Are you curious about the hidden structures that turn ordinary manuscripts into irresistible page-turning stories? Wondering how to shape your characters, scenes, and chapters so readers can’t put your book down? Kristen Tate shares her tips.

In the intro, key book publishing paths [Jane Friedman]; sub-rights and why it’s important to understand how many ways your book can make money [Renee Fountain]; the innovation of the indie author community and biggest changes in publishing with Michael Tamblyn [KWL Podcast];

Plus, 10 publishing trends for 2025 [Written Word Media]; Unveiling 2025: Indie authors gear up for AI innovations and craft renaissance [Indie Author Magazine];
How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition is out now; and join me for a live webinar: 7 steps to write your non-fiction book in 2025, 15 Jan.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of the Blue Garret, offering editing services and advice for authors. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. Her latest book is Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Most common mistakes authors make with openings
• The differences between scenes and chapters
• How to plot a page-turner
• The continuous development of an author's writing process
• Balancing reading for pleasure and reading for research
• Inadvertent plagiarism and the boundaries of fair use
• Benefits of working with a human editor
• Utilising AI tools while maintaining your author voice

You can find Kristen at TheBlueGarret.com.

Transcript of Interview with Kristen Tate

Joanna: Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of the Blue Garret, offering editing services and advice for authors. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. Her latest book is Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction.

Welcome back to the show, Kristen.

Kristen: Oh, thanks. It's great to be back with you.

Joanna: Yes, and you are primarily an editor, and you're actually my editor. So we've talked about that before. So it is very interesting having you on the show to talk about this book.

Why write a book on the craft of writing fiction when you focus so much on editing?

Kristen: So I think for me, and I think this is true to some extent for you and other people who write nonfiction, but I really write to learn. It's just one of the ways I understand the world. So this book was one that when I started editing fiction, I wanted to be able to find this book, and never did find it.

We were talking a little bit before the interview started about my first book. It's a collection of book reviews of writing craft books. At the end of writing that book, I realized that all along I had secretly been hoping to find like the one true formula for writing an amazing novel.

I did find formulas, they are out there. They can be really useful, especially for beginning writers who are just starting to feel out what it takes to shape a plot or something like that.

From an editing standpoint, they don't really fit a lot of books. Each book is kind of its own, you know, it's kind of like children. They're all pretty unique.

So I decided that I really wanted to start from the other end, and start from novels that I thought were successful in different ways, and just take them apart and figure out how they worked. So I just kind of did that through writing.

It started as a blog, and then it eventually turned into a book so I could formalize it and share it with a wider audience.

Joanna: You mentioned there that you focused on books that were successful in different ways. What I actually appreciated is you didn't go to the common classics. I think so many writing books use older books that I feel in many ways aren't so relevant to modern fiction writers.

How did you choose the books that you focused on in this book?

Kristen: So this is one of the beauties, actually, of being an indie author. So it was partly my taste. I didn't have to do this strategically. I didn't have an editor or a publishing house saying, “We want you to cover these books,” or, “It would be more saleable if you covered X, Y and Z.”

I really started from books that I knew I wanted to learn from and thought were doing something interesting. I also really deliberately chose a big range of genres, in part because I wanted mystery writers to find something there for them, and romance writers to find something there for them.

Also, I feel really strongly that if you're writing genre fiction, it can be really helpful to learn from other genres. And so I wanted to give readers a way, even if they don't read a lot of mystery novels or fantasy novels or whatever, I wanted them to get a sense of just what the different opportunities are in that genre.

Joanna: I actually ended up buying one of the books.

Kristen: I keep hearing that. I think that's lovely.

Joanna: Yes, and just to be clear, there were no spoilers in the book. You managed to avoid that. So that was quite a feat as well.

Kristen: Well, for most of the books, there's a big chapter on like the overall structure, but there's a spoiler alert. So you know that if you want to read the book first before getting the spoilers, you have to hurry up and do that before you read that chapter.

Joanna: Yes. So the book is full of common questions that writers ask, or perhaps don't even know how to ask, so we're just going to go through a couple of them. You say, “Having edited hundreds of novels by this point in my career, I can tell you that the opening is the most challenging section for most writers.”

What are some of the most common mistakes you see with openings, and how can we improve them?

Kristen: So I think there are two big ones that I see over and over, and it's mostly just a misunderstanding of what readers want to know first.

So I often see newer writers try to give us all the information, all the kind of surface information about their protagonist. Things like their full name, like their last name, their hair color, their eye color, and all of this detail about physical appearance.

While we want to know about that eventually, the thing that readers really want to know is what is this character thinking and feeling. What's their story? What are they up against? What do they want? What do they need? What's standing in the way of them getting that?

All of this other stuff that I think writers are very anxious about, like, how do I get my character in front of a mirror so I can have them looking at themselves and describing themselves? You know, that's not a problem you have to solve.

Just wait for a moment where it's going to come up organically. Maybe it doesn't even ever come up, and it's just less important.

Then the other common problem I see is that, especially for a character-driven work, I'll see writers try to front load the character's backstory.

So they want us to know all of this really important information about how this character came to have the problems or the weaknesses that they have and that they're going to have to get over.

Like that's the really important part of the character arc. We need to know what's holding them back and how all of that happened, but rather than starting with it, you really want it to come more in the first third of the novel, or maybe in the halfway point. We just don't need it up front.

Again, what we need up front is what's happening right now because that's the thing that's going to pull us into the novel and give us a reason to keep reading. Everything else is kind of old news, right? The character still needs to wrestle with it, but it's already happened. So it's just not as interesting to us as a reader.

Joanna: On that, I remember taking ages to understand what a scene was. I think it was Larry Brooks' Story Engineering book that I finally learned what it was, like about four or five years into writing fiction. I confused it with a chapter.

Of course, there are writers like James Patterson who has one scene per chapter, and that might work with a lot of thrillers.

What is a scene and what is a chapter? Why are these things so important?

Kristen: Yes, that's a great question. I like to think of scenes and chapters as being just different size containers. It's really important to remember that readers experience your book across time.

I think when we are deep inside a book, like we've been in it so long and we know the whole story. This happens to me as an editor too. We forget that the readers are understanding the story sequentially.

So part of what's important about scenes and chapters are the white space breaks, like getting to the end of that container. The size of the container conveys different messages, so a scene break is a smaller break and signals to the reader that there's some kind of shift happening.

We might be doing a time jump, maybe we're switching to a different point of view, any of those kinds of things. Whereas a chapter break is much more emphatic and gives you a chance, as a writer, to use that extra white space to underscore something like a theme moment.

I really like writers to pay a lot of extra attention to the few sentences right before a chapter break because they get to resonate over that white space. So it's this extra tool that you get.

Then within the container, those are all kind of little mini stories in there. So they have a beginning and a middle and an end. It's not just like you're taking this big, giant stretch of material that is your story and arbitrarily breaking it up into pieces that go in these different containers.

The scene is where you really get to be thoughtful about how those pieces work. It's a way too of communicating to the reader in a subtle way what the structure of your book is.

So you can see this where many authors will include part breaks, and that's just a way of waving a flag to the reader and saying, okay, we're having an even bigger shift here. We're going to move to like a whole different act two of the novel.

Joanna: I think also when I first was writing, I liked to end the chapter with something that wraps it up. Whereas, what I think I learned from James Patterson is that you can include a cliffhanger to make readers turn the page.

I know you said there's some nice white space there, but if you want to increase the pace, you can split a scene across a chapter. So it carries on as if there's no time difference, no person difference, but it gets them into a new chapter.

As you say, some people might read two chapters before bed or something like that. So it just keeps reading. So you can play with these containers as well.

Kristen: Yes, and I mean, that's a good thing. You don't want every chapter to be a cliffhanger. You want to mix it up. Thinking about those containers as ending in different ways is a really useful way to do it.

Joanna: So another thing I think is really interesting in the book is you go through how to plot a page-turner. You know that I'm a discovery writer, and this is something that I have really thought about.

In fact, it might be something that I could achieve working with ChatGPT or Claude or something to help it corral my chaos into some kind of order.

Tell us a bit more about plotting a page-turner.

Kristen: Yes, I mean, this was one of the big questions I came into the writing of the book with. How does a writer go about constructing these complex plots, and just how do they work?

I think a lot in metaphors and visual metaphors, they really helped me. So I think for a page-turner book, I really think about roller coasters. So a lot of it is about managing the kind of tension and expectation for readers.

So if you think about a roller coaster, one of the key experiences is that very slow, steady climb up to this big height. You're building the anticipation, and you know you're going to go over that cliff, but a good roller coaster, that's not the only thing that happens.

You might have one of those at the beginning and another really cool one at the end, but in the middle, you have to provide other fun experiences. So there have to be some like loop-de-loops and like an unexpected curve.

So I think that's really what's happening in a page-turner, where you're trying to maximize the reader's investment and get them to leap over those white spaces at the end of the chapter. So that's one part of it.

I think the other part is really characters.

For a page-turner to really work, we have to care so deeply about your characters that we have to know what's going to happen to them.

Often too, I think you need very high stakes. So it really needs to be life or death. Or I think romance authors can tap into this sometimes, the happiness of the whole rest of your life is at stake. So I think those are the two qualities.

Then in terms of writing one, I think this part is hard. I didn't do a lot of research into the writing process for the books I studied, but I did look at some interviews and tried to find some detail about what these authors said about revision.

I think one of the takeaways is it can take a lot of revision, especially if you're a discovery writer. You really have to go back and spend some time engineering your story once you know what it is, and maybe building in some extra turns or adding some extra suspense through different techniques.

So I think you can, as a discovery writer, get it all down on the page and then go back and retool.

Joanna: Another discovery writer friend said to me that perhaps the only way to do it as a discovery writer is to think that anyone could have done it. Let's say it's a murder, you have to kind of write as if each of these characters did it, and then decide much later in the process who actually did it.

Kristen: You might just find in that case that you have to go back in and drop in your red herrings or your extra clues or something like that. So I think revision can be the key. I think it's really hard to plot a book like that with that kind of complexity and with characters that we really care about.

I think it's really hard to plot that without getting into the writing. I have not found an example, and maybe you'll get people writing into this saying that they know an example, but I haven't seen an example of someone saying, “Yes, I have been able to plot one of these very complex page-turner type novels from the outline stage.”

I think it's hard because I think that doesn't give you time to develop the characters that we care about and know what they might do.

Sometimes it is about the surprises.

I think often the best moments in a novel are where a writer will say to me, “Yes, like this character actually surprised me, and I thought they were going to do X, and they did Y.” I think that comes through in the writing, so I think it's good to tap into those discovery elements when you can harness them.

Joanna: Yes, it is interesting. I do remember seeing a picture of JK Rowling's spreadsheet for, I think, one of the Harry Potter's, or it might have been one of the Cormoran Strike books. I was sort of looking at the picture going, okay, that's how you plot something complicated with all of these different things.

I know some people use different software and all of that kind of thing, but it does feel like to do this kind of thing, sometimes you do need to plot a lot more in advance. I don't know, I feel like I go back and forth on wanting to try to change the way I write, and then just not doing that. I don't know.

You've worked with so many authors. Do people change [their writing style] over time?

Kristen: Yes, I think they do. I think a lot of it is knowing what your strengths are. If you're trying to make yourself do something you hate, that's just never going to work. I have definitely seen authors who have started out writing their early books, really from instinct.

Once they see the kind of revisions that I ask them to do—and I use a story spreadsheet, it's basically a reverse outline, really, as part of my developmental editing process.

Once they start to get those back and get the skill of seeing their novels from the top down, they start to learn how to build some of that stuff into the initial writing process. They also learn that, okay, this is something I can do during revision.

I'll see what happens when they're basically doing their own developmental edit at that point. So they'll write a draft just as they have always done, they'll do this reverse outline, and then they'll do their own revision round, and then be able to come to me and go straight into copy editing because they just built that in.

I definitely have seen that happen, and I think you learn new things with each book. I think there's something that happens after you get 10 books in or 20 books in, and some of that story sense just becomes really intuitive.

You don't have to think so much about things that you had to think a lot about at the beginning, like what is a scene? That just become second nature.

Joanna: Yes, definitely. I mean — 

Why do we bother if we don't learn something with each book?!

Kristen: Right, it's no fun then.

Joanna: Exactly. One of the things that I do hear from some people—I mean, I read a lot of fiction, I know you obviously do—but some authors say they can't read fiction in a niche, or just in general, because it affects their work or that they're worried about plagiarism.

Then the way you're writing about fiction here is in a much more deconstructive way. So how can authors read fiction, I guess, in one way to learn and structure and all of that kind of thing, but also sometimes turn it off and just try to enjoy a book. It's really kind of hard to balance both.

Kristen: I have people ask me all the time—

How do you still read for pleasure when you're also an editor?

I am able to just turn off the editor brain. I think it helps that I don't read books that I'm working on on my Kindle, and that's what I read 90% of my for pleasure reading is on the Kindle now.

I do understand this concern about the inadvertent plagiarism, and I think it's one of those anxieties that is not a real thing. Especially if you are putting your heart and soul into a book and weaving your own experience into it, I think writers are going to be less influenced than they fear by what they read.

That's especially true if you read a lot. I could see if you are doing a deep dive into James Patterson or something, I could see being influenced by his style. If you're reading a different author every couple of weeks, I just don't think that that's going to happen.

I think when you are not reading, especially like very recent fiction—and this is why I picked very recent books—you're not getting a sense of how style is changing, of other like tips and techniques and tools you might be reading.

I just feel really strongly that novels, I mean, going back to that child metaphor, they're all so different.

So the second you see a technique that another writer has used and pull it into your book, when you apply it to your own characters and your own plot and your own style, it's not going to be really recognizable as that same technique. It's going to feel really, really different.

I just think reading is one of those ways where we get to like writing —

We get to kind of intuitively let that story structure sink into us, and it's really the most pleasurable way to learn how to write.

I really advocate for writers reading more, and like I said, reading outside of their genre.

I guess if you really can't get over that kind of anxiety of influence, that would be what I would recommend. If you're writing genre fiction, go read some literary fiction. Or if you're writing mysteries, start reading fantasy novels. You'll pick up some really cool techniques to bring back into your genre that could be exciting.

Joanna: Or it can actually just really help you on voice. I do think about author voice. I don't know if you read Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club?

Kristen: Yes. Oh, they're so fun. I actually had COVID a couple years ago, and I had such a terrible headache that I couldn't read. So I listened to them all on audio, and I still have a positive memory of my COVID experience because I spent a week just listening to those books.

Joanna: Oh, fantastic. There's going to be a movie, so if people haven't read the books. I was really resistant to the book because he's very famous here in the UK. So I kind of thought it was one of those cases of a celebrity who got a book deal, and it was going to be bad. It's so not bad. It's just fantastic.

I read all of them, as you have, and I've started his new series and everything. When I was reading it, I was like, wow, this is so different to a book that I could ever write or would want to write.

I've read a few kind of cozies, and they haven't come across in the same way. I think I learned from that that you can enjoy books, because I mostly read darker books. I was like, wow—

You can just love these different types of books and learn from them, even if it's a realization that this is not something you're ever going to write.

Kristen: Yes, absolutely. I think, too, that's a lesson to put more of your own personality, and humor, and weirdness, and all of that into your books.

That's the thing that's so unique to you and is going to distinguish yourself from all of the other books that might have very similar plot moves. Often, they do, and readers just don't care.

Joanna: Or they want that, often.

Kristen: Yes. I mean, that's what tropes are all about. They want to see that familiar roller coaster move coming around there, it's exciting, but they want to see your spin on it.

Joanna: We talked a bit there about inadvertent plagiarism. I wanted to come back to the quotes in the book because, of course, you're quoting writers and the chapters are also themed around certain books and authors.

There'll be people listening who are writing nonfiction books and who are collecting quotes. So how do we both use quotes within the bounds of fair use, and maybe we need to explain what that is, and also—

How do we make sure not to plagiarize accidentally?

Kristen: I have an academic background, and that really got pulled into this book. When you're writing an English Lit paper, you're taught to do close reading and use textual evidence. So it's second nature to me to, if I'm making a point about the way something works in a book, to pull in a passage and take a look at it.

Let's step back a minute and talk a little bit about fair use. So the way I often see this pop up as an editor is authors wanting to use song lyrics in their books. I can't even count the number of times this has come up, and I think you've had legal advisors on your show, and it's a tricky issue.

It's a little bit different for songs because they're so short. So part of what the fair use principle is you're using a very tiny percentage of a work. We're respecting other people's copyright and IP and all of that. Songs are very, very short. Something that's a book length work is a lot longer.

There's kind of rules of thumb out there. This is one of those gray areas in the legal context, which is frustrating, I think, for those of us who want to follow the rules and have it be very black and white.

One figure I've seen floating around is not to use more than 10% of a work. So for an 80,000 word novel, that's actually a really high number. I didn't even come close to that.

In terms of writing nonfiction and using things deliberately, I think some of it is ethical. What I do see out there that I think crosses an ethical line are these things that are study guides of popular nonfiction books where it's kind of encouraging you to buy this shortened summary version in place of buying the actual book.

Joanna: They drive me mad!

Kristen: Oh, yes. I mean, that's one of those things where I see them out there, and I think this doesn't seem right, and how is this allowed? That's certainly not what I'm doing. It's not what you're doing. You often use epigraphs, I know, in your nonfiction books, and all of that's fine.

What we're doing when we're quoting authors in that way is really encouraging readers to go take a look at these books. You include a resource section at the end of all of your nonfiction chapters, actually pointing readers to those sources that you've quoted from. So that's really important.

If you're writing nonfiction and you're doing research, the rule is really to just take meticulous notes.

I use the highlighting tool on Kindle or transcribe notes. I don't paraphrase when I am taking notes because I want to be able to go back and check exactly what the original quote is.

So I want to know when I'm quoting and when I'm not, so I can make sure I flag that in the book. It's just about really keeping records, making sure it's all in one place, and you can go back and check that later. Or your copy editor can check it later and make sure it's accurate, and make sure that readers can find what you're quoting.

Joanna: Yes, so just basically —

Don't use song lyrics and don't use poems, as well, unless they're out of copyright because they're often very short as well.

I think some of the other things around fair use are parody. So you can use things for parody, but parody is very difficult. It's not something we're particularly doing.

Also as part of education and commentary, which is what you're doing. With your book particularly, I feel like it is commentary. When you've quoted things, even though they're within the fair use boundaries, it's still commentary. So it's transformative as well.

Kristen: Exactly. It's really just a matter of, as an author, you want to treat other authors with respect. If you're doing that, you're not going to go wrong.

Joanna: Yes, and also context. So somebody did this to me once, and I'm still sore about it. They took a line from one of my novels to make a case that I was some kind of fascist. I was like, that is a character saying something in a novel that you've taken completely out of context.

I feel like that is part of, like you said, about respecting other people. You can probably find quotes in people's books, like people picking quotes out of the Bible and things out of context. I feel like, as you said—

It's about respecting the person whose book it is and doing that in a positive way.

You don't want anyone to happen upon your book, or for you to share it and just be really upset that you've quoted them in some way.

Kristen: I really think of nonfiction books in particular as part of a conversation, but actually, I think you can think of fiction books the same way. So just in a conversation with another human being, you don't want to mischaracterize what they're saying. That just doesn't lead to a productive conversation.

What I'm trying to do in this book is show how these books work and encourage readers to read them. So I'm kind of extending the conversation that these authors have already started by publishing their novel.

Joanna: Nonfiction books, to me, have a lot of elements that might come off the page in some way.

How are you taking the book and the material off the page and into people's minds in other ways?

Kristen: This is something I feel like you do really well in your nonfiction as well, is you and your chapters with often questions, and as I said, your resources list.

I think, for me, this happened in two ways. As I said, I'm a very visual learner, and so when I was wrestling with, especially a lot of the kind of structural elements of these novels—

There's a chapter on N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became, which is such a great book. She has, I think, six or seven different point of view characters and narrators. So to wrap my head around how that worked, I ended up creating figures for a lot of these things.

They're kind of graphical, so I could wrap my head around it. So that's something that I have used as a learning tool. They're on my website, and so that's something that kind of comes off the page and can help readers.

Then another thing I'm getting ready to do in the new year that I'm super excited about is I'm going to start a Novel Study Book Club. So we're going to kind of keep this reading going. The theme for next year is going to be bestsellers.

There's going to be a Patreon community. We're going to vote on a recent bestseller to take apart and study this way each month. So I'm really excited to see how that's going to work and just use it as a way to encourage people to read more.

I think if people can do it in a community, and hopefully get some kind of resources around how to unpack the structure and how to understand it, that it might be more profitable and just feel a little bit less lonely.

Joanna: Yes, I think it is interesting to do that, and often when someone else points things out. Well, in my fiction, for example, sometimes you say things in the edit and I'm like, oh, I didn't even know I thought that, or I didn't even know that that was there.

When you read in a group like that, it may be that you find things within the text and it helps other people see things that will bring out new ideas.

Kristen: I think this can really help authors be better editors of their own work. If the way another reader is experiencing something surprises you, that's really a learning experience right there. That's a way you might come back to your own work and think, oh, well, how can I apply this here?

As a reader, I might experience this this way, but now that I know that another reader experiences it in a very different way, I can play around with my choices here.

Joanna: Yes, it's all about learning things and then putting it into practice. I was thinking about this, and obviously as we've mentioned, you're my editor, but I also use ProWritingAid, and we are in this time in the writing and publishing history of generative AI.

It feels like an author could put all the craft books into practice, including yours, and then work with ChatGPT or Claude and ProWritingAid and say, do I even need a human editor? Like, why would someone hire Kristen or hire another human editor?

What are the benefits of working with a human editor in an age of generative AI?

When does it add more than software, basically? I know it's a super leading question!

Kristen: Well, I mean, it's complicated, and I think the answer to this is going to change. I mean, I think the part that's not going to change is that ultimately, you're looking for human readers. As good as these tools are, and many of them are quite good, they just are not a stand in for a human reader, and that's what your editor is.

I think the other thing that I see happening in particular right now with these tools is that they tend to move people towards the most common solution or answer. That's a plus in many ways, but often if you're writing fiction, that's actually not what you want.

So especially if I'm working with an author who I know has used one of these tools, either in the planning process or maybe in part in the generating process, then as a human editor, my role is to help them be even more human.

If I can kind of then tease out an element that I can see, “Oh, I think this is your voice versus the AI voice, and let's figure out how to heighten that.” Or, “Here's a place where you took the most obvious next step in your plot. What are five or ten ways that you could just make a left turn here, and how would that impact the reader's experience?”

The other piece is really the human coaching element. I find this becomes a bigger and bigger part of my editing practice is that writers, it doesn't matter how experienced they are, there's going to be some kind of emotional or psychological stumbling block in a book.

They may run into imposter syndrome, or they just get stuck, or they encounter writer's block or something. You really need a little bit of, I think of it as book therapy, to get a writer out of that.

It's a mix of encouragement and reminding them of the elements that are already working in their book and trying to give them a layout of a reasonable path in front of them for how to do the revision work that they need. An AI cannot do that very convincingly yet.

I think you really do need a human being on the other end of the screen, or the phone, or just in the Microsoft Word comments to help keep you going.

Joanna: Yes, which is that real value added side of things. I still think perhaps early writers believe that editing is just fixing grammar and typos, whereas that's a tiny, tiny piece of it. I mean an important piece, but still, as you say, it's not necessarily the most important.

You did say that sometimes when you're working with people who use AI tools—obviously, I'm very honest with you about my usage, and you've not had an issue with that, and obviously I use things in an ethical way.

So can you tell then, if someone hasn't told you, do you notice? Also, do you have a problem with AI use? Also, you're part of an organization for editors.

Should editors have a problem with AI use? Where's the line around usage?

Kristen: I think everyone's got to decide this for themselves. People have really strong feelings on this issue, and I understand them. I have the advantage of I live in San Francisco, and my partner works in tech. He told me, probably three years ago, these LLMs are going to be able to write a novel.

I was horrified, and said absolutely not, I don't believe you. I kind of had a mini tantrum. It prepared me for the fact that actually, now they can.

Now I definitely don't have people coming to me who have just spat out an entire novel using one of these tools. The fact is that they are not good at that. Yes, it can be done, but they're just going to be cliched and boring and generic.

Again, these models, they're geared not towards creativity and uniqueness and all of that. That's just not what they do. I think also you can detect when that human element isn't there.

So I don't have any problem with writers using them.

I can often tell, especially if it's a writer I've worked with a lot, and then they'll send me a synopsis or something, and it's just in a really different voice. The AI voice tends to be quite flat. It's very correct, but it's very flat. So that is something I've started to notice.

I think the thing that we have to do on both sides of the editor-author relationship is just be really upfront about how we're using these tools, when we're using them, and experiment with when they're helpful and when they're not.

I am absolutely 100% sold on using these AI tools to write book descriptions, for example.

Or for example, in my own book, what I did use it for was to help me with the takeaways that are at the end because they're really good at summarizing.

I then had to rewrite them in my own voice because they didn't have my voice, but even that part might come. So I think it's just going to be a matter of communicating with one another. I think being really upfront with what we're doing.

One of the things I'm adding to my contracts for 2025 is having a clause in there that makes it really clear that I'm going to ask for consent before I use one of these tools on anyone's novel.

Many of my clients are going to say no. In fact, I would say probably the majority of them really don't want me using any of these tools, and that's absolutely fine.

I think on the other side, just authors coming to me, they can tell me, “Okay, well, I've used this tool for outlining.” Certainly, some authors are not as good at a dialogue, or they're not as good at setting, or they don't think about smell or whatever.

They have a weakness that they know that they're trying to compensate for, and they can use one of those tools to provide ideas. If I know how they're using it, then I can, again, make sure that human element doesn't get lost.

I can make sure we're finding all of the opportunities to get their own voice in there and get rid of that kind of AI flatness that can creep in.

Joanna: Yes, interesting times indeed. We've been working together quite a few years now, and I use the tools more and more for different things, but as you know, I work with you on every book and every short story, and I don't feel like there's any detriment to the process.

I feel like it's almost improved a lot of areas of my business and my writing, and using ProWritingAid I hope takes a bit of the basics off your shoulders so you can focus on the more interesting side of editing and the more human element side of editing, I guess.

Kristen: Yes, and I think this is kind of where we're heading, where a lot of these tools are actually not very good at some things. You know, some of the things like commas and all of that, and there are a lot of false positives. So I actually don't use those as an editor, myself, because it slows me down.

If an author uses ProWritingAid before they come to me, that's fantastic.

Just like you said, then I can focus on the really important stuff, like line editing. That's where the real magic of editing comes. I think for a lot of editors, like that's what they want to do as well.

Like commas interest me, but they're not quite as thrilling as taking a line that's a little clunky, or just flat, or the author is missing an opportunity to introduce a really beautiful parallelism, or sharpen up a metaphor. Like, that's where the real magic comes, and that's the stuff I love, and I know most editors love that as well.

It's much more exciting than fixing typos. The typos are important to me, and I'm a perfectionist, and I want you to have a perfect book, but let's focus in on the stuff that's really about the art. Let some of these tools do the heavy lifting in terms of things like fact checking, and for your books, in particular, checking quotations.

There are things now that these tools just make so much faster and easier, and we can use our very limited human time to focus on the stuff that will make a big difference.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Where can people find you, and your books, and editing services online?

Kristen: So my business is the Blue Garret, and you can find me at TheBlueGarret.com. Then if you're interested in joining that Novel Study Book Club, you can find me on Patreon at Patreon.com/BlueGarret.

Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Kristen. That was great.

Kristen: That was a lot of fun.

Takeaways:

1. Focus on Character and Present Action Over Details Upfront: Instead of front-loading physical descriptions and backstory, engage readers by showing what a character wants, feels, and faces right now.
   
2. Think in Scenes and Chapters as Story Containers: Use scenes to create mini-stories within the narrative and chapter breaks to control pacing, highlight emotional resonance, and keep readers turning pages.
   
3. Approach Plotting as a Process, Not a Formula: Complex, page-turning plots often emerge through drafting and revision. Embrace discovery writing and then retool the story’s structure once you understand its shape.
   
4. Read Widely and Deliberately to Improve Your Craft: Studying contemporary, diverse genres broadens your repertoire of narrative techniques and helps you integrate unique elements into your own voice.
   
5. Use Tools But Keep It Human: While AI and grammar software can streamline parts of the process, human editors bring insight, emotional support, and voice-cultivation that technology cannot replicate.

The post Writing Tips: Craft, Structure, and Voice With Kristen Tate first appeared on The Creative Penn.