My writing is often inspired by characters and the desire to put them in certain situations. For me, the character’s story is most often what motivates me to write. Most of my stories are centred around characters I’ve created for an RPG at one time or another.
The writing software I use is a LateX editor. Alot in LateXila (now called Enter Tex). I switched to LateX after massive issues with both Word and LibreOffice Writer. Those programs are simply unstable above a thousand pages. LateX has no such problems and I’m finding the programming-language-like approach an absolute joy.
A character needs a setting and I like complex, internally coherent settings. To safeguard continuity and logic I’ve written a web based (php/mysql) system that I call the Book Making Machine. I use it to keep track of events, locations, characters, families, titles, ranks, military units and more. It’s a tool that constantly evolves to meet the needs of my writing. I like it when events in my material are properly referenced. If a character would likely know about something that has happened somewhere else in the setting, I prefer it if it comes up in the story somehow. For this reason, I sort of expect to publish new editions of older works periodically when I’ve added substantial material to a setting. It wouldn’t feel right if characters were oblivious about events that they ought to know about. Since I write up and down the timeline of my setting, this is something I expect to run into.
So far I haven’t used AI to write anything. I’ve experimented with it a little, to see if it can extend texts in my own style (it can’t). In fact, all writing it produces is generic and forgettable. So far, the main use for it is in the endless search for missing or wrong words in the editing process. It may also occasionally be useful to give a starting point how to write the next section. It doesn’t really come up with much that’s usable, but, in the absence of a person to discuss plot points with, it does tend to help shape one’s own ideas. Recently I’ve been able to use it to help with structures. I’m not much of a poet or blurb writer and what it comes up with does tend to give a starting point, even if you end up changing absolutely everything.
I should add a little update in that AI has proved useful in the editing process. I’ve been using it for that now, mostly when I’m not happy with a passage and am not sure how to change it. Getting it to work the way I want it (i.e. changing almost nothing), took a while, but once you have it more or less reliably doing that, it does tend to help. Not that what it spits out is immediately usable, but it does sometimes get you to consider a synonym, or some times rearrange a sentence for the better. It’s also proving useful as a spell-checker, grammar-checker and most of all, punctuation-checker. You have to be careful, as always, or it’ll turn everything into generic, mostly meaningless, mush, but it has proved useful to assist in editing in recent months. I’d much prefer a human editor, but so far I haven’t come across anyone that I felt would be a good fit for me.