I've been fiddling around a lot with a local copy of DeepSeek-r1. I've come across a lot of limitations and things it can't do, but that's not what I'm here for today.
There's something LLMs are surprisingly good at. Workshopping stories. That is to say, formal criticism, editting, and so on.
Why this, retrospectively, makes sense. It's an actual pure language task. The system doesn't need to know very much about the world, but about how words come together. Hallucinations, if they ever arise, are not a significant problem, since they are obvious within the secondary world of the story being worked on.
In this sense, they can be used like a sort of more potent thesaurus, (give me three ways to say this).
Other useful things. Finding dialogue beats (all the cinematographic-style frowning, blinking, etc). That's especially hard for me as someone who can't see body language.
Refining snappy dialogue, keeping to the voice of a character. This is surprisingly successful. It really helps detecting dialogue that doesn't work and, if you're willing to let it write for you, it can come up with some wicked lines.
Structural criticism. Pacing, conflict, plot holes, uniqueness of character voices. Finding cliches.
Finding problems. Why is it a bad idea if my character does x? Does it make sense psychologically for my character to do y?
The most important aspect is, you don't have to agree with it, but it's still useful. It gives very fast feedback onr your text, obviously not as good as a real editor, but better than you can get rubberducking. Occasionally it will say stupid stuff, and you ignore it and move on.
I realise for many people using LLMs in their creative project is anathema. I understand and respect that. For me, it's not like that. Writers have been using tools forever: dictionaries, thesaurus, concordances, reference works... Why is it suddenly bad if the answer comes out of this tool instead?
Anyway, the immediate feedback turns out to be a huge thing for me. I'm able to write a lot faster by getting the illusion (and I am well aware it is an illusion) that someone has read my text.
#writing #LLM #AI #story
