I used AI to edit my novel

Books take ages to write. Could Chat GTP help authors with the mundane bits of editing?

Well hello there, friends! How are you doing? I hope you are warm (I am not) and dry in this tempest of a Spring that we are currently experiencing. If you are in a different hemisphere, I envy your toasty ankles and balmy afternoons. Before we jump into this week’s post, I wanted to give you a heads up that at the end of this month, I will be hosting a mini-workshop on ‘How to Outline Your Novel’, as voted for by subscribers. If you would like to attend (either live or recorded) you can do so by taking out a paid subscription. If you aren’t in a position to pay but would really like support, please direct message or email me and I would be happy to gift you a subscription.

Thank you for all your support, monetary or not - it allows me to keep writing and makes you the goodest of good eggs.

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If I had to name the most common struggle that the writers I work with have, it’s how to actually get the story written.

This is a subject I could talk about for three days straight, because despite working on my fourth novel, it’s my Achilles Heel. The advice I give always touches on the same thing. Deadlines. Give yourself one, but don’t use it as a stick to beat yourself with. Look, you might be good, but to think that you’ll write 10,000 words a week on top of a full-time job and right when a new series of The Traitors lands is quite simply unrealistic. 

Historically, I have been the queen of unrealistic expectations. Sometimes, I haven’t had a choice but to be unrealistic. When I signed my first publishing deal, I was so happy and so eager that I honestly didn’t see a problem with handing in a second novel five months later. Five months was ages. I could come up with an idea, write a first draft, and edit it in that time, right? Right?!

Every writer has a least favourite part of the writing process. For me, it’s teasing out developmental edits. It’s like spinning plates in the middle of a dodgeball match; the smallest slip-up and it takes twice as long to get them all back up again. But what if you noticed something major, something that would involve rewriting 95% of your manuscript? Something that wasn’t to do with plot, but the tense it is written in? If AI can tell us where to put commas, surely it can switch that too? How much time would that save?

Sometime during the worst of lockdown, I was interviewed by The Guardian about what it was like to write fiction when our collective reality felt like an incredibly boring dystopian novel. ‘It feel like being underwater and coming up for air each time I ascend the staircase into the main house.’ My pandemic was not as bad as others. It was hard in the way that most people’s were and acutely hard in a way that I hope wasn’t common. I wrote more than I ever have before, and still, I didn’t have time to edit my manuscript before handing it in. This happened later, of course, but it wasn’t as good at this stage as I hoped it would be.

I met my deadline. Just.

When writing my third novel, The Wedding Crasher, the world had opened up again and yet I was so mean to myself about not being able to maintain the same pace. Writing 35,000 words in a month whilst also working a job isn’t honourably prolific, not when I cancelled weddings, wrote during weekends away, and felt annoyed when people I loved called me to check in. Needless to say, I am a far more measured writer now. Christ, it's why I started Not A Write Off in the first place. 

My life is very different now. I have a baby who gives not a honk about my deadlines. My fourth novel is one I have been working on since March of 2022: the month I got pregnant. My publication date has been pushed by a very understanding editor to ease the pressure. 

The book is coming out, in February 2025. But… friends… with a first draft done, I anticipated a cheeky four to six weeks of tweaking and chopping before handing it in. Then, I made a discovery.

I was maybe 30,000 words before I realised that the first person, present tense POV that I started writing in wasn’t really working. I have two protagonists in this novel, which is a first for me. The story follows each character as they navigate their friendship anew, one having ghosted the other five years previously. I chose first person. How would we understand the particularities of their thoughts otherwise? How would we GET them? Reading it back, it was over-written and—to be honest—a little annoying. I had written 97,000 words. And now I realised that it needed to be in third person, past tense. What's that, I hear you shout? I should have realised this sooner? Yes, I know. But I wrote this book in such fragments, any sense of an overarching critical eye was lost. Until now.

Here we are, in March of 2024, the deadline looming. Rewriting a book in a different POV should be easy right? You change the ‘es’ to ‘ed’ and swap out the ‘I’. In fact, it’s SO EASY that AI could do it, right?

I never intended to put my manuscript into Chat GTP, for the simple fact that my books are regularly pirated online and I don’t want to feed the internet more of my work. However, I was curious to see if I could hold my own against a machine. So, here’s what I did. 

I re-wrote a small section of my manuscript in the third-person, past tense. Here it is:

Settled in the back of a taxi, Roza stuffed an M&S food bag between her feet. Its contents were an advertisement for her hasty approach to the pot luck; a bunch of bananas, a Tex-Mex dip selection, and two bags of crinkle cut crisps. Five minutes later, they turned down a familiar sycamore lined avenue. Her heartbeat quickened at each of the local landmarks that once punctuated her walk to school, always with Sadie at her side. Roza sat deeper in her seat and scanned each junction. Even though it had been years, she still expected to see her crossing the road, hair pulled into a high pony-tail, tote bag swinging at her side. Here was another person she owed an overdue conversation. Like always, the thought made guilt loom over her, bear like, and went on growling at her ear.

Then, I pasted the unedited paragraph into Chat GTP. Here’s what it came up with: 

She dashed into M&S and panic-bought a bunch of bananas, a multi-pack dip of the Tex Mex variety, and a few bags of crinkle-cut crisps before hailing a cab outside. Pulling out of the station and down a sycamore-lined avenue, her heartbeat quickened at the local landmarks that once punctuated her walk to school, always with Sadie at her side. She sat back in her seat, eyes scanning the road in front. Nearly 150,000 people lived here, and yet she always felt like Sadie was about to cross at the next set of traffic lights, her hair pulled into a high ponytail with an oversized scrunchie, tote bag swinging at her side. The cab slowed down a side street.

Technically, it worked. Grammatically, it’s sound. But there’s something missing from Chat GTP’s edit: detail and soul. 

Redrafting is so much more than checking for syntax. It’s thinking about tightening plot lines, emphasising reveals, cadence, the flow of a sentence, distinguishing mannerisms and vocal patterns in characters–an endless list of choices to be made that allows the book to take shape.

AI produces a result, but writing is all about the process. Sometimes that process is meditative, sometimes it’s mundane, but it’s where the real magic of stories can be found.

About the author:

Abigail Mann is an author, book coach, and writing mentor. She is currently writing her fourth novel for HarperCollins and has a thing for sharp contemporary literature with a comic edge. Abigail coaches with the London Writer’s Salon and privately mentors writers who need to cloud bust their plots, clean up their submissions, or reach a fiction milestone. Her other internet home is here.