Can AI Write a Fiction Novel for You?

I’m the founder of The Novelry, the writing school for writers serious about becoming published authors, and we supply the publishing industry, via literary agents, with a stream of talent and manuscripts to publishing standards.

Contracts require authors to confirm they have not used AI tools to generate content; otherwise, that content has no ownable value and cannot be copyrighted. Our role is to provide the industry with original content where AI has not been used and we’re more than able to do so.

Those of us in the industry know that AI-generated material cannot compete with human fiction. How come?

Let us begin with that wonderful grudge-bearing creature, the author, and why and how they write.

The machine that is AI does not wish or have desire, it does not rage or have regret. These human frailties have powered storytellers’ subject matter from the ancient religious works through to the current bestseller list. The wounds, flaws, vanities, and sins of humanity are its singular genius. Without the corruption, there is nothing to say and no need to say it.

What makes writing human?

Suffering

‍All creativity is rooted in our human failings. From the idea to the execution, it’s not possible to create a work of art without being a flawed human being. We reach the audience via our shared vulnerabilities. It is confession that creates intimacy. A reader feels known and seen when the author reveals their weakness.

Fiction lays bare the gap between thought and deed and its contradictions alert the reader to the crisis of identity which functions as the driver for change in the story.

The novel as a form is concerned with the journey from personality to identity. This happens not just in the concept but page after page, where ideas, words, or sentences are put together in a way that does not make “normal” sense.

The machine does not suffer. Because AI cannot wish for anything at all, and for that, the story and the text is directionless. It lacks the deepest and most dynamic cause.‍

Our selfish needs

‍The reason for the idea for a story itself is unknowable at source to the author. We don’t know why we are driven to write a certain story until we’ve finished it. We don’t know the storyline until we start pulling on threads of experience and preoccupation. An idea is all well and good, but it’s not possible to deliver it if it doesn’t matter to you. We write to treat our own problems. If you don’t birth it, you don’t care for it.

Good stories don’t arrive box-fresh and good to go. You work a bad idea into a good idea through experimentation, time, and labor on the page. Ideas grow. Objections arise too, as you work, and it’s in the fix of those that the story gets muscle. Perseverance of this kind is often driven by ruthless personal needs.
—Louise Dean

Hypocrisy

‍A theme of a work of fiction is not a universal truth like peace and love. If it is, the book’s a dud. The theme of a work of fiction is a hypocrisy the author cares to poke. Underneath the “truths” of the liberal social contract run the real injustices these “truths” deflect. Your theme is something you may have experienced to your cost. It takes courage to upset our social circles. The machine can deliver the mainstream conventions. Nothing to see here.

Only the human author stumbles like a drunk into the cellar of hypocrisy, because only the human has been slighted and hurt.

Choosing to be bad

‍There is no story without a bad guy, or someone we can laugh at. When we converse, or joke, among friends, we create a bond of mischief that is forbidden outside of the circle. Some are admitted, some are left out. The author decides who is in and who is out. The human excludes, the human prefers.

Without the bad, there is no great. Without our most awful human traits, the very things we might deplore outside the covers of the book, there is no fiction.

Whatever AI can produce is of no more use to the underwater world of our inner lives than a plastic fish.

So, this is my message to fiction writers everywhere:

As an author, you’ve got to get things wrong. Then you’ve got to get them wrong again and again until the wrongness becomes you, unrepentingly, on the page and establishes your voice.

Remember, if you have used AI to write your book, you’ve used a tool to lift content from other sources. The material is not yours. You cannot pass it off as something you have created or own. Literary agents and publishers, and some writing schools like The Novelry, who supply them, will ask you to attest that you didn’t use it to generate the content of your work of fiction. Everything from the opening sentence to The End. AI-generated creative work cannot be copyrighted per the guidance of the U.S. Copyright Office. If you need more guidance, read our AI policy.

Beloved writers, leave AI out of your writing life. Let AI handle the administrative chores of your life and give you back time. Write a book for you. The magic is yours for the taking, and the practice of the sleight of hand that is the craft, combined with that ruthless journey of self-discovery, will please readers... and set you free.‍

Through courses, one-to-one coaching with bestselling authors and Big Five editors, and partnerships with leading literary agencies, we guide writers along a proven pathway from first idea to a finished, submission-ready novel.