Artificial intelligence: it may excite you or scare you, but there’s no escaping it in today’s world.
The fact is, artificial intelligence programmes are here to stay, whether you like them or not.
As a writer, it’s worth thinking carefully about whether you want to incorporate these tools into your writing practice, or whether you’d prefer to look for alternatives, or whether you’d rather stay clear of artificial intelligence altogether.
The better informed you are, the better decisions you can make.
Sudowrite is one of the most popular artificial intelligence writing tools out there today, so in this article I’ll review what it has to offer writers. For those who think the program isn’t for them, I’ll explore possible alternative tools they could use instead.
What is Sudowrite AI?
Sudowrite is an Artificial Intelligence programme designed for fiction writers. It helps authors with the processes of brainstorming, outlining, writing and editing.
Sudowrite Features
Sudowrite has a huge range of features for writing and editing a novel. Here, I’ll look at some of the most useful features:
Brainstorming
One of Sudowrite’s best features is its ability to generate story ideas.
If you’re desperate to write a story, and you’ve got a very basic idea of what you want your story to be about but don’t know how to move beyond your spark, Sudowrite can help.
The brainstorming tool is simple and user friendly. You write down your one-sentence idea, and Sudowrite will come up with many more ideas for you.
Plot Points
Once you’ve the basic idea for your story, Sudowrite AI will then come up with a variety of suggested plot points for you.
Plot Twist
Sudowrite can help you develop a plot twist for your novel, providing a huge variety of options for moving your story forward.
Writing
Sudowrite will actually start to write your story for you, helping those who struggle with writer’s block as they stare at the blank page.
The text won’t automatically be in your own voice, or necessarily even cover your ideas as you envisage them, but this can be very useful for writers who struggle to get words on the page, but are happy to rewrite and edit text that’s given to them.
Story Visualisation Canvas
The AI will bring up graphics for you based upon your character descriptions and scenes. You’re able to visualise your plot points through using movable cards on a canvas, which can help spark ideas for how to structure your plot.
World Building
Sudowrite helps you come up with myriad ideas for world building, in terms of social organizations, technologies, magic systems, religions, customs, lore, culture, economy and so on.
This is particularly helpful for writers looking to write a series, needing to keep their worlds consistent across different books.
Expanding Plots
If you’ve an idea for your plot but are struggling to expand this out into a full-form structure, Sudowrite can help you brainstorm ideas. As you write, you can ask Sudowrite to ‘expand’ your sentences, providing ideas for adding depth and detail to your ideas.
Some of these ideas may be fairly simplistic or clichéd, but they are useful for setting off sparks in a blocked mind.
Write and Rewrite
From a very simple sentence of an idea, you can ask Sudowrite to start writing your text for you.
If you don’t like what’s given to you, you can ask the AI to rewrite what’s there, and you’ve the option of writing something more specific so as to ensure you’ve given the AI enough information to work with.
You can also import your own manuscript and ask Sudowrite to rewrite sections you aren’t happy with yet.
Description, Tone, and Show versus Tell
There’s a feature in which you can ask Sudowrite to expand out the description on any aspect of your story. This can be useful for writers who struggle to write descriptions, and really speed up your writing process.
Descriptions aren’t limited to visual details, and include taste, smell, sounds and touch.
You can also choose certain ‘tones’ to alter the style of the writing, and in theory Sudowrite should learn to adapt to your own tone as you continue to write the story.
There’s also a really helpful feature for new writers which suggests ways you can show rather than tell aspects of your story – an area which can be hard to get your head around when you’re still learning the craft.
Beta Reading
Sudowrite can beta read your entire manuscript and offer you different reader opinions on your text – these will be different AI readers, not human readers.
Feedback from writers suggests these AI beta readings can be surprisingly insightful and useful.
Shrinkray
Once you’ve finished your story, Sudowrite will help you develop a logline, blurb, synopsis and story beat outline for your story – a useful feature as many writers really struggle with this.
Community and Classes
Sudowrite has an online community where you can meet other users and writers to discuss your writing experiences and make new friends.
There’s also a huge range of online tutorials teaching you about how to use Sudowrite to write your novel.
Sudowrite Pricing
Sudowrite pricing varies between 3 plans:
Hobby and Student at $10 per month: this gives 225,000 credits per month
Professional at $22 per month: this gives 1,000,000 credits per month, which is considered ideal for anyone working on a single novel or screenplay
Max at $44 per month: this is recommended for professional authors who use Sudowrite to help them publish books multiple times a year.
Sudowrite Free version versus Premium
There’s no free version of Sudowrite.
You’re able to sign up for a free trial of 10,000 credits. Once this is exhausted, you’ll need to choose a price plan and start paying if you wish to continue.
The free trial is a good way to discover if Sudowrite is the correct writing tool for you.
Sudowrite Pros and Cons
Sudowrite Pros
- Sudowrite is a fantastic tool for those struggling with writer’s block. There’s nearly limitless idea generation possibilities which can really spark off ideas in a blocked mind.
- Sudowrite possesses a decent understanding of genre, which can really help new writers come up with story ideas which are genre-appropriate.
- Sudowrite provides support to writers at multiple levels of the writing process, from brainstorming ideas; plot, character and world development; writing and rewriting, copyediting and reviewing; all the way through to beta-reading, which is more than many other writing tools, especially given its reasonable price.
- Sudowrite has some incredibly useful features for new writers which can really help their craft development, in particular the show versus tell feature and the description feature.
- Sudowrite can help writers overcome their fear of the blank page, providing text which the writer can then shape into the story they desire.
- Sudowrite has some remarkably advanced features, and can generate quite decent text from a mere idea, and useful feedback from its beta reading features. There’s also a community available, and the option to share your work with other human users for feedback.
- Sudowrite can speed up the writing and publication process for writers who publish a large volume of books.
- Experienced writers who understand story structure are in a strong position to discard clichéd and irrelevant story ideas and plot points, and can more easily pick out the strong suggestions from the weak.
- Some authors can finish books far more efficiently if they’re provided with blocks of pre-written text which they simply use to spark ideas, and will then rewrite and edit the prose in their own voice. This is one way Sudowrite can really speed up the publication process for experienced writers.
- Sudowrite can help authors keep their world-building and characterisation consistent across large series of books, and having the AI’s assistance in this regard can save writers a lot of time.
- Sudowrite’s community and tutorials provide ample opportunities for writers who want to learn about Storytelling craft to do so, and the software can help writers plot their story around different structures such as Save the Cat, The Hero’s Journey, etc.
Sudowrite Cons
- Many of the ideas Sudowrite generates can be seen as clichéd, inappropriate for the story, or lacking a coherent and powerful story arc. For an inexperienced writer, it would be easy to over-rely on these ideas, and to then start writing a poorly structured story lacking thematic resonance.
- Moreover, real concerns exist about intellectual property rights, in that Sudowrite, as an artificial intelligence tool, is ultimately always taking ideas from other published writers. This can affect the originality and individuality of the story that’s written using the AI tool.
- Although the text it generates can be surprisingly decent, it’s clear straight away that the voice lacks individuality. For a new writer, yet to discover and hone their writing voice, it could be easy to over-rely on AI-generated text rather than developing their own craft, and this will show in the quality of work produced at the end. Sudworite AI simply doesn’t have the lived experience and independent thought that a human writer possesses.
- It would be easy to generate an entire story in Sudowrite without actually learning about the craft of storytelling, and this would enable a writer to produce a piece of writing that looks quite polished on the surface, yet lacks any real depth or vitality.
- Some of the ideas and recommendations can be completely off-base. An experienced writer has the advantage of recognising inappropriate suggestions or catching inconsistencies, but a new writer could easily be led off their path by taking unnecessary and inadvisable tangents in their plot.
- Sudowrite has the danger of encouraging lazy writing – a writer may feel that they are producing something strong, because they haven’t yet learned the craft of storytelling sufficiently to see the weaknesses in the story. And the more a writer relies on artificial intelligence to write for them, the more their own voice risks atrophying in the process.
Is Sudowrite Worth it?
There’s no objective answer to this question; it’s a matter of personal preference.
Sudowrite may well be worth the cost to you if you’re a professional writer experienced in drafting and editing your own novels, and simply looking for a tool that helps you speed up your process. In this case, you’d likely be investing in the Max price option.
It’s also valuable as a tool for experienced writers to help overcome writer’s block. The idea and text generation can help spark ideas when you’re struggling, and as an experienced writer you’ll possess the craft knowledge to use these ideas and prose wisely, rather than over-relying on them.
You’ll understand that the text will likely need heavy revision and editing to bring it in line with your vision and voice. In this case, you might choose either the Hobby price option or the Professional price option, depending on how many credits you find yourself using monthly.
As a new writer, Sudowrite can help you overcome your fear of the blank page and help you find ideas, but you’d need to be careful not to become reliant on the tool, or you might struggle to develop your own voice and vision. This could lead you into writing clichéd stories which lack strong themes, structure and depth.
For other writers, regardless of the stage of their journey, Sudowrite may just feel too unsatisfying to use.
After all, if the tool comes up with the story and writes it for you, how is it actually your story? Are you writing or learning anything of real value? Will you gain a true sense of achievement writing a book this way?
If you feel uncomfortable about letting an artificial intelligence tool do all the heavy lifting for you when writing a book, there’s an alternative tool you might like to consider.
Alternative Option to Sudowrite
If you’re interested in using AI as part of your novel writing process, but don’t like the idea of allowing AI to come up with story ideas and write the prose for you, then you might consider Fictionary Storyteller as an alternative tool.
Fictionary Storyteller is a software which provides a flexible structural framework for drafting and editing your novel, and the option for using AI to analyse the effectiveness of your scenes and provide feedback, but won’t go so far as to suggest story ideas or generate text.
Fictionary can be a good alternative for writers who worry that using Sudowrite will cause them to become over-reliant on AI and allow their own skills to stagnate in the process.
The advantages or disadvantages of Fictionary, depending on your perspective, is that Storyteller will require you to think much harder about the story you want to write and to develop your own voice than Sudowrite will. Storyteller provides no shortcuts, in the way that Sudowrite does.
What Storyteller does provide is structural guidance which can help you write and edit the strongest story possible, but it will be entirely your story, your ideas and your prose.
To use Storyteller effectively, you’ll need to learn the craft of storytelling. Fictionary has a free online community with tutorials and webinars where you can hone your writing/editing skills and learn all about story structure.
You’ll be provided with guidance as to how to structure your story well, but it will be up to you to come up with the ideas and text.
Once you’ve done this, you’re provided with tools for self-editing your scenes and story according to 38 story elements, and the optional artificial intelligence tool will give you feedback as to whether or not your scenes meet the most important of these elements.
Using Storyteller is a more demanding experience, which challenges you to develop your craft and write unique, individual stories. The software will help you deal with some of the most difficult parts of writing and editing a novel, including how to structure your story and scenes, and how to integrate different storylines and subplots into one narrative.
Storyteller doesn’t provide you with a tool for rewriting your text, so if you choose Storyteller but still wish to gain access to a tool for copyediting your prose, then you’d need to look at also using a specific copy-editing tool such as Pro Writing Aid. This means you’d be looking at two subscriptions rather than one, but be aware Pro Writing Aid does have a free option which can help reduce your costs.
Let’s look at some key features which are unique to Fictionary Storyteller:
Story Arc
Once you’ve completed your manuscript, Storyteller will consider which scenes form your most likely plot points and devise a visual narrative story arc for you, so you can see where your story rushes or sags.
Story Elements Tabs
Storyteller provides you with a rigorous and clear method for self-editing your story through checking each scene against certain story elements, such as tension, conflict, goals and emotional progression.
To use the software effectively, you’ll need to understand how each element works – which means you’ll need to learn storytelling skills.
Once you’ve gained these skills, you’re in a great position to edit scenes yourself without relying on the opinions of others or on artificial intelligence – but the option to use artificial intelligence is there, should you choose to take it.
To summarise, Fictionary teaches you the tools to write strong stories and then provides a framework for you to edit and revise your novel without getting overwhelmed.
The artificial intelligence tool will use the same story elements as you to come to its conclusions, so you won’t be left wondering how it was that the AI formed its opinion.
Goal Progression Arc
Storyteller also provides a visual guide as to the ups and downs of your protagonist’s journey towards their story goal.
This is an important step in creating a story with strong pacing, and the better you can visualise this, the better your chance of creating a gripping and coherent story which doesn’t wander off on unnecessary tangents.
These are just a few highlighted features offered by Storyteller – I recommend checking out the software’s free trial to gain a more comprehensive view of all of its benefits.
Price
You can gain access to Storyteller for $14 a month, or Storyteller Premium, which includes all the free live online classes, for $29 per month.
Conclusion
Whether or not Sudowrite is the correct tool for you is a matter of personal opinion and taste. Much depends on your reasons for writing and your experience level.
If you’re able to use Sudowrite as a tool to strengthen your writing process, it can work well.
If you over-rely on Sudowrite to do the hard work of writing for you, then you may end up producing a book of questionable quality, and you may find you don’t get much out of the process in terms of your own experience and learning.
In my personal opinion, writing a book is about so much more than the end product. Writing involves a path of learning and discovery – both about yourself and the world. If we over-focus on the destination, we miss the point, which is that stories are all about the journeys we take in life.
If you want to learn more about the craft of storytelling, come along to the free online Fictionary community where you’ll find a wide range of friendly writers, keen to share this journey with you.
It’s not obligatory to have a Fictionary subscription to join this community, so it’s a great place to chat about different AI tools and discover which one might work best for you.