You’ve reached the middle of a scene, and something isn’t working. Your characters are talking. Information is being exchanged. Nobody seems particularly interested in any of it, including you.
You could ask an AI to rewrite it. You could ask for more tension, stronger dialogue, or a dramatic interruption. It will probably have suggestions. A suspiciously well-timed knock at the door is always available.
But before you accept any of them, there’s a useful question to ask: what does this scene need?
That’s where I want to begin this blog.
A place to look closely at the writing
I’m Dahlia Holloway, a fiction writer and writing instructor. I started exploring Sudowrite in March 2023 because I wanted to find out whether AI could help with my own writing process. It offered ways to get unstuck, explore possibilities, and keep going when focus was difficult.
Since then, my teaching has grown around questions of craft, voice, and creative control. Writing with AI is a place to explore those questions in more detail.
We’ll look at characters whose motivations don’t quite add up, scenes that feel thin, feedback that sounds sensible until you try to use it, and prose that has become very polished while somehow losing its personality.
Sudowrite will appear here regularly. So will ideas you can try with other tools, or think through without opening one.
What kind of help are you asking for?
Let’s go back to that flat conversation. Asking for “more tension” leaves a lot for the AI to decide. It might add an argument when you wanted restraint, or reveal a secret you needed to keep for another chapter.
A smaller request might help you understand the problem first:
Read this scene without rewriting it. Where do the characters want different things, and where does the conversation become a straightforward exchange of information? Point to specific moments in the text. If their wants are unclear, say so rather than inventing them.
That gives you something to examine. Perhaps the AI notices a useful pattern. Perhaps it mistakes deliberate silence for missing information. Either way, you can compare its reading with what you intended.
From there, you might decide that one character needs a reason to withhold an answer. You might discover that the scene belongs somewhere else. You might keep it exactly as it is because the quiet exchange does something important in the larger story.
The value of the exercise depends on whether it helps you see your work more clearly. Agreement with the AI is optional.
Let AI remove friction, not authorship
That’s the principle behind this space. Putting it into practice means paying attention to which parts of the process you want help with, and which parts you want to work through yourself.
Generating alternatives can be useful. So can struggling with a sentence until you understand what you meant. A task taking longer doesn’t automatically mean it needs to be automated.
There are also real questions about AI’s limitations and its place in creative work. I want room here for uncertainty, criticism, and changing your mind. You can find a tool useful and still have questions about it.
What you’ll find here
Expect practical explorations of writing craft, experiments with AI-assisted workflows, and close looks at the choices those workflows leave in your hands. I’ll explain what a prompt is trying to do, where an approach may help, and where it may lead you away from your intentions.
You can try what fits, adapt what almost fits, and leave the rest.
For now, take one passage you’re uncertain about and finish this sentence: “I want help understanding…” Be as specific as you can before deciding what, if anything, you want an AI to do.
That’s a good place to start.