Recent content by NotoriousNAG

Ofc, and there's valid ways to use it (brainstorming being the most obvious), but it's always good to point out it's limitations so others can make an informed decision

The only thing I'd say is to play around with it and see how easy it is to prompt it into giving you specific advice. If you ask it "Do you think I'm using too many adverbs", do you find that it says yes? What if you ask it "Do you think I should use more adverbs?" What if you say "I've been...

I really don't think the idea of using AI to give any sort of meaningful feedback on stories is sensible. It can spot misspellings etc (though can't tell how many Rs are in Strawberry half the time), but it's got absolutely zero ability to actually evaluate your work. LLMs work by breaking text...

Oh god, I used submission grinder probably about 10 years ago when I was actively submitting, had a whole spreadsheet to track things and everything. Sadly nothing came of it (very fairly, I was not writing good stories) but I'm happy to see it's still going

I think any discussion of what's important in a story will inevitably end up being a discussion of how to build that thing into stories. I'm not sure there's much of a distinction, really, between describing stories that work because of their structure and discussions using a structure to write...

It's a book originally about screenwriting that pretty much lays out a structure for you to follow. It's reasonably well known and has been adapted for novels since it came out (there's an official version now apparently). I'd hesitate to call it formulaic but only because that's got such...

I'd be a lot more convinced that the structure is descriptive if I didn't routinely see people using such structures prescriptively. The whole point of something like Save The Cat is explicitly for it to be followed. The Hero's Journey might have been meant initially as a description, but it's...

Yeah but you can't follow a structure without considering key plot points that have to happen within scenes. You can't really plot out your inciting incident without getting into scenes, just like with any other plotting keyframes. There's a lot of very successful books that don't particularly...

I think a lot more emphasis is put onto structure than is really due. It's important to make sure you're keeping things moving but it's easy to get bogged down tinkering with stuff like "hero at the mercy of the villain scene" instead of actually writing. This is the sort of thing I'd think of...