Paid $40 for an AI plotting tool and it gave me nothing I couldn't do in a notebook

Last month I got tired of staring at a blank page, so I signed up for one of those story outlining apps that promises to generate beats and twists for you. It was $40 for a year, and I figured that was cheap if it meant I'd actually finish something. The problem is it just spat out generic fantasy tropes every time I fed it a basic idea, like a quest, a betrayal, and a chosen one. I spent more time rewriting its suggestions than I would have just plotting myself with index cards on my kitchen table. I also found that the more I relied on it, the less I trusted my own gut about what makes a scene work. I canceled the renewal yesterday after 3 tries and went back to my old method of scribbling three sentences per chapter on sticky notes. Has anyone else burned cash on writing software that ended up being a glorified random generator? What do you use when you're stuck and need a nudge without losing your own voice?

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1 Comment

richard_hall15d ago

Forty bucks for a year is basically lunch money, so the real loss here is three afternoons of your life. A notebook never fails you because it doesn’t pretend to know your story better than you do. If anything, this just confirms that the nudge you need is usually just sitting down and writing the dumb first draft.