In one episode of my Adulting for Authors podcast, I mentioned that I tried to get the AI writing software Sudowrite to write my chapter synopses. Personally, I prefer to do my own writing and not let any software do it for me, but there are some writing-related things that I don’t mind outsourcing. One of them is outlining a novel I’ve already written. Because I don’t outline before I write, and while I have discovered outlining-as-I-go, I still have old manuscripts which don’t have outlines. It turns out people will sometimes ask for an outline if you’re pitching your book to them for a screen adaptation. When AI text generators came into the scene, I thought it would be great if I could just feed my whole novel to a software and get a synopsis for each chapter which I can then use for my outline.
I used Sudowrite for a few months — I’m both a programmer and a fiction writer, so you can imagine how curious I was — and while it couldn’t generate any text I could actually use in my stories (thank goodness, I guess I still have a job — for now!) I found it useful for getting me to actually write. So it is a productivity helper, but maybe not in the way they advertise. When I tried getting it to create synopses of my chapters, it didn’t do it very well. When I talked about the experience on my podcast, it had been months since I’d canceled my Sudowrite subscription. And after that episode aired, someone from Sudowrite emailed me and asked me if I’d like to try their new synopsis-creating feature. I said yes, and they gave me something like a 170k-word allowance on my account so I could test it.
The feature is called “Shrink Ray” and it worked a lot better than whatever summarization feature I’d used before. It actually generates not just a synopsis but loglines, a blurb, an outline of your chapter or story, and suggestions on what happens next. I tried it on four chapters of The Billionaire’s Game and the results were … interesting. Yeah, there were still some errors. In the ShrinkRay-generated text from chapter one, it mentions the color and type of dress my main character was wearing but if you read it and not the story, you wouldn’t know why that detail mattered.
Here’s the text generated by Sudowrite after I applied its Shrink Ray function on Chapter 1 of TBG:
Loglines
When a desperate assistant to a Hollywood A-lister wakes up in a Porsche outside a mansion, she embarks on a mission to get her screenplay read by the one man who could make her dreams come true.
In the race to break into Hollywood, assistant Ines Andrada discovers a chance to get her script in front of influential producer Jamie Kilborne, but must battle past obstacles and her own fears to make her dreams come true.
Blurb
When Ines Andrada wakes up in a Porsche outside Ester Fischer’s mansion, she has no idea the day will take her. With an appointment to meet film producer Jamie Kilborne, she finds herself at Mason Kilborne’s residence, where a chance encounter could be her ticket into the film industry. But when an escort arrives earlier that morning, she realizes this is her one and only opportunity—and failure isn’t an option. Will Ines be able to make the most of this unexpected moment? Find out in this thrilling story of ambition, risk and luck.
Synopsis
Ines Andrada is an assistant to Hollywood A-lister Piper Scanlon, who is using her position to get her foot into the film industry. When she wakes up in the Porsche she parked outside of Ester Fischer’s mansion, she discovers it is nine thirty a.m. and her boss has left with Tom Stockwell without informing her. She has an appointment with film producer Jamie Kilborne in an hour, so she rushes to his apartment on Wilshire, still wearing her white evening dress and with a copy of her manuscript in tow. She had taken this job with hopes of getting her scripts read, but it’s been a year and nothing has come of it. When she arrives at the Kilborne residence, she discovers that Jamie is Mason Kilborne’s cousin, and Mason had just finished working out on the balcony when he received a call from his receptionist that Jamie and his assistant were on their way up. Unbeknownst to Ines, Michael Sorensen had sent an escort to Mason’s place earlier that morning, but luckily Mason had refused the offer. When the elevator doors open and Ines steps out, she realizes that this could be her chance to finally get her screenplay in front of someone who might actually give her a chance.
Outline
I. Introduction
A. Ines Andrada is an assistant to Hollywood A-lister Piper Scanlon, who is using her position to get her foot into the film industry.
B. When she wakes up in the Porsche she parked outside of Ester Fischer’s mansion, she discovers it is nine thirty a.m. and her boss has left with Tom Stockwell without informing her.
C. She has an appointment with film producer Jamie Kilborne in an hour, so she rushes to his apartment on Wilshire, still wearing her white evening dress and with a copy of her manuscript in tow.
D. She had taken this job with hopes of getting her scripts read, but it’s been a year and nothing has come of it.
E. When she arrives at the Kilborne residence, she discovers that Jamie is Mason Kilborne’s cousin, and Mason had just finished working out on the balcony when he received a call from his receptionist that Jamie and his assistant were on their way up.
II. Unforeseen Circumstances
A. Unbeknownst to Ines, Michael Sorensen had sent an escort to Mason’s place earlier that morning, but luckily Mason had refused the offer.
B. When the elevator doors open and Ines steps out, she realizes that this could be her chance to finally get her screenplay in front of someone who might actually give her a chance.
C. As they are talking, Mason reveals that he is also trying to break into the film industry as a director and offers to take a look at Ines’ script if she shares it with him later that day at lunchtime at his favorite spot in town – The Fairmount Hotel bar & lounge room area near Beverly Hills where they could discuss further about it without being disturbed by anyone else in the place .
D. However, before lunch time arrives Ines has to attend Jamie’s meeting which turns out to be uneventful as he doesn’t even have enough time for them due to other commitments he has scheduled for himself . As Ines leaves disappointed from Jamie’s office , she runs into Michael Sorensen who informs her about Mason’s offer for having lunch together later that day .
E. Later during lunchtime , after some initial awkwardness between both , they finally talk about Ines’ script and its potential as well as some other topics related to their common interests such as books , music or travelling . After few hours discussing different ideas they decide they should work together on developing the project further so they can make it happen eventually .
First off, Sudowrite’s Shrink Ray seems to have embellished the layout to add events that aren’t in the chapter. I mean, sure this might be useful if you had a chapter and you wanted ideas on what happens in the chapter after that, but it’s entirely useless if you’d already finished writing the novel.
It also gets some details wrong. In the Outline, under Introduction, it says that Ines finds out Jamie and Mason are cousins. This is inaccurate. In fact, the whole mistaken identity thing happens because Ines mistakes Mason for his cousin Jamie, whom she was expecting to meet.
Under Outline, there is a section called “Unforseen circumstances” which contains some of what happens in the chapter, but they’re only items A and B. Items C to E are things that never happened in the chapter, so I’m assuming it’s the AI trying to be helpful and giving me suggestions on what happens next.
Still, it’s pretty impressive. At any rate, you might still be able to use Shrink Ray to help you write an outline your story. I expect the software will get better in time because it seems to be improving really quickly.
I’m not discounting the possibility that the errors in the Shrink Ray-generated text were because my writing just isn’t AI-friendly. When I used it on chapters from a different story (one of my works in progress), it got the ages of the characters wrong. The software is great but it just isn’t there yet, not at the level of competence I can use. I’ll probably check back after a couple of months and see if it works better.
If you want to study how well/badly the Shrink Ray feature worked, you can compare the Shrink Ray generated text above to the chapter I used it on.
A note of warning if you’re thinking of using the Shrink Ray feature: it uses up a good deal of word tokens. When you, say, ask it to summarize a passage of text or just prompt it to write something, the number of word tokens it uses up is the number of words it generates. The Shrink Ray feature is the opposite— it uses word tokens for the words it “reads”, not the words it generates. So if you use Shrink Ray on your entire 50,000-word story, you will use up 50,000 word tokens. If you check Sudowrite’s pricing, you’ll see the cheapest plan gives you only 30,000 word tokens. The other plans, Professional and Max, will give you 90,000 word tokens and 300,000 word tokens, respectively. So you may have to get the Professional or Max plans if you plan to use the Shrink Ray feature on your novels.
You may wonder why anyone would pay to use AI writing software when ChatGPT is free. Because theoretically, you could give ChatGPT a whole chapter and ask it to create a synopsis of it. However, ChatGPT (at least the free version) doesn’t allow you to generate text that contains violence or explicit sex. This won’t be a problem if you’re, say, writing a children’s book but it will be a problem if you’re writing high-heat romance (which I do) or a crime thriller. Sudowrite doesn’t seem to care what you write or what you ask the software to write. (I’m guessing there are probably some restrictions, like you probably can’t use it to write child pornography, for example.)
Anyway, if you’re curious to try Sudowrite, you may use my affiliate link. You’ll be paying the same price for your subscription but apparently you’ll get an extra 10,000 word tokens if you use that link. I’d love it if you let me know in the comments below how it works out for you.