When it comes to writing a novel, most authors spend countless hours crafting compelling characters, developing intricate plots and writing descriptive prose. The writing process itself can be laborious and time-consuming. With recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, new content generation tools are emerging that aim to assist novel writers and speed up certain aspects of their creative workflow.
While no tool can completely replace human creativity, intelligence or skill, some programs are getting better at generating initial drafts, filling in minor details and automating routine writing tasks so authors can focus on higher-level creative work. In this article, we’ll explore some of the leading content generation tools on the market today and how they might be useful for helping write a novel.
Plot Generators and Story Planners
One of the most challenging parts of writing a novel is developing an engaging and cohesive overall plot structure. Many writers find it helpful to plan out major plot points, subplots and character arcs beforehand using a story planning tool. Some popular options for plot and story planning include:
Scrivener – This is a full-featured writing app that includes built-in outlining and storyboarding tools for mapping out novel plots. Authors can create nested folders to represent chapters, scenes and plot points. Characters and settings can also be defined.
StoryMap – An online story planning tool that allows creating multiple plot lines, character biographies and comprehensive storyboards in a visual format. Authors can connect plot points, track character goals and collaborate with others.
Plottr – Specifically designed for plotting novels and longer works of fiction. Provides templates for common plot structures and allows customizing beats, plot points, character goals and more on virtual notecards. Easy to reorganize and change as the story develops.
Plot Generator – This AI-powered plot generator focuses on coming up with initial main plot lines, major twists and high-level narratives based on genre and character details provided. Can serve as a starting point or source of inspiration.
While these tools won’t write the novel for you, they aim to alleviate the mental workload of envisioning all plot elements from the beginning and ensure continuity across a longer work of fiction. The visual outlining also helps perceive gaps and refine connections between scenes.
Character Profilers
Well-developed, multidimensional characters are crucial for any compelling novel. Character profiling tools can assist with envisioning backstories, traits, goals, relationships and more to bring fictional people to life on the page. Popular options include:
Character Planner – A versatile character planning tool that provides in-depth templates for profiling physical description, personality, backstory, goals, flaws and more. Easy to adjust attributes as the storyline progresses.
Character role generator – This AI tool generates short character bios based on occupation, gender, age and other key descriptors provided. Helps spark new character ideas or fill minor supporting roles.
Myers-Briggs Character Analyzer – Based on the Myers-Briggs personality theory. Authors describe a character’s behavioral tendencies and receive a suggested personality type analysis to inform deeper characterization.
While these apps don’t craft characters for you, they structure the character development process and ensure psychological consistency across the narrative. The visual profile overviews also serve as handy references while writing scenes involving those personas.
Descriptive Prompt Generators
Generating fresh, vivid descriptions is another challenging aspect of novel writing that can sometimes stall the creative flow. Descriptive prompt generators try to spark new ideas in these areas:
Descriptic – Provides one-word writing prompts accompanied by short descriptive writing exercises on various topics like character, setting or mood. Helps stimulate new metaphors, analogies and sensory details.
Scene Descriptor Generator – Rolls randomized descriptive scene elements to envision like weather, lighting, landscape attributes and more. Combines prompts for a fully-fleshed paragraph starter.
Character Descriptor Generator – Generates fresh descriptions of a character’s physical appearance, mannerisms, style of dress or accessories. Inspiration for attracting reader attention to personalities.
While these apps don’t write the passages themselves, they aim to jumpstart descriptive details and keep fresh ideas circulating when usual descriptions feel tired or spent. The prompts enhance skills like sensory language, metaphor-making and objectively observing facets rarely described.
Scene Autofills and Paragraph Expanders
Some cutting-edge tools are emerging that can automatically generate entire paragraphs, scenes or chapters by filling in details around a high-level prompt or summary given by the author. The quality is still evolving:
Anthropic’s Constitutional AI – An AI writing assistant that can autogenerate paragraphs and scenes based on terse prompts. The language aims to be natural and coherent but some generated content may still come across as stilted or nonsensical to human readers. Works best complementing rather than replacing an author’s own writing.
NovelAI – Subscription-based AI tool focused on interactive storytelling. Promotes writing with rather than primarily relying on the AI. Users craft scenario outlines to inspire new scenes, which the AI then attempts to extrapolate with plausible details and consistency. Collaborative approach versus outright replacing human writers.
Wordtune – Autofills sentences and paragraphs with grammatical language while attempting to maintain factual consistency, flow and tone matching an author’s existing content. But quality and usefulness depends heavily on the specificity and coherence of original prompts provided.
While scene autofilling tools aim to increase efficiency, their language quality is still developing. Most experts advise against over-relying on generated content and instead using these as supplements while still crafting the bulk of scenes and prose independently for highest quality results.
Conclusion
As AI and natural language processing continue progressing, novel writing tools show great potential to streamline certain aspects of the creative planning and drafting process. The best approach seems to leverage such technology judiciously as productivity aids rather than replacements for human skills and judgment. No tool can match writing books that genuinely resonate with readers on an emotional level. But used wisely in combination with an author’s own talents, these applications may help devoted novelists put even more compelling stories into the world with a little extra support along the way. The future remains promising for further empowering creative workflow without compromising artistic vision and integrity.
Andrew Stroud