Beat the Bots book by Jane K. Cleland should be the go-to book for an aspiring author. It touches on all the basics of writing a good fiction book and gives a boost to anyone who thinks that starting a career as an author is a waste in the times of AI.
There is a lot of buzz around how AI agents and algorithms will soon make a career in writing worthless. That may be true to a certain extent for certain writing professions. But it is not entirely true, as yet, in case of fiction writers.
Yes, AI chat applications can write a story. Maybe a few pages long. But anyone who has spent any amount of time to craft a 60 thousand word novel using the AI tools realizes how hard it is to keep it consistent and on the path that you want it to be. Future applications will most likely overcome this barriers, but it still won’t be the writers’ words, characters, and plot twists.
And that is the one single message that Cleland sends in this book. Your story is your’s and no one else can write it for you. No other person and definitely not a machine. Because the machine can’t yet predict what you are thinking and what you are about to do next.
Perhaps the day is not far when you will have the tentacles of the machine embedded in your brain and then it could predict your next thought like the Borg, but not today. I digress.
Jane K. Cleland is an award winning writer of books on writing suspense and thrillers and has published many novels that have also been optioned for TV. She is a contributing editor for Writer’s Digest Magazine and the chair of the Black Orchid Novella Award, presented by the Wolfe Pack in partnership with Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.
The author points out with examples the strengths and limitations of what AI agents can help you with. How you can use it to accelerate some parts of your craft. But if you stay true to your story, the bots cannot beat you.
For new authors, the bots might seem very efficient when it comes to plotting, but it inherently lacks originality. The author correctly points out that AI is mostly a Search Engine on steroids. It can only read what is already written and it can pull a bit from here and a bit from there. What it cannot do is form an original thought.
Once that is drilled down in your mind, and you are ready to jump in into writing the next great novel, Cleland is ready and waiting to hold your hand through the entire process.
She guides you from how to paint the rough contours of your canvas, to giving you the tool for fine detailing needed to define the characters in the book.
Every author for centuries is writing the same story. For romance authors it is,
- They meet each other.
- They fall in love with each other.
- Then the universe conspires against them
- They unite to defeat the universe’s conspiracy against them
- They live happily ever after.
I can hear the clamor of romance authors jumping up and throwing things at me at this time, but let me finish.
Yes. The story is the same, but it is what happens between these lines that matters the most and makes one story different than others. The author again points out how this stuff between the lines is yours. Only you can write it. No bot in the world can write the story that you want to write. The way you look at your characters. The way your characters do things they do.
Chapter after Chapter, Cleland hand-holds new and experienced authors through the various, recursive steps involved in writing a book and hones their skills. Recursive because your characters influence the story and the story influences your characters. You may begin your voyage with a certain set of ideas, but you will have to be flexible to accommodate the unexpected storms and islands that you walk into while writing your book.
Ultimately, the author helps you bring in YOU into the book. Keeps showing you how to be original and stay away from the bots, no matter how easy and exciting its answers might seem.
Beat the Bots is an information dense book that will demand many hours from you as you work through it. But it will be worth your effort if you work through all the parts of the book. It might prove a little too much to do all that in one go. But you can read, work and digest the information slowly. writers who are already in their third or fourth books can still learn many things to hone their skills and make their stories richer and better.
Overall, Beat the Bots by Jane K. Cleland gives you the confidence that AI still has a long way to go when it comes to writing a full length novel. And even if it gets there, your writing is unique to you. Your word choice, your emotions, your twists, your settings, and your characters.
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