A new client arrived with 45,000 words she’d bought from an AI service.
A novel based on her own story, the right length, delivered in a file. She’d done what a lot of people are being told to do, and she had a manuscript to show for it. Then she came to a ghostwriter, and she signed the Discovery Intensive.
I think that will be a common sequence for the next several years, and I want to explain why it made sense to both of us. The draft was a house built from a catalog. Right number of rooms, doors where doors go, and nobody had ever lived in it. The story of her life was still in her. The manuscript was around it.
I don’t blame her for buying it. She’d been told a machine could hand her a book about her own life, and she believed the people who sold it to her. I blame them. A service that sells a finished life story without one conversation with the person who lived it is selling a shortcut that doesn’t exist, and the customer pays twice, once for the file and again for the book.
What can an AI manuscript not do?
Supply the material. An AI can produce sentences all day, and the sentences will be grammatical and the chapters will be the right length. What it can’t know is what happened in the room, what she was afraid of, the detail she’s never told anyone, and what the people in her life will say when they read it. Those are the book. Everything else is furniture.
That part is rotten. These services promise the book and deliver the furniture, and the author finds out when somebody who knows her reads a page and doesn’t recognize her in it.
A generated draft of a real person’s story is a plausible account of a life the machine has never witnessed, filled in from the average of every similar story it’s seen. It reads fine. It’s also not hers. She could tell, and that’s why she was sitting across from me.
What is the first job with an AI draft?
Find out whether the story is in the manuscript or still in her. Some of the 45,000 words will survive, because a generated draft sometimes hits on a structure the author recognizes and can use. Most of the book has to come out of the interviews, because that’s where the material is, and no draft substitutes for asking her what happened and waiting for the answer.
So the draft becomes a map, the way a client’s first description of a book is a map. I read it to see what she thought the book was, and then the interviews go looking for what the book is. The AI gave her a shape. The shape isn’t the book, and it was never going to be.
The conversation the machine never has
A story drawn from your own life has real people in it, and putting real people into print is a legal exposure. A writer who helps put a real person into a story that damages them isn’t a bystander in the eyes of the law, whatever the contract says. That conversation belongs in the first hour, before the writing, and a ghostwriter has to raise it.
The machine doesn’t. It’ll write the scene with the real name in it and never flag the risk, because it doesn’t know the name is real. I raise it with every memoir client, because the alternative is finding out from a lawyer after publication, and I’ve written about that risk in the memoir ghostwriting material on this site.
This worries me more than the flat prose. Bad sentences cost an author readers. A real name in a damaging scene can cost her a lawsuit, and the service that generated the scene won’t be anywhere near the courtroom when it happens.
Is an AI-written draft still worth anything?
It proves the author cares enough to try.
That’s not nothing. A person who has gone as far as buying a manuscript has decided the book matters, and that decision is the hardest part of any book project. The draft also gives the interviews a starting point, a set of chapters to argue with, and arguing with a draft turns up material faster than starting from a blank page.
What it can’t do is the part a ghostwriter is for: get the material out of the person. The interviews do that. The silence after a question does that. A draft, however long, has never once done that, because the material was in her.
What will the next few years look like?
More clients arriving with an AI draft. Fewer arriving with a book. The two aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them is where the work is. I expect the Discovery Intensive to start with a manuscript assessment more often than it starts with a blank page, and I expect the assessment to reach the same conclusion most of the time: some of this survives, most of the book is still in you, let’s go get it.
That’s not an argument against the tools. Use them. It’s an argument about what they produce, a shape, and what a book needs, a life. The guide to ghostwriting covers the interview method that closes the gap.
AI is a tool. Treat it like one and you’ll do fine; hand it the whole job and you’ll end up where she did.
My writing handbooks use AI prompts to help writers build a better protagonist or a tighter plot, and they stop there, because the writer still has to write the book. If you can write a book with AI and keep a reader turning pages, more power to you, because the reader is the only judge who counts.
How I read the draft she brought
Once, quickly, with a pencil, marking three things.
What she’d keep if she could keep only a page. Where the machine had filled a gap with something generic. Where a scene stopped short of what obviously happened next. The first list tells me what she believes the book is. The second tells me where the interviews have to go. The third tells me where the real material is closest to the surface.
Then I put the draft away and didn’t open it again until after the first two interviews. A draft in front of you during an interview turns the interview into an edit, and I won’t let a file set the agenda for a conversation about somebody’s life. The file gets consulted afterward, to see how much of it survived contact with what she said.
The catalog house
You can live in a catalog house. People do. It’s a kitchen and the plumbing works. What it doesn’t have is the mark on the door frame where a child was measured every birthday, or the room nobody uses because of who used to sleep in it. Those are the details a reader stays for, and no catalog has them, because they only exist in the life that was lived.
Those details are why I do this work. Getting a client to the mark on the door frame takes patience and a lot of quiet, and no generator can sit through that quiet with her.
Her book will have them. They’re coming out in the interviews, one at a time, in the pauses. The draft she bought will have helped, because it told us where the rooms were. It could never have told us who lived in them.
Bring the draft, or the notes, or nothing at all. The Book Discovery Intensive settles what the book is for and what your existing material can become. If you’ve already bought a manuscript, the assessment starts there and goes looking for the book underneath. Connect with me on LinkedIn or send me a direct message and we’ll talk about it. Part of The AI and Writing Hub.
The services selling generated life stories should tell customers up front that the file is a starting point, and they won’t, because the pitch sells better without it. She paid for 45,000 words and still had to come find the book in herself. If you’re holding one of those files, keep it and bring it, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s finished.
