Why using Generative AI in your prewriting process is a Bad Idea

Warning: potentially controversial opinions ahead.

It’s no secret that I am not a big fan of generative AI/LLM use in any aspect of the creative process. I’ve become increasingly distressed as I see more and more people admitting to their usage of LLMs and genAI to create their fiction—especially when I hear people who I used to respect talking about how they use it in fiction. They seem to see it as no big deal where…I have issues with these uses, especially those who claim it helps their prewriting processes. That’s a huge “OH HELL NO” red flag for me.

I’m not just talking from my own biases as a fiction writer who has had her work scraped for AI training. My special education Master’s degree project focused on remedial writing, and I spent ten years working as a resource-level learning specialist and case manager at the middle school grade levels. The more time I spent working with students who were struggling with reading and writing, the more I learned about the value of the prewriting process, not just for good writing but for reading comprehension. The same skills used for prewriting also are connected to reading comprehension.

So how does that combination of skills work? It’s tied to how humans handle language. Language processing is a complex mixture of receptive and expressive language usage. Receptive is what you read and hear. Expressive is what you speak and write. An ability deficit in either area can lead to problems in both reading and writing. If your receptive language processing has a deficit, then it becomes hard to understand what you’re reading—and causes difficulties in your ability to express your understanding of what you’ve read. If your expressive language processing has a deficit, then of course you have issues describing your understanding of what you have read. But expressive language deficits have further challenges, because often part of the problem is the ability to organize your thoughts in order to share them in a manner understandable to others. Someone can be operating at the genius level in receptive processing while struggling with expressive processing—but no one is going to know it because of their difficulties in being able to express their knowledge and understanding!

(And yes, this mixture of high receptive/low expressive ability can and does happen.)

The link between prewriting skills and reading comprehension is surprisingly simple when you think about it. Prewriting is a cognitive process which expands an individual’s ability to analyze, compare/contrast, and assess how information fits together. These are the same tools a good reader applies to whatever they are reading.

This ties into reading comprehension as well. Part of understanding what you read is the ability to follow along with a writer’s thought thread. The same tools used for organizing writing also work for making sense out of someone else’s writing, whether you use mind mapping, graphic organizers, or the like. Take any graphic organizer and fill it out using a short story. A novel. A film. An essay. Prewriting skills are also structural analysis tools for reading comprehension.

The key is that the more that you wrestle with understanding something you read, the more you think about it and sit with the concepts a particular piece of work presents to you, the deeper it will imprint upon your memory processes and be available to you for later reference. The same is true with writing, where you have wrestled with the concepts and characters and points you want to make long before you start typing, or put pen/pencil to paper.

It doesn’t matter if you are an obsessive planner who writes in a linear fashion, someone who writes sequences out of order to put them together later, or someone who feels their way along with the story. Part of the drafting process involves the creation of a coherent thread of thought that makes sense. Handing the foundation of putting those organizational pieces together to a LLM, even if it’s just generating prompts or ideas, undercuts the formation of that thought thread in later drafting. Otherwise, you risk not thinking about discarded notions, the messy planning pieces, or the research rabbit holes that might end up in the work after all because the generation process didn’t come from your brain, but from the LLM, so you haven’t spent time contemplating all the information that gets buried in your brain. You miss the rewards of the exploratory process, such as the “aha!” moment that pulls it all together because one of those discarded concepts ends up fitting into the work after all.

For me, that’s the biggest red flag when it comes to the seductive lure of genAI for prewriting, especially if you’re wanting to grind work out quickly. Yes, the LLM has access to a lot of data. But what it doesn’t have is the ability to combine that data into an intuitive leap that makes your work different. Sure, when the time crunch hits, it’s tempting to use LLMs for the sort of brainstorming you might otherwise do with selected others. Heck, thanks to the massive amount of scraping of writers’ work out there, you could even ask the LLM to generate ideas from the perspective of your favorite writer. Sounds intriguing—but.

How much have you lost by spending your time creating appropriate prompts?

Wouldn’t that time be better served by doing research on your own? Immersing yourself in the appropriate readings, so that your backbrain starts generating its own notions? Wrestling with the idea that doesn’t want to come to life just yet? Laying the foundation for that intuitive leap that lifts your idea above tropes and clichés?

That’s the thing. To me, all the tasks that people say they want to outsource to genAI are important, integral parts of my writing process. Yes, it’s a slower way of writing. However, after writing twenty-five books and a number of short stories, I’ve found that it is worth the extra length of time required to do my own planning rather than outsource it to a plagiarism machine that relies on brute force memory association and is unable to take that creative, out-of-the-box intuitive leap that human brains are capable of making.

It all comes down to that sweet, sweet discovery moment when you realize that your subconscious has been simmering its way to a solution for that dilemma you’ve created for yourself. That’s as much a part of the writing process as putting down the actual words—and to omit it risks sliding into mediocrity and cookie-cutter story sameness.

Why take that chance?