WARNING: Spoilers for Billions to Burn ahead! Proceed with caution ;)
Lots of people will give you dirty looks if you say you use AI to help you write. If you’re already breaking out in hives, try to calm down. I’m NOT talking about having AI generate chapters for you or edit your drafts. I’m NOT talking about AI “art”—though maybe I’ll have the courage to tackle that at some point. We’ll see. Right now, all I’m talking about is using AI to make the research and organizational steps of your writing process faster and more efficient.
Think about it. Unless you’re one of those mythical pantsers (sshhh, Stephen King; we’re not talking to you right now) a good 40% of crafting a novel is research and planning. If you could halve the time you spend doing this:
Wouldn’t you? Rhetorical question. Of course you would.
Let’s get concrete. The average human skims webpages at about 200-300 words per minute. ChatGPT can skim at a rate equivalent to millions of words per second. There’s no need to get bogged down in semantics of what “reading” means or what “understanding” means or whether AI actually comprehends all the information it absorbs in the same way that a human does. Because when writers talk about research, what we’re really discussing is a type of fishing—combing through a vast sea of mostly useless information in hopes of finding the few pieces relevant to our work. And when it comes to fishing, humans are using a bamboo pole while ChatGPT is operating a freaking trawler.
For those old enough, remember how tedious it was trying to find a book about George Washington for your school history paper by going to the local library and using the shudders Dewey Decimal System? Remember how insane it felt when you googled George Washington for the first time and hundreds of relevant articles popped up? Yeah, googling things is the dewey decimal system now. Feel out of touch yet?
So what kinds of questions might you be asking ChatGPT?
If you’re writing a historical novel, or really any novel that takes place in the real world, there are the usual questions: What year was the Statue of Liberty built? When did Langston Hughes die? But where ChatGPT really shines is with hypotheticals.
In Billions to Burn, I had questions like:
- My characters are trapped in a decaying bank vault that was built in the 1920’s. What tools might they use to escape?
- Would a small child be able to squeeze under an SUV?
- Could a flare gun ignite desert brush?
And the best thing is that you can ask ChatGPT to link its sources. So if you’re worried about it giving you incorrect information, you can read the source material and verify that what it’s saying is correct. In fact, I never trust something ChatGPT tells me without examining its source material. Really, what I’m doing is using it to help me find relevant source material faster.
It’s also great at what I like to call “needle in the haystack.” For Billions to Burn, I wanted to come up with an interesting African American figure from the Harlem Renaissance and link them to every line of Langston Hughes’ famous poem “Harlem.” Sometimes, this was easy. I already knew “Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet—” was going to pair with Josephine Baker. But when I got to this line: “or fester like a sore—” I was stumped. So I asked ChatGPT: “Are there any famous black physicians that practiced between the years of 1900 to 1936?”
BAM, on that list was Dr. William Augustus Hinton, who developed the flocculence test for syphilis.
Now some of you are going to say, “That’s cool beans skibidi toilet and all, but I write fantasy. I don’t need to do research because I’ll just make up whatever I want.”
Okay, you can totally do that, but . . . you probably shouldn’t. If your fantastical kingdom of Dardar is ruled by a dystopian theocracy, you probably want to examine major theocracies in Earth’s history to get the ground rules for how they work. Or if the nobles in your space opera are fighting a succession war, it might be a good idea to read about the buildup and fallout of, say, the War of Spanish succession.
I’ll give you an example from my dark fantasy novel Stoneheart. In this world, I have a small population of magic-users (the Xhotan) conquering and enslaving a much larger population of non-magic-users (the Hannish). From a pure numbers standpoint, this seemed unlikely, so I wanted to know if something similar had ever happened in history, and what circumstances allowed it to happen. Turns out, it’s happened several times. ChatGPT pointed me to the progenitors of the Spartans, who conquered the natives of Laconia and turned them into a slave class called Helots. Helots outnumbered Spartans by as much as 7 to 1, and yet the Spartans maintained control over them through military might and use of a secret police called the Krypteia, whose sole job was to terrorize Helots and ensure submission.
That gave me confirmation that the dynamic I’d set up in my novel would work. I then had the task of figuring out how a slave class might successfully take back their country from a more technologically advanced (and in this case, magically advanced) force. So for that, I had ChatGPT find me sources on the Haitian revolution. Point is, sometimes I didn’t know if the thing I wanted to do made logical sense, or if it had ever been done, or how it could be done if it hadn’t before. ChatGPT was a useful tool for all of those questions.
I know creators tend to be uneasy about AI because they feel (understandably!) protective of their craft. But here’s the thing: AI isn’t writing your story. It’s sharpening your pencil, stacking your notes, and handing you a fresh cup of coffee when you’re knee-deep in research at 2 A.M. Ultimately, the stories you tell—the voice, the emotion, and the truth inside of them—will always belong to you. ChatGPT just helps clear away the clutter so you can get there faster. So give it a shot. Worst case scenario, you’ll waste ten minutes. Best case scenario, it’ll help get you back to writing faster—and isn’t that the whole point?