On Method
How I use AI to tell deeply human stories—without losing my voice
What happens when a writer uses AI—not to generate stories, but to shape them with care? This is how I craft fiction that feels real, with help from a tool that never forgets who’s in charge.
There's a question I keep circling, quietly, every time I finish a story:
Does it still count if I didn't write every word by hand?
It's a fair question. Especially in a world where so much feels manufactured, where sincerity is suspect, and where AI can churn out 5,000 words in five seconds if you ask it to.
But here's the thing:
That's not what I'm doing.
What I'm doing feels closer to songwriting, or shipbuilding, or silkscreen art.
I'm building the shape of something and letting the materials push back.
I'm not asking AI to be the writer—I'm using it as the thing I write with.
I build the ship. The stories make the voyage.
There's this line I think about a lot:
The person who builds the ship isn’t always the one who sails it around the world.
What the shipbuilder does is design the vessel. Plan the route. Set things in motion.
That’s me.
The story is mine before the first sentence is written—the concept, the emotional arc, the character’s silence or grief or denial. That all comes from me.
I use AI for friction, variation, and pace.
I push, it pushes back.
Sometimes it hands me a sentence I wouldn’t have thought of.
Sometimes it fails completely—and shows me what I don’t want.
Either way, it keeps me moving.
I've never been this prolific.
But I’ve also never felt more creatively alive.
The Tweedy Test
Finding meaning in the mess
Jeff Tweedy has this songwriting exercise:
Open a random book, highlight a bunch of words, and make something out of them.
Build a melody. Attach meaning. Shape it into something real.
AI, for me, is like that—but in reverse.
Instead of finding scattered words and building meaning, I start with meaning
and ask the system to generate possible scaffolding.
A sentence here. A mood there. A single twist of phrasing that opens a new path I didn’t see.
But the melody? The story? That’s mine.
Different, not lesser
Let me be honest:
This is a different kind of creative act than traditional writing.
I’m not pretending otherwise.
When I write traditionally, I’m wrestling with language word by word, sentence by sentence.
There’s a particular kind of labor in that—the slow accumulation of choices,
the way rhythm builds through repetition and revision.
With AI assistance, I’m working at a different level.
I’m more like a film director who doesn’t operate the camera
but knows exactly what shot they want.
The creative energy goes into vision, pacing, emotional architecture.
Into knowing what to keep and what to cut.
It’s not the same as typing every word myself.
But it’s not ghostwriting either.
It’s something new.
The speed problem
What really makes people uncomfortable isn’t the collaboration—it’s the velocity.
If I told you I worked with a creative partner for six months, bouncing ideas back and forth,
you wouldn’t question my authorship.
But when that same process happens in days instead of months,
suddenly it feels suspect.
We’ve been conditioned to equate creative struggle with creative legitimacy.
If it comes too easily, it must be cheap.
But speed doesn’t determine authenticity—the choices do.
Whether those choices happen over months or minutes,
they’re still mine to make.
I’ve also realized something else: I think best in conversation.
When there’s an ongoing dialogue—even with myself—
my creative brain stays more activated
than when I’m staring at a blank page.
AI gives me that conversational thinking made visible.
It keeps the creative dialogue flowing
instead of getting stuck in my own head.
In the end, I’d rather you ask:
Was I moved by this piece?
than
Did the author type every letter?
The first question gets at what stories are for.
The second is just about method.
And method has never been the point.
The voice stays mine
Here’s what I’ve learned:
The themes that obsess me,
the emotional patterns I can’t escape,
the specific way I see the world—
that doesn’t come from AI.
It comes from me.
I keep returning to the same territory:
- people using external systems to avoid internal work
- the difference between performance and authenticity
- the way we can become addicted to anything that helps us avoid ourselves
That’s not because AI suggested it.
It’s because that’s what I carry.
The stories on Small Quiet Things sound like me
because they come from the same place my handwritten work comes from.
The difference is speed, not source.
Let me show you what I mean
"Rent-a-Dad" started with a simple prompt:
A job app where people can hire dads to perform dad duties.
It could’ve become lighthearted comedy—wacky dad-for-hire hijinks.
But I saw the deeper story.
What if someone was perfect at this job… but failing as an actual father?
What if professional perfection was masking personal failure?
That emotional insight—the way we sometimes perfect our performance of love while failing at love itself—came from my own understanding of human psychology, not from the prompt.
The finished story explores a man who gets five-star reviews
for being “exactly what a dad should be”
while his own children grow up without him.
Every piece of praise becomes another twist of irony.
The dramatic architecture—that gap between success and failure—is mine.
Same with "Night Storage"—
I took the idea of emotional residue
and built an allegory for addiction and recovery.
Same with "The Keeper of Unsent Letters"—
I transformed a prompt about a creepy letter collector
into a meditation on how communities can support each other through impossible losses.
The prompts give me raw material.
My job is finding the universal human truth hidden inside.
What you’re really reading
When you read my stories, you’re not reading raw AI output.
You’re not reading something generated and pasted into a template.
You’re reading something curated, shaped, emotionally structured.
You’re reading choices I made.
The order. The tension.
The way a scene slows just before the reveal.
The way a voice cracks—quietly—when it finally admits what it’s been avoiding.
That’s not AI.
That’s authorship.
You’re also reading my obsessions, my patterns, my particular way of seeing.
And if I’ve done my job,
you’re not just noticing how I see—
you’re seeing something in yourself, too.
Why this still feels real
Because creativity isn’t just execution.
It’s noticing.
It’s shaping.
It’s choosing where to stop.
The stories on Small Quiet Things came from me—
from years of circling the same themes:
people avoiding connection,
communities learning to support truth instead of suppressing it,
individuals choosing service over safety.
These are the stories I would’ve written if I had more time.
Now I do.
I’m a stay-at-home dad.
I’ve been carrying story ideas for years,
telling myself I’d write them someday—
when the kids were older,
when I retired,
when life was less chaotic.
But stories don’t wait for perfect conditions.
They’re alive now.
Asking to be told now.
While the emotions that sparked them are still fresh.
AI collaboration gives me the ability to capture those stories
during naptime,
in the twenty minutes between soccer practice and dinner,
in the small windows of possibility that define parental life.
This isn’t about lowering the bar for storytelling.
It’s about removing the barrier that says you need
unlimited time and perfect conditions to create meaningful work.
How many stories have been lost
because their authors were too busy living the lives
that made those stories authentic?
AI doesn’t replace the human parts of storytelling:
- the observation
- the emotional intelligence
- the ability to find universal truth in specific experience
But it can remove the friction that keeps those things from reaching the page.
That seems worth celebrating.
Will this evolve?
Yes. Probably.
The tools are changing.
So are the conversations.
I don’t pretend to have the perfect answer.
But I know this:
I’ve never made more honest work.
It may not be for everyone.
That’s okay.
I’m not trying to win the argument.
I’m just trying to make something small,
and quiet,
and true.
—Taylor Gillis