Exploiting AI

49,434 Reasons Why ChatGPT Wasn’t Enough

Discover my six tools for better creative writing

Creative Tools (image by author)

Having written over two hundred stories for Medium, I decided to expand into books, both fiction and non-fiction. This is a long-term ambition that I hadn’t worked out how to achieve.

Sadly (for me), there’s more to it than writing 50,000+ words instead of 1,500. But how much more? I didn’t know. There’s a graveyard of failed attempts on my cloud storage, proving that.

Then ChatGPT and Claude arrived.

Their feedback — and advice — was a revelation. The chatbots didn’t just spot spelling and grammar mistakes. They commented on meaning and intent. Memorably, Claude told me a character’s dialogue didn’t reflect his age, and it was right.

I believed I was making progress. ChatGPT and Claude identified weaknesses in my writing, which I discussed and resolved with the chatbots. Previously, this would have meant me signing up for a course or finding an editor.

But the chatbots weren’t enough. I let a so-called finished text sit for a week, but I returned to discover it was a mess. I needed to do more. This article describes what “more” looked like — and lists my six tools of creative writing that helped me move on. Some are…