I’m going to make this short and sweet.
Because it doesn’t have to be long.
And because some people’s heads are going to explode, and I want to contain the damage.
AI
I use AI to edit everything I write.
I write sales letters, reports, non-fiction books, and all kinds of emails.
I write essays, short stories, and novels.
I use AI to edit everything I write!
Sales Letters, Reports, Non-fiction books, and All Kinds of Emails
Emails
Let’s say I want to write an email for a product I’m promoting to my list as an affiliate.
I take the sales letter for the product and dump it into ChatGPT. Then I ask Chat a series of questions like…
List the top five benefits and features of this product.
Summarize the product offered in one paragraph.
What’s the hook for the product’s sales letter?
Write five possible calls to action for the email.
Write an intro paragraph for the email.
Write five possible subjects for the email. (To be used for the email’s subject line.)
From all of this, I assemble a promotional email. If I like the email, I go with it. If I’m sort of meh about the email, I ask Chat to critique it and make suggestions. A few rounds of that and I’m done.
Then, I queue up the email to send out.
Sales Letters
For sales letters, I do basically the same. I take whatever notes I have about the product and go through the same steps. It takes a lot longer. Also, I’ve written several hundred sales letters, so I’ll take a few of my recent ones and ask Chat to create a guide or template from those. This I use, along with the information from the product notes, to build a sales letter.
It takes longer, but the process is the same.
Reports and Non-Fiction Books
I use Chat to do research on the topic, and then I use it to create an outline. I go through the same process as above. I look at the outline, tweak it, and then ask the AI to critique it. A few iterations of this suffices.
From here, I either write the report (or book) myself or get Chat to write the sections for me. Look, I’m not writing literature here. Reports are used for marketing, and non-fiction books are all about the information within, not my glowing style.
Reports and Non-Fiction Books are about information only. They’re not about me personally. They’re not complicated.
Clients
I follow this same general flow when writing for third parties, which I do some of…although less nowadays.
Essays and Fiction
I don’t use AI at all to compose essays.
Why would you do that?
It would be like using one of those nifty Elon Musk robots to do your workout for you.
I write essays to get the crap out of my system.
I also like how modern essays meander.
The word essay comes from the French verb essayer.
Essayer means to try.
So, in a sense, an essay is a trial…something tried.
Michel de Montaigne lived in France in the 16th century. He created this entire form of writing. Often, Montaigne’s essays begin with a quote from one of the classic writers. So, he might quote Seneca (in Latin). Then he sort of riffs off the quote for a while.
Essays are still pretty much a sort of riff off of something. They start somewhere, then meander around, then ping over here and pong over there, then touch on the topic at hand, then introduce something completely out of the blue, then pong and ping some more, then land back where they started. Or not.
I love essays. I wish people would pay me to write them. I could turn out a few a day, easy!
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Sorry, I’m back! Had to go stir the chicken. I’m cooking chicken curry tonight. The smell of curry is wonderful.
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So, I said I don’t use AI to compose essays.
I certainly use it to find grammatically mistakes. (Like the one I just made!)
I have Grammerly and ProWritingAid both. Both are resident on my computer, and both do stuff like correct stuff in Word. I’m not sure which one corrects what. I don’t care. I just want to make sure I don’t publish something where I wrote “grammatically” when I should have written “grammar.”
(I just put the onions and bell pepper in the curry.)
That is the extent to which I use AI in essay writing.
Novels
I write mysteries and the odd thriller.
When I write, I normally just sit down and write—scene 1, then scene 2, and so on.
Mysteries are dramatic stories. (Although I reserve the right to write an experimental mystery someday where I completely screw around with the form. Who knows, it might work.)
But back to the ranch, mysteries are dramatic stories.
To be trite, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Said another way, they divide into Act I, Act II, and Act III.
Aristotle was the first to recognize the three act, dramatic structure. You can read all about it in his Poetics.
I learned the three-act structure from a book by Syd Field about screenwriting.
Later, when I started writing in earnest, I ran across Save the Cat. (Actually, this is because I couldn’t find my old copy of Syd Field’s book. I was on Amazon ordering a new one when I saw the listing for Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.)
Save the Cat gave me enough of a paradigm to write a popular fiction fairly quickly.
I’m sure purists are about to poke their eyes out with a sharp pencil by now. I’ve mentioned how I sanely use AI and said I like Save the Cat. Somehow, I think admitting to liking Save the Cat would be tantamount to going to culinary school and talking about Big Macs.
Writing a novel is truly daunting. Writing your first one is pure hell. Having a road map helps…a lot!
I’ve noticed lately that I don’t really need Save the Cat much anymore. Counting the six practice novels I’ve written and the seventeen I’ve published, I’ve written a lot of books. I’m moderately good at it. But I still keep in mind the overall structure of Act I, Act II.1, Act II.2, and Act III.
If you’re going to drive from Atlanta to LA, you probably need a bit of a road map. (Or you could use Waze.) This doesn’t mean you can’t decide to go up to Minnesota on the way. It just means you kinda sorta know where you are and how, generally, to get where you’re going.
Editing Novels
<cracks knuckles>
I write the overall story from start to finish. I don’t rearrange stuff. (If Michaelangelo could do it, so can I!)
I edit as I go. When I start writing for the day, I’ll read the last two scenes and correct them. This means that I usually take out words and make things clearer. If I have a question about continuity, like where they left the car, I’ll change that as I go. By the time I’m done, the book is pretty much done. Story…check! Fixing clarity and wordiness …check! Slimming down the prose…check! Catching grammar mistakes…double check!
In other words, by the time I’m done…I’m really done!
I can write a novel in a month. (That’s not fast, by the way.)
AI is key to this process, but like with the essay, it is only in the last step or two that I use it.
Bottom Line
AI is a tool that saves a lot of time. It also saves money. It would cost me a good $500 to $1k to hire a competent editor to edit my books. Grammarly costs me $150 a year.
Anything Else?
Yeah…research.
ChatGPT is a great research tool. I use it a lot to figure stuff out.
In the book I’m currently writing I needed to know what happens when EMTs first get to an auto accident. What do they say? ChatGPT gave me that in about forty nanoseconds. It would have taken me half a day to figure that out on my own before AI.
Like all tools, AI is a tool.
Maybe someday it will be able to write a passably good mystery. But not as well as I can. It doesn’t have my lived experience.
Creativity comes from God, the Divine.
I’ll always been several steps ahead of AIs because I can reach into my subconscious and pull out the gold!
FREEBIES!
Want a couple of really cool mysteries for FREE?
First book in the Julia Lives in a Van series, Click HERE.
First book in the SeaBreeze Murder Club series, Click HERE.
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