I have too many story ideas and not enough discipline to properly develop and write them.
AI has been a godsend, it really has. It’s helped me with everything from ideation to story development to outlining to character sketches to drafting actual scenes.
I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 and I think it’s more thorough and just a better writer than ChatGPT. Though I haven’t used Anthropic or Deepseek for this, and of course AI tools are always improving.
Here’s roughly what I did:
-took a basic story idea — a billionaire resurrects prehistoric beasts and pits them in arena combat, a kind of Gladiator meets Jurassic Park — and asked AI to elaborate on the idea and create several plots — and each plot came with its own set of characters
-stitched together the most interesting plots and characters
-asked AI to develop character descriptions, and sometimes better names (it had a default preference for fancy Western names)
-asked AI to create a list of scenes according to the plot
-asked AI to draft the scenes
-then I did a lot of rewriting and editing to simplify the story and make it coherent and flow (as the AI by default tends to write 100 words then 50 will do, and can struggle with chronology and flashbacks)
-then I copied everything into the (beat) screenwriting app because it’s free and easy to use
-then I asked AI to write a brief 200-word summary, I rewrote that
Here’s the result:
In a secluded facility, Japanese tech billionaire Sakamoto resurrects prehistoric animals like sabertooth tigers and giant dire wolves so wealthy elites can wager on brutal fights to the death. Sakamoto’s ambitious scientist Kaylen injects one of the injured beasts with a powerful new compound. Soon the beast breaks free, causing widespread mayhem and death. It’s evolving… becoming intelligent… outsmarting its creators. Taking advantage of the chaos, Sakamoto’s corporate rival attempts his own coup, desirous of the revolutionary tech.
The whole script only clocks in at 24 pages (standard scripts are 3-4x longer). I’ll probably feed the whole thing to AI and get more suggestions on minor story arcs and new characters and new beasts, etc, but I’ve found that already at 24 pages the AI has a hard time with accuracy and consistency. So whatever I add, I’ll have to do it on my own or ask AI for one scene at a time.
Right now the script is maybe a 4/10. I can send it if you dm me, but I want to do at least one more round of thorough edits and additions before sharing it here. I spent ~1-2 hours a day for a month.
I plan to keep doing this for more stories, in fact right now I’m interested in writing historical fiction about the Yokohama gold rush, the 10-20 years before the Meiji restoration when (1) Perry forced Japan to grudgingly opened to foreign trade and (2) because Japan’s official gold price was far below the international gold price, this led to a massive wave of arbitrage that drained Japan’s gold reserves and catalyzed a series of events that led to the downfall of Shogun military rule and the beginning of Meiji… crazy stuff.
And AI will undoubtedly play a big role. I haven’t even tried fiction-specific AI tools like Sudowrite…
If you’re using AI for fiction, let me know.
(the featured image was made by feeding a scene into gemini for image prompts and the image prompts were fed to chatgpt for image gen)