How I write

If you want to hear how this all started, listen to the first Perspectives recording. I'm sitting on the patio of a coffee shop in London with a flat white, and my brain turns on. That recording is about five minutes. This page is the rest of it.

It starts with talking

Almost everything I make starts with me asking questions, or talking out a broad concept. For the Festival Arts Series I pulled out my phone and started recording. I had no idea what I would do with it. I just kept describing the art festival world: what it's like for artists to set up their booths, the conversations they have a hundred times in a weekend, the kinds of art you see, the trades they do with one another. I put it away and pulled it back out the same day and went, huh. What if?

I build the world first

I'm a systems thinker. My sweet spot is talking through all the parts and pieces of a system that go together to make something real. I've done it for businesses, nonprofits, and community groups. I do it the same way for a book.

So I built the world first. Then an idea for that world holding characters and stories and books. Then the characters. Then the story arcs. Then the background for the characters and for the arcs, and the threads I wanted to move through all of it. By the time I write a chapter, I know the people, the places, the festivals, the money, and what each person knows and when.

I did my own research along the way. I asked my own questions, I got them answered, and I moved forward. I'm willing to leave a question unanswered. I'm willing to not know. And I'm willing to be certain in spite of not knowing.

What the tools do and what I do

I speak into my AI tools, and the chapters get written from what I say. I say almost everything that's in them. I don't supply the exact words, except for most of the dialogue, and much of that is me, straight out of the transcripts of me talking. Some things the tools come up with.

Then I read every line and edit heavily. I go back through, change the dialogue, find what I said in the transcripts and put it back in. I give the characters more character. What you read is what I said, after I've been through it.

Feedback, fast

One of the most amazing things about writing this way is how fast I find out what's wrong. I use AI to critique what I'm writing. I ask it to tell me where the story doesn't hold together, and then I fix it.

In Book 1, which is about artists who do festivals, I had them going to a festival that didn't make sense. It seemed right at the start. The further I developed the story, the more it was the wrong kind of festival. I don't remember whether I caught it or one of my reviews did. Either way, I had to take it out, archive it, and come up with a different place for Hannah to show her work, and a different set of places where the relationships could happen. That's what the reviews are for.

Every piece is a little different

Every Thursday Until Christmas started as voice memos, and the first draft came from those. On Halloween this year I spent part of the evening talking out an idea for a book that has nothing to do with the series, and by the end of the day there was a short record of what I'd said: the premise, the two people, the shape of the story. That's how a book begins for me. Where it goes from there depends on the book.

I use AI-assisted writing tools as part of my creative process, from developing ideas to drafting and revising. The stories, characters, creative direction, and final editorial decisions are all my own.

The part that hasn't changed

I've always worked this way. I ask a lot of questions and I turn things from nothing into something, again and again. I'm thinking the way I thought in my twenties and thirties. I just work faster now, and I get what I asked for faster. Some of that is me being fast-paced. The rest is thirty years of building automation tools and using them in the operations of everything I've touched. If that isn't learning to use the tools in front of you, I don't know what is.

— Alexa Camden