I just posted COHERENCE, the result of my first time writing fiction since, I believe… high school English class? I’ve been loosely thinking about the core idea and related topics for the last year or so and felt like a short story was the right format for them.

Turns out: fiction is hard. I don’t know that I’ll be doing much more of it anytime soon. But it was a fun muscle to exercise. (I would welcome sharp feedback!)

All that to say: I don’t claim any sort of fiction-writing expertise. But I’ve written one piece, and I naturally also treated it as a chance to see if AI was useful in doing so as of May 2026. Here were my takeaways on where it was and wasn’t.

Extremely useful

In the outlining phase, I found AI really great for helping me evaluate my outlines and plots and character arcs against specific philosophies.

Brandon Sanderson, for example, has a remarkable YouTube lecture series on his writing philosophy. Asking an LLM to test my outline and/or “plots and Plots” against his thinking was a hugely helpful input. Same with Dan Harmon’s story circle and related concepts.

My brain isn’t practiced in thinking about writing in those ways, and the AI (pointed towards specific sources/philosophies) at this stage almost felt like having a writing partner critiquing my approach to the story.

Once I got some actual writing down on the page, it was also tremendous for editing — especially copy editing (“your verb tense is screwed up here”) and keeping track of factual consistency (“first you said David was driving in this scene but later you say Mara was”). It caught a ton of little things I would have missed in the process, and I think the story is much better for that.

It was also, of course, great for general research. “What hospital in Akron should I have Mara’s mom go to given the story so far?” is a canonical LLM question, and it saved me plenty of time on things like that. It also helped me find some great epigraphs for chapters where I couldn’t think of one myself.

Last: I found it surprisingly good at suggesting a list of approaches to a plot / story problem that I could consider. As discussed below, it was mostly garbage at finding plot and story problems. But when I identified one, I could ask AI and it would give me ten ways to solve it. Usually eight of them were terrible and made no sense, but one or two would be seeds of a good idea and I could figure out how to expand and adjust them and make them work.

Totally useless

Despite my best efforts: I found the AI pretty much useless for the writing itself.

No matter how I prompted, I couldn’t get it to write in quite the right tone — there was always an AI tinge to it. It couldn’t write with good rhythm or pace or word choice (I’ll let you judge whether I can. But it certainly couldn’t…).

(And yes, all the em-dashes in the piece are actually mine. I promise I’ve been using them forever. See this blog post from 12 years ago where I use ten of them in a thousand words.)

It also had a very poor theory of mind for the reader, and as such, struggled with anything story-related once we got going. It had trouble tracking what the reader knew, what the characters would be thinking or what they knew at any point, and all of that led to anything it wrote being pretty out of step. It produced what seemed like reasonable beats when read in isolation, but (aside from the tone issues), rarely made sense in the broader context of the story or its pacing at that moment.

I abandoned trying it in the writing process pretty early. I came back midway through once I had a good amount written in an attempt to few-shot prompt it with some of what I had done so far. It was marginally better but not there yet.

I suspect that in months or a year or two, LLMs will be able to write exceptional fiction. Maybe they even can today, if prompted better than I did.

But for the time being, I would say they are outstanding at outlining and editing — but not yet writing itself.

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