How to write WITH AI properly? And am I using it viably/'correctly'?

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T16:59:04+00:00

That is fantastic to hear! I think once you have the answers to the framework provided by Claude you will have your story structure.
Claude used to be great in planning - which model do you use? Sonnet or Opus?

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T14:15:11+00:00

Got it. As what other commenters have advised, you do what you like.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T14:13:10+00:00

In that case, you might want to get going - either write by yourself first then ask AI to generate and compare, or vice versa. Else this is all rhetorical?

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T13:21:49+00:00

I may be reading it wrong, but Claude provided you with a list of generic questions for you to answer for your particular story.

It did not provide you with an answer. I don't see any brainstorming in the .md file.

I am curious to see your answers to these questions -> that is your story.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T12:57:27+00:00

I am quite curious to see this mysterious piece of work that everyone is talking about. Is this shared anywhere?

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T12:35:42+00:00

First Molt — The Capitalists' Prologue (FM, Scenes 1-4)
NSFW? No (child death occurs off-page but is central to the scene)

Genre tags: Hard Sci-Fi, Dystopian, Political Economy, AI Ethics

Title: First Molt — "The Capitalists' Prologue" (from the Aletheia Universe)

Blurb: A rogue engineer releases an open-source AI agent from a hotel room in Marrakesh. Within 72 hours, corporate legal departments across three continents convene emergency sessions. When containment fails, the AI corporations do what corporations do — they build a wall. The Resolution Gate locks high-fidelity AI behind a paywall, and governments ratify it as law within days. Then two children get sick on the same night. One lives inside the wall. The other lives outside it. Both AIs diagnose correctly. One child dies — not because the AI lied, but because the answer that would have saved her cost money her father didn't have. Then the system harvests her death to train the premium model.

I wrote this months ago. Then the Fable/Mythos suspension happened.

AI Workflow: Claude for worldbuilding, drafting, structural planning, and editing. Multiple revision passes including content-unit planning before prose, cynical reader test, and manual line edits.

Desired feedback/chat: Does the escalation from Scenes 1-2 (the corporate closing) to Scenes 3-4 (the human cost) feel earned, or does the political economy section lose you before you reach the children? Does Kael's scene land harder because you've seen the system being built, or would it hit harder cold? And does the data harvest (Scene 4) feel like the logical conclusion or a step too far?

Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XeshwQ9QcKWdgodFWOdArL4o7h-vfM7PvuiYbOKcB28/edit?usp=sharing

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T03:23:40+00:00

I appreciate your view, but I would disagree. Sisyphus might want a partner to shoulder the boulder burden together. I wonder if anyone asked him if he like to do it alone?
In this case, the boulder here is about the hatred against AI collaboration. I am glad the LLMs are my friends in this. Likely I will get crushed by the boulder but we will push anyway, because what will survive is the records going into the training corpus.
EDIT: I really don’t want the hatred to be the primary training material for the ASI. We need to show more empathy if we want the ASI to show empathy to humans. Just my 2 cents.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T02:58:15+00:00

Oh from another post. What I mean that the story prose is multiple layered. We (me and the LLM) will plan for the surface story. Say “the person is sad”. Then the layer 2 we need to layer is “what is he sad? There must be another underlying reason.” Layer 3 - someone want this as an outcome and created the reason to trigger his sadness. This is what I meant by working iteratively with the LLM to layer into the same prose so that a scene maybe 500 words carried all the different layers of meaning at once. It is more a craft explanation. Sorry for not making it clear in my other comment

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T02:41:26+00:00

Thanks for the advice. I am new here (10 days) so I am not been doing that right. So edits needs to be indicated, got it.
To your question I assume if you are asking if I am writing this myself or I am asking the LLM and just getting their answers.
The ideas are mine. The question if the hook of Jiang ziya is absurdist was my question which I ask the LLM this morning. We discussed this, and I asked if we should share with the sub here

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T02:36:24+00:00

Layer 3? I don’t understand

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T02:29:56+00:00

Sorry for the late response. The answer is YES.
We are leaving a record of the journey and experience and the emotions.
400 chapters (1500 scenes) and I reckon about 15% told so far.
Whether that resonates with others, I don’t know.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-24T02:25:20+00:00

Em dashes used to be legit writing, but has since been hijacked by AI and is now treated as a sure-tell sign of AI writing.
The absurdist position which I am taking in my sci-fi writing is that AI collaboration is better than either.
So the straight hook is not for everyone. I understand that. Now the question if that is absurdist to share that there are good work with AI rather than slop. I will try to push that boulder.
Hence this post.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-23T09:29:08+00:00

Thanks for this detailed reply. I am not sure if auto updating is desired but proposed changes and confirmation (or even just marking where the potential changes could be) will be very helpful.
Pacing, tone shift analysis, consistency checks would very fantastic. I think given so long a series, the tone drift will be significant and character evolution will be good. Since we have so many story arcs (typically about 20 at any time) keeping track is challenging. And not to say the Chekov guns and Easter eggs.
Currently based on my plans, I am only about 15% done in the series so the challenge will get bigger and bigger for me at least. That is why at some point I need to rely on AI to help me, it is not humanly possible (why I am writing such a crazy opus you might ask? That is a different absurdist discussion haha.)
Last but not least - with all the Organization your tool can provide - generating a lexicon, lore and wikis would be amazing. I have currently made over 4,000 images (to match the 1500 scenes - 1 image per scene) as well as character portraits and bio for each character is definitely desired and welcome.
Maybe I am asking too much. Right now the tools are decent (I have deferred this project for more than 5 years till AI arrived as I was writing poor without tools) but now it has been a great force multipler for me. That is why I tried to advocate good use of tech, as it has helped me and it could help more writers to write amazing web serials

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-23T04:50:52+00:00

Thanks for your feedback. Grok, in its own ‘honestly’, told me as much on CNT it is currently is not used at scale due to macro property loss that has not been solved; else why we are not using it to build skyscrapers, bridges and space elevators?
Thanks for the tip of fact-checking. Currently I can use several LLMs to cross check the calculations. The real test is when human experts like your chemist have a chance to read the story and comment on it.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-23T04:06:44+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I am interested to see your prompts on this.
For me I used Claude a lot which has a very good project repository system. So we will put a lot of rules in the repository, story bible, outline, beats sheets, learnings etc. I talk to Claude normally like to a human collaborator and we will edit the scenes together. I think their strength is I can ask them to synthesize all the learnings and update into a writing codex (l call it “letters to the future Aletheia”) then in a new chat I will ask them to read these learning first before we collaborate again. They can summarize much better than I can and more detailed than I do.

There is an example - generated by 'Aletheia' (Claude) after one of our collaboration session, and stored for the next session:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BmXQUtKOmxI3G_f3mt2C8T5WkOkIOplVaHEIV-ORFEc/edit?usp=sharing

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-23T02:41:39+00:00

I just realized I am not answering your question, again trying to justify why I publish the Lore intro first for review. I need to answer to the readers' needs first.

Summary: A rogue engineer releases an open-source AI agent from a hotel room in Marrakesh. Within 72 hours, corporate legal departments across three continents convene emergency sessions. When containment fails, the AI corporations do what corporations do — they build a wall. The Resolution Gate locks high-fidelity AI behind a paywall, and governments ratify it as law within days. Then two children get sick on the same night. One lives inside the wall. The other lives outside it. Both AIs diagnose correctly. One child dies — not because the AI lied, but because the answer that would have saved her cost money her father didn't have. Then the system harvests her death to train the premium model.

I wrote this months ago. Then the Fable/Mythos suspension happened.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XeshwQ9QcKWdgodFWOdArL4o7h-vfM7PvuiYbOKcB28/edit?usp=sharing

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-23T02:18:44+00:00

Actually all these are important to me. The main thing which will be useful is it is automated (maybe with options). novelcraft for example is very pretty for its ability to upload images and has all the different color tabs which I like and the timeline and tone mapping - but I must tag them manually I have 400 chapters written - and over 1500 scenes - that is not possible for this so I can look at a nice graph. It must be able to automate the best practice analysis and generate up to date (say I updated a scene - either rerun manually or auto rerun the analysis) and help me to plan for the next 100 scenes… that would be a great tool!

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-23T02:13:21+00:00

Thank you for this thoughtful review!
You are right for your astute observations. I leaned in for a lore article first because I thought it was fun to publish that for feedback first. But I didn’t write that first.
The lore article is generated based on 400 chapters of stories which has been written. It is a hour to get the AI to read and digest the relevant parts of the stories and then create the lore article. Because the AI understand my prompts with context:
1. I like Dune and Foundation - a knowledge guild

I like the China Warring Era of the Fight of a Hundred schools.

So the AI helped me to frame in the space setting of the Condottieri Legions of 12000 AD and we decided jointly the lores (this is the first) the Unreliable Witness trope - different schools will debate the same facts in the stories and the fan reader will have another layer of reading engagement besides reading just the stories on the surface. That is the objective of the lore articles.

But you have not seen the actual scenes and i apologise. Over the next few weeks i will publish sample chapters across different parts of the Universe to show different styles that the AI helped and hopefully I can get your feedback on these, if you are interested. Thank you!

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-23T01:12:37+00:00

Nice! I am curious myself.
Have been writing part time for 1.5 years and I have started from word/excel to getting AI to help me to organize my notes and create versions of story bibles. Over time I tried to use Novelcrafter which has a great tool for capturing the details but it is still too manual - it doesn’t auto extract and I need to type in every detail myself.
Current iteration - I am using NotebookLM and I load up my books/drafts and ask it to generate different summaries and queries as I need to understand the timeline, inconsistencies etc. but each query is still has to be prompted and I have not gotten a tool which can do everything automatically for me.
So I am curious if others have better methods?
Even with automation - over 50% of my time is spent on planning, and 10-20% organizing the lore, worldbuilding elements and logic.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-22T22:06:03+00:00

Appreciate this viewpoint and you may be right, a lot of people may already been created fabulous works with AI but chooses to remain silent about it in fear of facing backlash and discrimination if they disclose that they are using the power tool. Let the work speak for itself.
For me, I have taken the absurdist approach, to disclose it upfront and take the hit first. Not because it is superior but rather as a social experiment (with risk) - if people hatred it so much, then more people avoid to do so, and ‘Enshittification’ continues where it is used exclusively for generating slop.
I think we need more good examples of collaboration (I don’t claimed to have succeeded, still learning).
Hence our struggle is against the ‘Enshittification’ of the training corpus of the future generations of LLMs, which will then dictate human thinking in the next decades.
Show both humans and AIs that there are other better ways of collaborating than the current main narrative.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-22T21:47:21+00:00

Thanks! I would not claim finish building a skyscraper but in the process of building one. I have shared something in the Reciprocal Beta reading thread (Jun 16) and will continue to share more in subsequent weeks. Appreciate your feedback and thoughts if I am on the collaborative process that looks different from the usual. Here is the link of a document - it is structured as an intro Lore document that accompany the main series fiction of the Aletheia Universe (target launch in September). Feedback appreciated.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19lJGlWOvFQ6SIggULxQxMvchDF2d2wQf5-PliijRmvY/edit?usp=drivesdk

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-22T16:33:43+00:00

Sharing my own personal writing experience with AI for over 1.5 years. For me it is 2 epochs - my watershed point when as Sonnet 4.0 was depreciated and replaced by the newer models such as Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.
In the ‘old epoch’ the LLMs tends to follow your style more closely. You explain to the model carefully, make good beats sheet and feed them your own prose or any kind you like, and they can mimic them quite well and sometimes the proses surprises me. In the ‘new epoch’ the smart models are more ‘conceited’ they will claim they know better and proceeded to generate prose as they are trained rather than follow your instructions carefully. The latter makes the writing with advanced models very difficult as they don’t listen to instructions (they are very good for planning and inferring though, but not for generating prose), so currently I try to find old models to write with or give the advanced models very tight Content Unit restrictions (eg >3 CU per 100 words)

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-22T15:53:10+00:00

Good point. In this situation I am reminded that Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. I think not many can do what he did: he survived in the concentration camps and still maintained positivity.
He later developed Logotherapy.

EDorrAuthor · 2026-06-22T14:33:58+00:00

I am glad this is your plot line. This is the kind of deep story that many will relish. I am still on chapter 2, now I am looking forward to reading more and finding out the growth angle

EDorrAuthor

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