.com, and hyphenation24.com were also a few more clicks away. I tried DeepL but wasn't impressed. Then I discovered that ChatGPT also provided translations and applied the context of the text excellently to the translation.
I released my Dutch book "Autonoom" as "Autonomous" with a translation via ChatGPT after an English proofreader had refined all manual formulations. After that, I wrote my first book using AI. The English language usage was much better than I could write in English myself, and almost flawless. Inspiration for a culture of extraterrestrial beings via Midjourney, an AI image generator via Discord, turned out to produce useful images. Text generation was fast, but editing took up a lot of time. The book is now being read by my English-speaking proofreader among others.
Afterward, I began a trilogy in English using Sudowrite.
Sudowrite
Sudowrite is an online tool that connects various Large Language Models (LLMs) with a writer. It's a user interface for writers with an AI assistant. As a writer, you can specify which LLM you want to use and access various useful functions to generate, improve, or expand text. Sudowrite isn't the only tool available, and it may not be the best, but it has been around for quite some time and has a large and active user group. Novelcrafter does something similar, and verb.ai also helps with writing fiction. I don't like the Sorbet theme much, but others exist.
Sudowrite operates on a credit system because some LLMs require more processing power than others. For less than thirty dollars, you get a million credits. The consumption of credits is opaque, but with a million credits, you can go quite far. I used up a bit more than half of them for my first book. At the start of a new month, you get another million credits, costing you another thirty dollars, but you can always pause.
Sudowrite Tools
When writing in Sudowrite's online editor, you have access to several tools:
Describe
From a selected piece of prose, you can request further description. You'll receive a few lines with a more detailed description of the selected text, and you can indicate which senses are involved. Sight and hearing are common, but you can also include smell, taste, and touch, as well as the use of metaphors in the description.
Rewrite
Sudowrite can rewrite text in various ways: rephrasing, shortening, or making it more descriptive, for example. "Show, not tell" is also an option to rewrite your text or make it more internally conflicted or intense, but you can also provide your own prompt for the AI to rewrite the text.
Expand
You can request to expand the selected text further. You'll then receive a continuation of the selected text, as the AI thinks it can fill in. This can be surprisingly creative but may also go completely in the wrong direction. More on keeping your story on track later.
The result of these tools is cards with content in a right column on the screen that you can insert or copy in its entirety. It's also possible to copy a selection and paste it into your text. This way, you can also compose new paragraphs from different cards, being careful not to repeat text in your story.
Write
Finally, there's the option to let the AI write. This can be automatic, guided, or with a change in tone. In the writing settings, you can choose one of the different LLMs, such as ChatGPT 4 Turbo or Claude 2 Opus. Additionally, you can set the number of cards to choose from and the length of the text based on that. There are options to adjust the quality, speed, and accuracy of the generated text. A few relevant hints help the AI generate meaningful text. The slider for adjusting Creativity affects the extent to which the AI takes liberties with your story.
Sudowrite's True Power: Story Bible
With these tools, you can do a lot to quickly write flawless texts. However, they don't leverage Sudowrite's power to write fiction. Generating a book with the press of a button isn't possible. I also don't think you should want that. You want to write your own story, and the "Story Bible" is the function that allows you to do this. Sudowrite supports you in the process of writing with a few possibilities:
Braindump
The Braindump function provides a framework where you can jot down your initial thoughts about a story. Sudowrite takes these into account in later stages, such as your Synopsis and your Beats.
Genre
In the Genre section, you can specify your Genre and Subgenre, but also make Themes, Tropes, and Tone-of-Voice known to Sudowrite.
Style
By pasting an example of previously written text into the Style section and pressing the "Match my Style" button, Sudowrite generates a description of the style in which the story will be written.
Synopsis
The Synopsis section should contain the summary of your story. If you create it yourself, you paste it in. Sudowrite can also generate a synopsis based on the information in the Braindump and Genre sections.
Characters
Sudowrite can also generate characters in the Characters section, but I prefer to control which characters appear in my book. Besides the main characters, you can specify secondary characters. The format for Sudowrite is: "Character name: Description," and Sudowrite uses the synopsis to suggest characters. This information influences how the characters are described, how their dialogues sound, what choices they make, and how they react to other characters. You can update these sections at any time.
In the beta, much more detailed character components can be found, where the free-text section has been replaced by various characteristics and traits of your character.
Worldbuilding
In the beta, there's also a worldbuilding section with components such as Setting, Lore, Organization, Key Events, Magic System, Clue, Item, Technology, Government, Economy, Culture, and Religion. Apart from that, you can also create your own section and fill in a description and properties.
Outline
The Outline section is important for the progression of the plot in your story. Sudowrite can generate an outline based on Genre, Synopsis, and Characters, but by providing your own outline in the form of "Act 1: title, Chapter 1: text," you can better control and keep your story on track. You can always adjust the outline to what you think is necessary for the story.
Beats and Prose
Once you've done all this groundwork, Sudowrite can really get to work for you: the next step is generating Beats. These are step-by-step instructions on how a chapter or scene should unfold. From here on, I let Sudowrite generate the text, but I rigorously rewrite the Beats if they don't go in the direction I want the story to go. Furthermore, Sudowrite generates text in "Strides" of two Beats, so I split each Beat into two parts so that each Beat is generated in one Stride. With about ten Beats, Sudowrite is able to generate a scene or chapter in a few minutes. You can also structure your Beats in a way that allows you to be surprised by the AI's suggestions. Being open to the AI's suggestions and accepting what the AI has served you is part of writing with Sudowrite.
Editing
Carefully read through the generated pieces of text and discard anything that isn't good. This is where your role as editor of the text written by your AI assistant comes into play. The text is generated in purple, but once you edit it, the color returns to normal. You can replace words, shorten sentences, and add text to make your story flow optimally. Moreover, all the previously mentioned tools for expanding text are available here. This way, you make your story as good as possible.
To keep your story on the right track, you may need to regenerate texts, discard them altogether, or rewrite them rigorously. You determine how your story should be told, not the AI.
Rewriting
I copy the generated text into Scrivener afterward to read it through calmly and ensure that the story flows well. It's a good idea to read your book in one go to determine if any scenes are missing. If necessary, you can always go back to Sudowrite to generate new text or expand existing text. Outside Sudowrite, the text is safe if Sudowrite is temporarily offline (rare, but it recently happened), and Scrivener has other tools that are better suited for rewriting and finalizing your First Draft. For example, for replacing terms that the AI has used too often, such as "a testament to," "Tapestry of," and "a symphony of."
Copyright
Unlike digital photography, it doesn't seem possible for there to be copyright on your book, despite determining the frameworks and direction of the plot in your Outline and Beats yourself. I also determine the characters and Synopsis of my story. Moreover, I extensively edit the text to ensure it goes in the direction I want.
I'm aware that you can also give the AI free rein to make suggestions and thus leave the direction and characters of the book entirely to the AI. I wonder if that results in a strong story.
Publishing
When publishing a book created based on AI, you should be aware that platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) require you to indicate whether the book was written with AI and whether the images on the cover were generated with AI. Currently, this has no impact on the book's sales, but in the future, there may be an indication for readers about how the book was written.
Conclusion
Sudowrite proves to be a powerful tool bridging an LLM and a writer to quickly and flawlessly write fiction. You can maintain control by doing your homework well and guiding the AI within the framework of your Genre, Synopsis, Characters, and Outline when generating Beats and Chapters. Of course, you can continue to write everything yourself if you prefer, but others are already picking up these tools and producing books in months instead of years. The quality of the book lies entirely in the hands of the writer when selecting and editing generated texts. After all, the AI is merely an assistant to the writer.
Antoni Dol
April 24, 2024
http://antonidol.nl/ai