To Write or Not to Write (with AI)?

A Quick Guide

Please note: this guide assumes you care at least a little about being creative and aren’t a soulless empty shell hack intent on spamming recycled pabulum.

Ideas - No AI

Don’t get your ideas from AI. It doesn’t have any. It can’t come up with ideas. All it can do is regurgitate. Any idea you’re asking it for is being baby-birded into someone else’s mouth as we speak.

Steal your ideas the old-fashioned way, by reading books.

Creative Writing - No AI

Obviously not. What the hell would the point of that be? The AI flattens. Condenses. Smooths. Homogenizes. It abrades away anything unique and interesting. Despite its ability to mimic speech, it cannot speak, and it has no voice. Asking AI to write for you is denying yourself the ability to hone your voice. It’s denying yourself the practice of speaking. And in a world with AI, the voice that stands out from the choir is the one that will be heard.

Editing - No AI

Hey, I’m sure I’ll get some disagreement here, since there are so many apps that do this. And who knows, maybe AI will get better at it? But I have noticed in all my attempts to use AI to reduce my editing burden that the AI still tends to flatten and homogenize. It doesn’t understand the musicality of a sentence or a paragraph and so it will break or beat the sentence into something “proper” and “grammatical.”

I take great pains to create an interesting, varied, and surprising rhythm from sentence to book, so the AI doesn’t work for me. The aspects that I find most entertaining about my writing often get tagged as flaws by the AI.

And that really summarizes the danger of outsourcing your writing to AI. It scrubs away the you. It doesn’t know what good writing or interesting writing is. It doesn’t know anything. It just has a big, stolen dataset of books to search for patterns.

I’m not trying to conform to the most popular pattern. (Not for the amount of money I’m making, at least.) I’m trying to create a new pattern. My pattern. It is this pattern — my personhood — that is the value proposition of writing. I speak my truth as purely and bravely as I can, and hopefully someone reads it and is enriched by it.

Writing and reading is a conversation, long, slow, and deep — just the way I like it. I don’t need a robot telling me what to say.

Formatting - Maybe AI

Need to clean up a text real quick? Get rid of redundant characters? Add or remove paragraphs? Change the style? AI can do this pretty well. Just really double check it doesn’t change anything else, because it can, has, and will.

Marketing - Hell Yeah AI

I used to get creative with every aspect of my books — including the blurbs, store page descriptions, the websites. I always wanted to be different and stand out. Then I talked to an old hat indie publisher who cranked out cookie cutter horror books (no shade, that’s what she did and she made bank). She took a knife to all my fun descriptions and made them simple, direct, one-glance friendly.

And it worked. My sales improved with the (IMHO) lamer descriptions.

This is a situation where you need to flatten and condense your writing. Where you need to translate it into the quick, palatable, pez of consumerism. Being forced to wear so many hats — as the writer, editor, and publisher — makes it difficult for me to establish the critical distance I need to be a marketer. To me, a book is art, but to sell it, I need to treat it like a product.

Not to mention, I am writing these books for myself. I know someone is reading them because reviews show up and money appears in my checking account. But I don’t always know who. I don’t have the time, and I really, really don’t have the passion to be studying and adapting my marketing materials to achieve the optimal reach.

So yeah, the AI can do all that from now on. It can parse the data, find the audience, and tag the book for them. And I can save my blood, sweat, and tears for the next book.

Blurbs

Yes sir. If your book is out there and has enough reviews, you can ask an AI to whip up a blurb for it. If you don’t have the reviews, you can feed it roughly the first 5,000 words of your manuscript and it’ll do a bang-up job.

That’s what I did for Hallway:

Nothing is safe behind the locked doors of their apartment, where paranoia, strange visions, and a terrifying presence threaten to consume them all.

In their cramped, rundown apartment, Tim, Jess, and their unpredictable cat Harvey are barely hanging on—struggling with money, bad neighbors, and a building with more locked doors than answers. When Tim’s only friend vanishes under strange circumstances, the shadows in the hallway seem to deepen, and Harvey’s obsession with a mysterious “nowhere door” turns dangerously intense.

Every night brings whispers, anonymous knocks, and the creak of hinges where no one’s supposed to be. Jess—overworked, fiercely protective, and running on fumes—worries the apartment is doing more than wearing them down. Tim tries to hold it together, all while battling haunting visions, cryptic dreams, and his own unreliable mind.

But something is watching from the hallway. Something hungry, maybe even hopeful for their collapse.

Is it just the paranoia of poverty and medication—or is the real horror waiting in a place no tenant dare enter?

Step into Hallway, a claustrophobic tale of urban dread where reality warps and every closed door hides a new nightmare. Perfect for fans of slow-burn suspense, psychological horror, and the movie Barbarian, this novel turns the mundane into the monstrous and never lets you escape the echo of footsteps just beyond your sight.

Hey, you might as well buy it while you’re here.

SEO and Keywords

Yep, anywhere you can edit the SEO, the AI can quickly adapt to what you need. (Like a Substack post.) Same for keywords. On Amazon, for example, you get seven keywords and the AI can find the right ones for your book in about 7 seconds.

Pitfalls - AI Hallucinations

Something you really have to watch out for is this — if the AI does not have enough data, it will make shit up. If you don’t have enough reviews for your book for it pull data from, or if you haven’t given the AI enough of your manuscript to work with, it will begin extrapolating and it can go to weird and highly inaccurate places.

Always, always, always, double-check the AI’s work.

---