Finished First Draft! · Story Hacker Free

4d ago in Wins

Finished First Draft!

I finally finished a first draft of my upcoming cosmic horror novel, The Last Delgado. 38 chapters and 132k words took me a little over six months writing 2-4 hours every single day.

Although I had an outline already completed, I didn't start writing intensely until I came across Jason's channel on Youtube. I used AI heavily (you can see my tools used below) but also had to HEAVILY edit it. AI is only as good as the instructions you give it, and I had to keep it on a very short leash to achieve what I wanted.

For those curious, my tool usage and process is listed below.

Tools:

Novelcrafter

Claude 3.5 Sonnet via Openrouter

Google docs

Pro Writing Aid

Process:

1) Build outline - this was done months prior to learning about AI tools. It will be interesting to see how I change my approach to outlining for my next novel.

2) Populate Novelcrafter Codex - since I had an outline already, and knew all the characters who would be in the story ahead of time, this wasn't too bad. I used AI to help me better flush out the character details and add subtle traits to make the characters have more depth. I also put in locations, lore and objects into the Codex as well. This definitely helped with consistency in the AI generated prose.

3) Write the scenes in Novelcrafter. This was basically a two step process. First I would quickly get prose generated by using Novelcrafter's chat function (scene beats really didn’t work well for me) telling what was supposed to happen in the next several hundred words. If this was the start of a new scene, I would include the previous scene in the context, explicitly telling the AI in the prompt that I wanted to create a new scene after the current one. Otherwise I would just include the current scene in the context.

Then, once the full scene was generated, I would go line by line and edit the prose. This was where the majority of my time went. In some cases I would just edit the prose directly. However, I would ask the AI what it thought of the change, and this would often lead to a back and forth conversation which usually produced a hybrid result. I found it was very important to tell the AI why I was making the change, as this would often spark the AI to propose additional changes to achieve the result I was going for.

If I didn't edit the prose directly, I would follow a similar approach to the one above. I would tell the AI the issues I had with the prose and begin a conversation with the AI to get to a better revision. Again, in the end, the prose ended up being a hybrid of both of our input.

This process wax extremely time consuming as I applied it at a paragraph, sentence, and even word level. It was also expensive, the conversations with AI really add up, considering the full scene, and Codex entries were sent as tokens for each request. But in the end I think it was worth it. It kept the story and characters strictly in line with my vision. AI became a collaborative writing partner, producing a far better end product than either the AI or I could achieve on our own.

4) Once the scene was complete, I would ask the AI what it thought and then address any issues it identified that I agreed with.

Rinse and repeat until the novel is done...

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