Using AI in Writing

My dos and donts, and how I use it in my work.

You sit at your desk, staring at the blank page and the blinking cursor. Or your typewriter, if you're the old-fashioned type. You have an outline (either rough in your mind if you’re a pantser or detailed in a document if you’re a plotter). Your characters have taken shape, at least the MC, whom you can clearly see (and maybe fall in love with—but that’s a different story for a different time). All you have to do now is start typing. And you do.

You type a sentence. Delete. Try again. Delete.

You sigh because it shouldn’t be this hard. Other authors put out books once or even twice a year, proving it’s doable. Maybe something is wrong with you.

My Start with ChatGPT

Enter AI, the big bad wolf that keeps getting bigger and scarier. My first instinct, like many creatives, was to avoid it like the bubonic plague. I felt it would taint my work ethic and creativity.

That is, until a fellow debut Substacker, Goran Cetkovic from Decentralize, introduced me to ChatGPT and had the saintly patience to work around my reservations and explain all the ways it could be useful.

Today, I gladly call myself a pro user, having integrated it into my workflow for every area of my life, including writing.

Yes, ChatGPT helps me when I work on my novel. It does many things for me, except one: write on my behalf.

AI as a Creative Writer

If you're having a confidence or creativity crisis as an author, you might be tempted to tell yourself that this is a legitimate tool to express your thoughts on your behalf. There are YouTube tutorials that will teach you how to write an entire novel on ChatGPT, so you might think: If people can publish and sell amazing AI-generated images, why shouldn’t you be able to do the same with fiction? Why struggle? Why not get a couple of titles under your belt, make some money, and then take your time writing your great 21st-century masterpiece from a comfortable cottage on the beach?

Two reasons.

First, because cheating is lame. If you can’t write a novel on your own, express yourself another way, or write something within your current ability and work your way up. Write blog posts. Start a Substack. Write short stories. Or instead of trying to write like Faulkner (the greatest of all time, in my modest opinion), write like yourself because there are readers at every level, just like there are writers at every level.

Second, moral quandaries aside, because your writing will suck!

Anyone familiar with the system will recognize it in a heartbeat without needing AI detection tools. I know because I can do it. It’s why I unfollowed many beloved Facebook pages about books, movies, and other topics I enjoy. I can spot a ChatGPT-written social media post, a Goodreads review, an article, even passages in best-selling new fiction releases.

It's easy. And it's a matter of knowing where to look.

The Dead Giveaways of ChatGPT-Generated Text

ChatGPT follows a specific composition pattern. It doesn't write. It assembles words it has learned to string together, relying on recognizable structures. But the real giveaway? A set of terms and expressions it overuses.

Example 1: The Book Review

I asked ChatGPT to compose a review of my favorite novel of all time: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

Em-Dashes

ChatGPT rarely produces a paragraph without em-dashes. In this example, they are present in the first four paragraphs.

Sets of Threes

ChatGPT loves listing things in groups of three. This pattern is so ingrained that it often forces a third element where it doesn’t belong or removes necessary details to fit the pattern. The result? Inaccuracy and an artificial feel:

• There are books you read, books you love, and then there are books that take up residence in your bloodstream.

• Raw, brutal, and unshakably true

• It lingers in the silences, in the things left unsaid, in the spaces where love and violence intertwine.

Overused terms

Many of its ever-present favorites show up: urgency, wields (twice), raw, brutal, unshakable, the weight of, unfolds, intricate (twice), haunts/haunting, linger, intertwine, ache, pulses, resilience.

To be fair, I asked it to stress the brutality of the story. But brutal appears everywhere, along with linger and its usual suspects.

Example 2: The Social Media Informative Post

This time, I asked ChatGPT to compose a short overview of the same novel, the kind you'd see on Facebook pages about books, movies, or other works of art:

Em-Dashes

Present in both paragraphs.

Sets of Threes

• lush, poetic, and devastating

• injustice, power, and the weight of history

• class, gender, and colonial legacies

• fluid, dreamlike, and fragmented

• originality, depth, and enduring relevance

Overused terms

haunting, navigate, shaped by, unfolds, weaving, shattered, heart of, devastating, brutal/brutality (twice), fragile, sharp, unflinching, mirrors, reshapes memory, capture, aching

Note that brutal, haunting, and ache/aching appeared in both examples.

Example 3: A Real Message

This one is a true story. You probably know the novel A Little Life and its author, Hanya Yanagihara. She is notoriously private, with only an Instagram account where she posts photos of art.

When Bluesky became popular, many fake author accounts emerged, including one in her name.

The day after I registered, this account followed me. That seemed odd. I checked out her posts, and my suspicions were immediately confirmed:

Under a post about A Little Life, someone gave her a compliment, and “she” replied: Thank you, have you left a review on Amazon?

No author worth their salt would write that. But I don’t know Ms. Yanagihara personally, so I gave it two minutes of my life to be sure.

I left a comment asking what happened to the A Little Life film adaptation of the West End play starring James Norton. It was announced for September and never mentioned again.

Instead of a reply, I received a direct message from “her,” wanting to chat and inquire about my writing. And she wrote the following about her own:

Let's break it down.

• Em-dashes? None.

• Sets of threes? One: “complex human emotions, relationships, and the profound impact.”

• Overused terms and expressions? They were everywhere: individuals, delves deeply, exploring the depths, resilience, rich tapestry.

ChatGPT produced a generic text it would write about an author, and this person copied it and changed it into the first-person singular. I laughed out loud, reported the account, and exposed it to my few followers (short-form platforms are not my cup of tea). But it worked. By nightfall, Hanya herself posted on Instagram confirming it wasn't her. The account was deleted.

What ChatGPT Says About Itself

By now, I'm sure you can recognize the em-dashes and sets of threes, so we don't need to analyze this one…

How to Use ChatGPT to Make Your Writing Better

Here is how I have integrated the new technology into my work:

1. ChatGPT as a Personal Assistant

The bot performs many tasks that would otherwise take up much of my time, freeing it up for what matters most to me: writing.

Examples of Not-Writing-Related Tasks

A few typical examples of how I use the technology for everyday tasks:

• Email: “Compose a simple email in French to my son’s teacher to justify his absence from first period because he had a doctor’s appointment.”

• Dictation Text Cleanup: “I have the transcript of a recording I made of a lecture I just attended. The transcript was generated by an app and is full of inaccuracies. Clean up the text for me to make it coherent and legible. Organize it into paragraphs and sections.”

• Clarification: “I’ve just received an email riddled with grammar and punctuation mistakes to the extent where I can’t understand what the person is trying to convey. Make sense of it for me.”

• Photography: “Help me create my own user preset to achieve a unified look in my photography. The main aspects of my photography style are…”

• Food and Recipes: “I have zucchini, leftover chicken breast, cheese, cream, carrots […] in my fridge. Suggest a recipe for a pasta sauce I can make with these ingredients.”

• Personal Development: “I have set three main goals for this year: […]. Help me break them down into 12-week action plans. Ask me what you need to know to be able to do this.”

• Books: “I just read Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng and loved it. Suggest three books with a similar vibe.”

• Fashion: “What color shoes go well with a red dress?”

• Filling in my Blanks: “What was the movie with Tom Cruise where he got up on a couch or table in a white shirt and underwear and pretended to sing? He was very young at the time.”

• Duh questions: “I just read this post on social media and didn't get it: ‘A student just tried to email the IT department about a grade not showing up correctly but somehow emailed an address (which does have the letters IT tbf) that distributed to the ENTIRE faculty at NYU. It now appears most of my colleagues don’t know what a replyallpocalypse is.’ WTF?”

Examples of Writing-Related Tasks

• Proofreading: “Go through the following text and look for grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, or repetitions.”

• Basic Research: “What does blood smell like?” “Which terminal disease would keep a person confined to her house for decades and could result in sudden and unexpected death?” “Is bathroom mold dangerous?”

• Psychological Research: “Act as a psychologist and give me the blueprint of what a character could behave like if he went through […] in his childhood. Give me the most typical variants.”

• Fashion: “If I dress my female MC in overalls and a striped shirt underneath, what does that say about her as a person from a psychological standpoint?”

• English Terminology: “I'm trying to find the equivalent of the Slavic expression ‘U dobru se ne uzvisi, u zlu se ne unizi’ (Don't let fortune lift you too high, nor misfortune bring you too low).”

• Bodily Stuff: “If someone gets punched in the cheek, what exactly will they feel?”

• Technical Questions: “How should I format my novel in Word for an easy transition to Vellum?”

• Math: “If approximately 135000 words in publishing standards correspond to 111197 words in Microsoft Word, what would approximately 90000 words in publishing standards correspond to in Microsoft Word?”

• Templates (my favorites!): “I have to write a synopsis for my novel. I want you to come up with a template that I can follow to make sure I've written a great, concise synopsis.” “Come up with a blurb writing template for me to follow.”

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of how I use ChatGPT every day. The possibilities and benefits are endless, and as far as I can tell, there aren't any real pitfalls as long as you don't use the technology to plagiarize or pretend you've written something you haven't.

My takeaway here is simple: writing is an art, and it should be yours. AI can support your creativity, free up your time, and replace a potential assistant you might not have the money to hire. But what it should never replace is you. If it does, you're no longer a writer; you're a prompt designer and copy-paster. And where's the pride in that?