Ask for diagnosis before generation
A broad request such as “make this better” invites familiar filler: balanced sentence shapes, abstract emotion, tidy transitions, and an explanation after every image. Ask the assistant to identify the scene's promise, source of tension, missing context, or continuity risks before it drafts anything.
When you do request options, ask for several distinct directions with tradeoffs rather than a polished replacement paragraph. Choose the direction yourself, then write the sentence whose rhythm matters.
Give the assistant the smallest useful context
Page-aware help should begin with the active chapter, its neighboring scenes, and linked canon. A whole manuscript may be unnecessary for a question about who knows the location of a key.
Small context is easier to verify. It also reduces the chance that an unrelated draft note will be treated as settled story truth.
Turn suggestions into reviewable actions
An assistant can propose a task such as “verify the moon phase in Chapter 6” or a reminder such as “revisit the captain's injury before the harbor scene.” The proposal should show what will be created, where it will live, and what context produced it.
Nothing should enter the manuscript, canon, or task list until you approve it. A chat response is advice; an accepted action is workspace data.
Protect voice with a do-not-smooth rule
Many distinctive passages contain deliberate fragments, repetition, dialect, silence, or asymmetry. Name two or three traits visible in the passage, then tell the assistant which qualities must survive. Ask it to flag possible confusion without normalizing the prose.
After a proposed rewrite, compare concrete signals: sentence-length variation, favored verbs, image density, distance from the viewpoint character, and how often the prose explains an implication. Reject a cleaner version if its clarity comes from saying what your scene already lets the reader infer.
- Preserve sentence rhythm and point of view.
- Do not replace concrete images with abstract summaries.
- Label every invented fact or assumption.
- Quote the manuscript passage that supports a continuity warning.
Use an author approval loop
A dependable workflow has four steps: ask, inspect, approve, and verify. Ask for help on a specific problem. Inspect the suggestion and its context. Approve only the action you want. Verify the resulting manuscript or task in its real location.
The goal is not to remove the author from the process. It is to remove the searching, sorting, and remembering that interrupts the author's process.