My First 20+ Years as a Fiction Writer
My journey from “traditional” writing methods to AI-assisted editing. Spoiler alert: it still hurts!
In the shitstorm of professional and personal projects, I recently realized I had missed the fact I have officially been a fiction writer for (over) two decades. Pop the champagne!
I will start with the fact that, to no one’s surprise, it has been damn hard, and I have lost more money than I have earned from my publishing endeavors.
But I still love writing!
I want to take the chance today for a retrospective on my journey, and where I am heading next, also thanks to the just slightly controversial rise of AI tools (joking!).
Despite being twenty years into it, I have never really left my original writing project, in a way. I am currently editing, with the help of AI tools, my second epic fantasy novel, likely titled Path of the Nemesis. This is the more mature sequel to my debut novel, Path of the Guardian, part of a planned epic fantasy trilogy called Portal Wars.
Admire the cover in all its glory…
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Now, I have been a professional editor for financial publications, covering complex capital markets topics across long-form and news articles, for a decade. Even so, the challenge of effectively editing my own fiction remains the highest (virtual) mountain I find myself climbing whenever I am sitting at my keyboard.
But let me go step by step.
The Early Days
It took me ten years to go from starting to draft my first novel in Italian (at the tender age of 16) to seeing it published in 2011 by a small local publisher. I started out not having a clue of what I was doing as either a writer, a fictioneer, and especially as an editor. Writing that novel was my creative writing teacher, and it was a very harsh one!
I am documenting some of the nerdy journey that led me to the decision to write a novel at a young age on an author X account I recently set up, so feel free to check that out. But the gist of it is that there was very little guidance I had access to in my hometown, and the Internet was not nearly as powerful in the early 2000s as it is today. I mean, Skype and MySpace were the pinnacle of the Internet experience…enough said!
After moving from Italy to Hong Kong, also in 2011, and beginning my career as a journalist and editor, I shifted my authorial efforts to the English publishing markets, which continue to be far more promising than those of Italy, sadly (and especially for speculative fiction authors).
Getting from that published though immature first Italian novel to its English edition turned out to be a complete rewrite that took me nearly another decade and the help of multiple editors. It was a slow, painful surgery of an edit, cutting into the very bones of that first book project to lay more solid foundations for the sequels.
So, what about the sequels?
Phase Two
Well, I have since written and self-published the second novel in that trilogy in Italian (in 2020, “thanks” to the pandemic), completing another decade long effort.
But, in a development that shocked even me, I drafted the entire third and final novel of the trilogy in just a few insane pandemic months.
I remember it like a fever dream…
For two long months I woke up at 3 am every day, while the kids slept, to avoid the daily chaos, and wrote till my fingers hurt and my eyes got blurry. The result still leaves me stunned to this day: a 160,000 word monster of a draft and, at least in my very partial and biased eyes, the best creative writing I have ever produced.
I have not touched it since and plans for how I will edit such a beast remain partially formed, but more on that in a moment!
After the pandemic, and after relocating to Singapore (also in 2020!), began the slow work of rewriting my second novel in English. It has been a slow but more methodical process than I previously experienced for many reasons. Technology has played a big role in helping me. So let’s touch on that.
Translating a Novel
Since 2021, before I embarked on my tech startup journey, I was already scouring academic research and available translation tools (starting from good ol’ Google Translate) for help. After all, as a self-pubbed author, any professional translator was beyond my budget, and the work I received from freelancers was, understandably, not up to my expectations (you got what you paid for, I guess).
But much has changed. AI models like Anthropic’s Opus and Google’s Gemini Pro have become incredible at handling fiction translation, even for longer texts. Nowadays, I can really see the nuances of my original writing in the translations they produce, and I work with detailed prompts to preserve my writing style as much as possible on a line-by-line basis.
This would be very hard (or prohibitively expensive) to achieve with a human translator. It also gives me, in the peculiar position of someone who writes in both languages, maximum control of what I keep and what I change.
My process looks something like this: I typically start by getting at least two top AI models available to provide their own translations of an individual chapter, then make them assess each other to see who scores highest. That text becomes the rough stone to carve into through the rewriting and editing process, still keeping the original Italian side-by-side.
So far, I have found that this process has increased my motivation and improved the quality of the output, if not necessarily the raw speed of the work.
Writing is Rewriting
In terms of editing and rewriting fiction, things are messier in terms of whether I see some substantial improvements in my workflow thanks to the latest advances in tech.
Some tools I use in this phase have been around for years, such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid, AutoCrit. These are all fantastic assistants for any fiction and non-fiction writer, and they are themselves adding new AI-based capabilities to go beyond line editing and offer more “developmental style editing” to the writer. I typically find their AIs underwhelming.
It is clear their in-house models cannot compete with state-of-the-art models, at least for now. In some cases, I suspect all they are doing is using an API to GPT3.5 with some custom prompting to spit out their responses. Unfortunately, GPT3.5 sucks at most complex tasks, including fiction-related ones like editing (let alone fiction writing!).
That means editing remains a challenging, slow slog with many steps, even with technology involved. For me, it starts with a manual review, followed by asking models like Claude Opus to give me a full report on more structural/developmental aspects, typically using my own custom prompts. Opus at the moment ranks highest for its ability to work with fiction writing (GPT4 was the choice model until Opus came out).
Strange as it sounds (and putting aside the concerns over the data used to train these models), this “conversational editing” is the part I enjoy the most, as it allows me to go off incredible, sometimes absurd tangents for character development, world-building and more. I do not know if this works particularly well given I write speculative fiction, but the campiness of AI can be a real asset! These chats often spawn ideas I end up jotting down for other parts of the novel.
After that, as a last step, I move on to using the above mentioned line editing softwares and call it a day.
Do these tools really help?
Despite the challenges, my experience over the past year (basically since AI tools have gotten any good), would lead me to say YES, confidently.
My efficiency as a self-editor has increased, as I feel I always have a 24/7 crazy (in the best way) helper at hand to bounce off ideas and offer suggestions whenever I am struggling. This is important when dealing with the long and drawn-out process of editing a 120,000 word novel! It is still taking me years to finish that edit, but at least I get to inject some more fun into the process.
Are the AIs going to replace human editors?
As an editor myself, I would say, NAH, as I find constantly needing to be harshly critical of every word that comes out of the AI when offering editing suggestions.
At the moment, their fatal weakness is that they tend to be too way generous and afraid to hurt the human’s feelings to be comparable to how an editor approaches a poor writer (I speak from experience having been on both sides of the fence as both an editor and a reporter!). But it is a helpful support on the long way to the finish line and I am glad to have it.
My Master Publishing Plan
So, where was I? As of today, I am working on a final self-edit of chapter 25 out of 35 chapters in my second novel, titled Path of the Nemesis. With another pass from a human editor, I am hoping to have it ready to either self-publish or traditionally publish before the end of the year.
So, as that writing project (hopefully) ends in 2024, I will soon need to answer the question of how on Earth am I going to face the beast: the 160,000 draft of my third novel.
So far, my thinking is that I will not be even attempting to edit it in the original Italian, instead using the existing draft just as a base to help me write the English version directly. This will probably shave a couple of years off the timeline? That is my hope, at least.
What about marketing?
I have invested very little energy in marketing my books in English, at least so far. But as I get close to publishing the second novel out of the trilogy, marketing and sales will be something I need to take much more seriously. I know that, as tough as finishing books is, marketing and selling them is even tougher.
My philosophy so far has been simple: keep writing. One, two, even three books are not going to be what makes or breaks my commercial success long term. If by luck I get noticed before my tenth book, good. If not, guess what, KEEP WRITING.
But I know book marketing is a big topic, and one I am doing lots of research and experimenting in as well. Perhaps a topic worth touching on in future articles? Please let me know.
But, for now, thanks for reading this far!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the processes I talked about, the tools I discussed, author careers, and anything in between, so please reach out in the comments or at paolo@storya.app! My inbox is always open.
Peace,
Paolo
