Michael Stewart of Sudowrite – How to Write your Book with Sudowrite

Michael Stewart is the Community Lead at Sudowrite, an AI creative writing partner designed primarily for fiction writers. His background is in journalism and nonfiction writing, but he discovered his struggle with fiction perfectionism early on—unable to finish first chapters because everything needed to be perfect from the start. Sudowrite helped him accelerate past the "shitty first draft" phase to get to the editing work he loves. Michael works with a community of 16,000+ authors on Sudowrite's Discord server, leads 12 teachers rotating through daily live classes, and helps writers find their unique workflows with AI tools. He's passionate about ensuring authors remain essential to their creative process while using AI to eliminate tedium.

In this episode:

• AI democratizes writing access like personal computers did
• Romance authors accelerating from 6 to 200 books yearly
• Import Novel reads work nine times, builds Story Bible
• Story Bible catalogs characters, settings, synopsis, outline
• Write button generates 150-1,500 words as smart autocomplete
• Stuck locally vs structurally: two types of writing blocks
• Plugins ecosystem for niche workflow needs
• Chat feature more powerful than ChatGPT with full context
• Pedal assist metaphor: eliminate tedium, focus on what you love
• Character cards with Enneagram types and custom traits
• Characters Prompt the Author: role-play scenes through character eyes
• New editing tool in beta highlights passages with custom feedback
• Minimal involvement creates soulless, clichéd fiction
• Authors must remain essential to avoid generic AI writing

Resources mentioned:

• SudoWrite
• Join the SudoWrite Discord
• Book: "Steering the Craft" by Ursula K. Le Guin — for deepening craft skills
• Claude AI
• ChatGPT

Connect with Michael Stewart:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
  
  

Connect with Teddy Smith:
@teddyagsmith
Website: https://publishingperformance.com/?ref=ywm3mtc
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Youtube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHV6ltaUB4SULkU6JEMhFSw
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com

Transcript

Teddy Smith (00:01.202)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Publishing Format Show. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Michael Stewart who is the Community Lead at SudoWrites which is one of my, well actually it is my favorite AI writing tool. So Michael, thanks for joining.

Michael (00:12.706)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Teddy Smith (00:15.89)
Yeah, no problem. And the first question I wanted to ask was, do you think AI makes people a better writer or just a faster one?

Michael (00:24.262)
Ooh, that's such a good question out the gate. Well, I'm biased, naturally. But I think it can do all of those things. know, asking that question, think just to put things in context here is sort of like, hey, did the computer make people better writers or did it make them faster writers? Right? And the answer is like, well, the computer sort of democratized

Teddy Smith (00:32.574)
So.

Michael (00:53.406)
access, the personal computer, the home computer, democratized access to this sort of tool and the resources available through it. And so I think of AI as a technology through that lens where the answer is to your question is sort of, yes, yes, I do think it does both things, right? It's a little bit the sort of ratatouille.

Teddy Smith (01:11.582)
Thank

Michael (01:19.776)
ratatouille, anyone can cook sort of thing. It's like, well, anyone can become a great writer through these tools. It doesn't mean that everyone will necessarily be just because this tool's available.

Teddy Smith (01:33.65)
Yeah, I think a lot of people are quite lazy and then they just blame AI for lazy writing. And I think that's kind of maybe the problem. It's not the AI itself, it's the way you're using it. Do you think there's any misconceptions that people have about using AI, especially for fiction writing?

Michael (01:51.202)
that's a great question. I think there are lots of misconceptions. And I think, you know, AI currently is a part of the discourse. And with good reason, right? Because AI is a, it is a technology. And as with most technologies, the sort of like big.

massive tech companies like are holding a lot of the strings there. Where AI is a little bit different is there are a lot of open source efforts as well, and there are a lot of small shops that are doing their own sort of model training. In any case, because big tech is involved, there's a lot of thoughts and feelings and opinions because of the way big tech went about training some of these models, right? And so there are some sort of well

placed criticisms, but my feeling is always like, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's like some really excellent uses of this technology, of this tool. It can be used to powerful effect. And I think that my hope is that one day we all think about AI as a technology as much as we think about databases.

Right? How often in your day-to-day do you think about database? Not all that often. And yet it is a foundational, important thing to using, to navigating the internet, to doing everything you do day-to-day. And I think that AI will really have its moment in the sun when we think about it far less.

Teddy Smith (03:17.918)
Thanks.

Teddy Smith (03:34.78)
Yeah, it's really interesting. It's what we were talking about just before we came on about how much AI is changing over the last few weeks. We're recording this in like the end of February in 26. So it's everything is talking about Claude Fox and things like that, how it's going to change. Do you see any of that stuff affecting writers?

Michael (03:51.054)
Absolutely I do. So actually just a week ago, two weeks ago, there was a large profile in the New York Times of a few writers in the romance space that have accelerated their process. So actually one a Suderite user named Sonia was profiled in this piece, it was an excellent piece in the Times. And it highlighted how these folks, how their workflows have evolved from like, sort of like really working hard to get...

four to six books out a year. That's a huge time commitment to versus, you know, going anywhere from 10 to 12 books a year where you're on sort of a book of month schedule to 200 books a year, which was just unthinkable prior. And I think, yeah, the improvements that we've seen, is very, these tools are very quickly being adopted by writers, writer C.

they sort of recognize the utility. And what's wonderful is because AI is this sort of like amorphous, flexible thing, that sort of like any part of your process that you're struggling with, there is an angle by which these AI technologies can support or assist your workflow. And so I think that that's really, it's been really neat to watch and to be a part of.

Teddy Smith (05:14.642)
Yeah, definitely. We've sort of jumped straight into what AI does without really talking about what pseudo-right does. I kind of assume that everyone has heard about it before, but could you give us a bit of an overview of exactly what pseudo-right is?

Michael (05:26.072)
Sure. Yeah, so SudaWrite is an AI creative writing partner. It is a toolkit. You can think of it, if you've ever used Google Docs or Microsoft Word, a text editor, that is sort of, built it in this familiar way, where it's not intimidating, you just write in there. But the difference is that we've given it a whole bunch of AI features and AI tools to support different parts of that writing.

We do focus primarily on fiction, but we have folks that are nonfiction authors, folks that write screenplays or blog posts. We have users that are all across the board, and so we support writers of all stripes. But a lot of the... we have slightly opinionated design when it comes to pseudorite, where we sort of assume that you're going to be writing fiction.

Right? specifically sort of like long form fiction where we expect that the majority of our users are going to be folks that are novelists writing novels.

Teddy Smith (06:31.934)
Yeah, yeah. One of the reasons I love SudaWrite so much is I'm a bit of a messy planner with novels, especially. I basically just brain dump everything I want down and get it into like one document. And I could just upload it to SudaWrite and it kind of starts to make sense of it, which I think that's the perfect use of AI because it's taking your thinking and then, you know, organizing it, put it into a structure that you can like use to actually start writing your book properly.

Michael (06:41.774)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (06:57.356)
Yeah, yeah, that is a, boy, that is a struggle. So my background is actually in journalism, right? Many years ago, I like professional background in journalism, and so nonfiction was sort of my bread and butter for a time. Now though, like, basically I identified my faults writing fiction pretty early on, where it's like, I'm a perfectionist. I can't finish the first chapter because everything needs to be just right out of the gate in, or, you know.

or it just can't be on the page. And that's sort of, I won't say it's wrong, because I know there are other people like me out there, but it is a challenge. It is very hard to work that way. And so working with a tool that has sort of accelerated my process and let me get to, forgive the phrase, the shitty first draft a lot faster.

I'm like, okay, I'm great at the edit. I love the edit. Like for me, that is like a slash and burn sort of thing. But getting that first draft on the page was always a huge struggle for me. so I, Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

Teddy Smith (08:00.862)
Yeah, that blank page syndrome is real. What we could do today is have a look at some of the main use cases for pseudo-write. Because obviously, we could just go through here and just say, you can write a book, you can start at the beginning, and that's how it gets done. But there's four things that I get asked about the most. And that's being stuck as a writer, how to write quickly without ruining the quality, how to make your characters deep and realistic.

and then looking at editing and the polish. So I thought we'd go through four of those use cases to see like, where would be the best ways to use Soonerite. So let's just give you a bit of an example. Say I've written 25,000 words of a novel. I want it to be around 50 to 60,000 in total. And I'm a bit stuck. Where would I start with Soonerite? What would that first task look like?

Michael (08:51.266)
That is a great question. Okay, so what I will start with is that we make no assumptions that you're necessarily going to be writing that initial 25,000 words inside of pseudorite, right? And I would say one of the most common use cases when authors first find pseudorite is exactly what you're describing. They're like, I have half a book and I just petered out. I just hit this sort of threshold where I couldn't keep writing.

And so stuckness is one of the main things that we think about. And so there are a couple of ways to bring work into Sudoright. You can always copy paste, obviously you can do that anywhere. But we have a proper import where you can bring that file into Sudoright to get started on it. And we also have something that is sort of an AI enriched import. We call it import novel, but it doesn't have to be a novel.

It can be a work in progress. could be a finished book. It could be a messy pile of notes. My favorite use case is somebody they're just like, I had a very, very long conversation with Chad GPT and we cracked it. We know what the novel is. I want to get it into Suterite. And you can do that. can export, take that. Exactly. You can take that whole thing, feed it into import novel. And what Suterite does is it adds some of the structure that you're talking about. Right. And so the first thing that we do

Teddy Smith (10:00.478)
That's me.

Michael (10:14.336)
is we read whatever you import, like, nine times. And we set up a detailed story Bible for you. So we say, hey, here are all of the characters that we detected, here are all of the important settings that we saw you reference, and other world-building elements, like this item that may come into play, your MacGuffin. And so all of that gets catalogued, you get a detailed synopsis, and you also wind up with a sort of structured outline. And so you have ...

half a book, you 25,000 words, you're bringing it in. And so this is where I would put the question back because this is what I often do when we have folks in this situation is they say like, okay, I've got 25,000 words, I wanna finish the book, but I'm stuck. I imported it, story Bible looks great, but still now what? And so the question that I put back to them is like, well, are you stuck locally? Like, are you stuck like finishing the scene or the chapter? Are you stuck in some local sense?

Or are you just stuck, stuck? Are you stuck structurally with the work? And so there are some questions that an author needs to wrestle with themselves and still identify. But once you've done so, at that point you can figure out, if I'm stuck locally, and there's a sort of paradigm in pseudorite where you can flip back and forth, you don't have to, we have people that are pantsers, we have people that are plotters, right? People that love...

outlines and people who are just like, I'm a discovery writer. I'm going to figure it out as I go along. And so our toolkit sort of like offers these paths where you can go either way. If you're stuck locally, you would use something that panzers often use these discovery writers, which is the right button, right? It is. It's exactly what it sounds right. You put your cursor cursor right at the end. You click the right button. You're to get the next anywhere from 150 to

1500 words depending on your preference. You just set that. You can even choose which sort of AI you want to do the work there, which voice you're looking for, and it will do, it is like a brilliant autocomplete because it's not just reading all 25,000 words prior to that. It's going to look at that story Bible. It's going to make sure it's true to your characters with whatever it's generating. So that is like, that's the half, that's half of the answer, right? That's the list stuck locally.

Michael (12:37.826)
What if you're stuck structurally on this work? And that's where it is a bigger question. We've built, we actually have a big feature in the hopper that I'm very excited about for this, but we have built something previously called the import report, which exists in Suterite as a plugin. I don't want to use jargon here, so I'm just going to say that Suterite has a whole bunch of AI features.

out of the box. You come in, you have rewrite, have brainstorm, you have all these cool things. But pretty quickly after building SudaWrite, we started getting these questions for really niche tools that the AI could definitely do, but they're sort of really specific to an individual's workflow. It's like, converting my novel. I want to convert my screenplay into a novelization, right? This sort of thing. it's like, we're probably not going to build that feature, but we know that AI can do it.

So we built, we opened up Sudorite and we built this plugins ecosystem, which you can think of just the same way you would as a browser extension, right? And now you can just say in Sudorite, I need a tool that does X, Z. And there you go, you get a little button that does that exact thing. So import report exists as a plugin. You can run an import report on your imported work and it's going to do that structural analysis. It's going to say, I see.

I see what's happening here. You had sort of a false start at the beginning, right? Or you didn't ground this character. maybe you're using save the cat. There's no save the cat scene, right? And so it'll do that sort of analysis and let you know where you should dig in. And then the world is your oyster. You can figure out how you'd like to slice and dice that.

Teddy Smith (14:26.962)
Yeah, and so how do those tools help you diagnose exactly what's wrong with the scene? What does that process actually look like?

Michael (14:34.284)
Yeah, so that can be accomplished several ways. will say that my... So something that I often share is that part of the reason it's hard to give a specific walkthrough of Suterite is that it is a flexible tool. And we've designed it to be flexible because workflows are so varied. It's not just the plot or pants or paradigm. It's sort of the like...

the sequence, the people who like focusing on like, really spend a lot of my time on the first draft, I love the first draft, versus the people who are like, I hate the first draft, I wanna spend my time in the edit, right? And so because there are so many different preferences and workflows available, we've built this flexible tool. what that means is that for every question, there's usually four to five answers. So like, how do I do X, Y, on suitor? How do I rewrite a passage? And I could tell, I could...

rattle off five tools. I'm not going to do that right now, it's boring. But I could rattle off five different tools that would let you rewrite a passage. And part of the answer is like, well, what do you prefer? Like, what is natural to you? What is part of your workflow? And also, like, what is your end goal? Like, what are you trying to get to? So when it comes to diagnosing, you said diagnosing a scene. I will just share from my personal workflow. I will pop into the chapter that I'm working on or trying to troubleshoot.

Teddy Smith (15:33.886)
Yeah.

Michael (16:00.556)
And I will highlight the sort of operative passage where I'm like, I don't think this is working. And I'll use our chat. So we have a persistent chat in the sort of sidebar, which is great because you have your document here, you have your chat right here. And it is, I say it's more powerful than chat GPT because it has your full context, right? It has all of your documents in its brain. It has your story Bible. And so I will often say, hey,

this isn't resonating for me, like, can you read this? I really liked what we did in chapter three. Can you tell me why this doesn't feel like it's working? And it'll respond with three or four things. And the thing that I want to call out about this chat-based workflow, and the reason I like it, is because I'm not typically a confrontational person, but I feel very empowered to be confrontational with the chat, with a robot. So I can say, it's none of those.

Teddy Smith (16:55.006)
You're wrong.

Michael (16:58.346)
Yeah, you're wrong. No, those are not why. But the thing is, this is a clarifying exercise for me, right? It's because it's like, well, I know what it's not now, but it's something else. And so through this back and forth, through this sort of iterative discourse, we help zero in on it. And so I like chat because it's not sort of a click a button, get a response and have to chew on that and see if I believe it. Chat is a dance, right?

Teddy Smith (17:28.36)
Yeah, I really like the chat function. It's a bit like a local, have you used Google Notebook LM? Have you used that before? Yeah, it feels a bit like that where you can sort of chat with your documents bit and you can ask questions about what's going on. really, really like that feature.

Michael (17:33.398)
Yeah, yeah, I like Notebook LM.

Michael (17:40.79)
Yeah, yeah, and I think it's also a lot more flexible than people necessarily think, right? They see a chat and they're like, you know, I've got GPT, I can ask for stuff. But it is sort of, there are people whose workflows are almost entirely, inside of Sudirit, entirely chat-based. Because pretty much anything you can do through a button, whether you're looking for richer descriptions, whether you're looking for...

a sort of scene diagnosis or analysis or feedback. All of these things on Suterite, can sort of, you just need to know how to have the conversation, right? The same sort of way you would with an editor. As long as you can articulate what it is you want or articulate what it is you're sort of like looking for or not satisfied with, then the chat can be really helpful.

Teddy Smith (18:29.919)
Yeah, definitely. In the second use case, so this is something that I actually did when I first signed up to Sudra, I just wanted to test it. And it was, I just wrote a book literally as quickly as I could. And I did it in genuinely like an hour or something, but it wasn't that good. was like, it was kind of like barely even a first draft, know, was, it was, it was, didn't give it enough information. So how do you balance that, the difference between writing fast and also without losing that quality? Like, could you explain?

Michael (18:44.78)
Yeah.

Teddy Smith (18:59.26)
what that workflow would look like on StudioWrite.

Michael (19:01.686)
Yeah, yeah, think that so the reason

Basically the only thing that people are bound by today, because technology is where it is, is their own personal standards. If I had lower standards, I could have a few hundred books available on KDP right now. But I value my name, I don't have a pen name that I want to do that with necessarily, and I value the reader's time.

Right? And so this is where I think the question of quality does come in and should absolutely be a consideration. think the, yeah, you can, and I've actually done this in the course of, you know, speaking on SudaWrite at conferences where I'm sort of clicking buttons while being on stage. And we get almost through a novel behind me on the screen while we're presenting on this.

Teddy Smith (20:03.111)
Yeah.

Michael (20:07.414)
And so it is totally possible. I think that...

There's the most important sort of mindset here is that AI think of so Steve Jobs famously called the computer a bicycle for the mind right it is this Sort of accelerant this sort of thing that sort of like lets you go places lets you go further faster Go places, maybe you wouldn't have gone before intellectually and

One way to think about AI, this isn't my preferred metaphor, but one way to think about AI is pedal assist. Riding a bike that has one of those little battery packs that just sort of takes some of the effort off. It makes it feel more easy and breezy and effortless. The reason we do what we do is not to necessarily just create

Teddy Smith (20:52.542)
Yeah.

Michael (21:12.81)
have people creating books faster, but to allow the authors to spend more of their time in the parts of the process that they love. You want to spend less time on the tedium, on the sort of like, man, he should have been a she, which means I need to go back through my whole manuscript, because pronouns, it's hard to sub pronouns because you're using them for other people, and so...

I need to go back and read this whole thing and do this, but that's a task that AI is great at. It is like, it can read the surrounding context and intuitively sort of replace not just names, but the sort of surrounding pronouns and nicknames and dialogue styles for what that character was saying. circling back to your question of like, how do you maintain sort of quality? You still have to love

the writing process. You still need to sort of be involved as the author, recognize that your role may have shifted from some of the tedium, some of the like administrative work to being something more of an orchestrator, but you are still the author and you still need to be executing on your vision to a standard that you're happy with. And what this means is essentially like, yeah, you could crank that pedal assist all the way up.

but you're not gonna burn any calories if you do that, right? And so like finding this sort of happy space where you're you're vibing, right? Where you're like enjoying the process, you're hitting your sort of word count goals and not necessarily going faster just for the sake of going faster.

Teddy Smith (22:42.78)
Yeah

Teddy Smith (22:57.566)
I really like that analogy of saying, you know, you still want to, if you're not writing it, you're just basically just taking yourself out of the process. Like why are you even bothering doing it in the first place? You know, if you, if you really want to use AI just to make money, then writing isn't really not the best way to do it.

Michael (23:07.923)
you

Yeah, there are a lot more profitable ways to make money with AI.

Teddy Smith (23:15.418)
Yeah. And so in the third one, I think one of the things that I've seen my favorite writers do and some of most successful writers do is have those really deep characters that you can kind of identify with and understand exactly what they're doing. if, say, your characters are feeling a little bit flat, is there any way that pseudo-right can help you to maybe raise them to another level?

Michael (23:39.244)
Yes, so there are a few different ways, a couple of things. First thing is that I love our character section of Story Bible. And so, what's really neat about, in the past this, like when when SudaWrite first launched Story Bible, it used to be called Story Engine, the character section was like a text field, and it was just like, make sure you write your characters down so you have some information about them. But we...

What was that last year? 2024, we sort of rebuilt it entirely. And now you can have as many characters as you want. You can have as many traits as you want on each character. And so what's really neat about this is it's giving, it's helping you as the author stay on track, making sure you have a mental model of like, which side of his face was the scar on? Oh, was over his left eye. He had this big gnarly scar. And you have that documented in the physical description section.

of character card. So it helps the author stay on track, also helps the AI stay sort of factual and accurate. So it's a win-win there. But that's not everything, right? Like, as an author, I have a custom traits. You can set custom traits. And it's an Enneagram type. And so you can say, hey, this character is an Enneagram type too. They're the helper.

And so they always want to be in this supportive role, even to their own detriment, right? And so you can include these details, which again are both for your reference and for the AI, so that it can pull those details and weave them in as it's writing a scene. And you see this happen with dialogue. If you have a dialogue style, it will write honest to the character. But also with these sort of psychological traits as well, like the Enneagram type, things like that. So that's one part of that that I like.

And then the next part of this is sort of additive on top of that. with these rich characters, sort of like documented and built out and saved in the story Bible, you can do something. So, originally we built this as a plug-in, but you can now do it through chat. There's a plug-in called Characters Prompt the Author. This was built by a colleague of mine, Ryan, and it's really neat because you can highlight a passage and you can say, hey,

Michael (26:02.028)
You're Timothy, know. Timothy, what's going on in your head in this scene, right? And so you get, the AI looks at who Timothy is in the story Bible. It internalizes this character. And then through the eyes of Timothy, it reads that scene and it gives you sort of a report back. says, hey, here's what I'm thinking. I would be like, why would I say that to her when I like actually do love her? This sort of like,

prompting that maybe you as the author, you're either too in the weeds or too abstracted from. But now you can do that same exact workflow as well with chat, right? Where you can tell chat, hey chat, we're gonna do a role play. You're going to inhibit the role of Timothy and I have some questions for you based on how this scene played out. And so that is a lot of fun.

And it's a great exercise, a great unstick it, and it helps you get to what you're talking about, which is that sort of emotional truth, emotional depth of these characters.

Teddy Smith (27:03.708)
Yeah, it's kind of like having a co-writer almost, which is amazing. You know, I think one of the things that people have the most blocker on, I think sometimes is having to work by themselves and having to internalize all these questions. Like having someone where you can spitball with a bit and just try and understand where your thought process is going. That is super helpful.

Michael (27:22.518)
Yes, that was my most productive time of my life was when I had a roommate that was also a writer and we would get each other excited and help each other get through. Yeah, outside of that, like, it can be hard, at least the way I work. It's hard to have sort of everything up here and no one to bounce it off against. And chat's great for that.

Teddy Smith (27:28.414)
You

Teddy Smith (27:42.889)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And so for the last one is the editing and the polish. Now, I think for me, when the books I've written with SudaWrite have actually end up going via an editor anyway, just to make sure that everything is clear. I think that for me, that was really important. Other people are different, but I still use SudaWrite to make sure that it was kind of as close to where I want it to be as possible. when you're, say you've got what you think is your final draft.

What would that editing process look like and how would you try and use the editing process to elevate what you've written?

Michael (28:16.716)
Yeah, so we do have a feature, it's a little bit older on SudaWrite, called Feedback. And this version of Feedback that's available today can read, it sort of reads half of your manuscript at a time. It can handle up to, I forget if it's 30, 40,000 words. And what it gives you is it gives you sort of three readers, almost like beta readers, SudaWriter sort of perspectives on it, where it says,

Here's what I liked about it. Here's what was hollow. Here's what didn't work. And so that is one exercise I like to do is like run the feedback. The other thing is I mean, you know, I'm opinionated about this because I feel like one of the reasons in the discourse that AI catches some heat

is because people who don't spend enough time in this final draft, final edit phase, right? I think that the least that you can do, I feel like one of the last things that should happen is a human reading this from start to finish. Because I have seen, you know, the things that always catch attention are where somebody left part of a chat GBT response in the middle of their, you know, fortunately on ...

Teddy Smith (29:32.03)
Let's unpack now.

Michael (29:35.254)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. How does that look? I could try it again in the middle of a manuscript. That's tough. Fortunately on SudaWrite, there's no, you know, chat's in its own space. It's never going to be writing in your document. But that aside, I think that the feedback tools, there's an incredible ecosystem of plugins that we actually have. So there's a whole category called editing in our plugins ecosystem. And these are folks who are like,

Teddy Smith (29:46.098)
Yeah.

Michael (30:04.578)
look, really what I'm looking for are copy edits, or what I'm looking for are line edits, or developmental edits, right? And so it sort of depends on what your final draft editing process looks like. You can dip into the plugins ecosystem. But the other thing is, I will say, just to, because you can't appear on a podcast without teasing something fun, we actually have an update to that feedback utility in the works. It is in, it's sort of,

private beta right now, but this is really cool because for the longest time people are like, I actually have a finished draft. I just want to come into SudaWrite to do the final pass cleanup. And our tools are okay. And a lot of that was done either through chat or the, like I said, the editing plugins, but now we have a first party tool in the works that is incredible. That lets you select precisely what you're looking for. So you can say copy edits, line edits, developmental edits.

And there is, what was the other? So things like consistency, we get people asking about like consistency checks, anachronisms, right? There's all these sort of things that you may be looking for. And there's even a custom edit type or a custom feedback type where you can say, hey, I always want to make sure that the dialogue rings true to the character and that they never contradict themselves over the course of this. And it'll read your whole manuscript.

And what's really neat about this, I'm probably saying too much because this feature is not publicly available yet. But it goes through and it highlights your work and leaves comments on your work with sort of like, hey, here's what I noticed, which is I'm very excited to get this in people's hands.

Teddy Smith (31:46.034)
Wow. And so with that editing part of it that you just talked about, what sort of feedback does it look at? What would a, I don't want to ruin the surprise when you launch, but what sort of things is it trying to pull out of your draft?

Michael (31:59.19)
Yeah, boy, we demoed this for a small group recently. It sort of depends, which is to say when you click the tool, you get a little pop-up and it says, hey, which of these feedback types would you like? Are you looking for sort of structural edits? Are you looking for line or copy edits? And then, like I said, there is the freeform field as well, in addition to sort of the consistency or accuracy checks.

There's a freeform field. So it's really entirely up to the author is what's neat. You can say, hey, I want you to read this whole draft and look for places where these two characters that hate each other speak. that's what I'm looking for. And it'll read the whole thing and highlight these sections of the manuscript for you. Because I want to read all those scenes myself, but I don't know how to find all of those scenes, right? If I search by name, it's...

Teddy Smith (32:40.571)
You

Michael (32:53.87)
And so it's flexible and it's designed primarily for feedback, but it's leaning much more heavily on the AI than some of the other stuff that we've done.

Teddy Smith (33:04.126)
Yeah, that's incredible. I can't wait to see that. Do you think it would take away some of the work that a human editor would need to do? Or do you think it is a different job? Or is it different types of books need different types of editing? Like, where do you think it sits?

Michael (33:16.247)
Yeah, that's a great question. think that, yeah, I think it can. I think that where the value of the human editor is still in the expertise, right? It is still that like, you know, as someone who is not a professional editor, I can get my book to what I feel like is a first draft, but it's the unknown unknowns that are the issue, right? And this is where the human editor still adds value. If anything,

A tool like this allows that human editor to execute faster and execute maybe to a higher degree of quality and maybe look for things in their time with the manuscript that they wouldn't have looked for had they been in the weeds, you know, fine, going over the manuscript with a fine tooth comb. I think that's still valuable. And I think, like I said, last look from a human is still ultimately what we want. But tools like SudaWrite are being embraced.

by ghostwriters and editors as much as they're being embraced by authors. Specifically because of the sort of like I said, you're shifting the work in your process to the parts that sort of you like and you're good at and you excel at, and you're letting the computer do computer things.

Teddy Smith (34:34.527)
Yeah, perfect. That's really good. I mean, that's really helpful to help unblock those. So this is four of the main things I get asked about with fiction writing. So that is it's good to see how sudo write can unblock them. So I thought I've got a couple of more difficult questions to finish because you used to be a journalist, as you said. So I thought I'd keep you on your toes. What is the worst way that someone could use sudo write?

Michael (34:48.942)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (34:57.964)
The worst way? worst- unpack worst for me. like worst like...

Teddy Smith (34:59.452)
Yeah.

Teddy Smith (35:05.106)
Well, what would give you the the very like worst outcome? What would give you the worst but.

Michael (35:10.57)
Okay, what would be the, yeah, that's a good question. I think the thing that you illustrated early on is like, the worst results you could get out of pseudo-right would be being minimally involved in the process, right? And I've illustrated this. I can go in, I can type a two-sentence brain dump, and I can say genre, sci-fi, style, know, sounds good.

like some other author. And then I can just hit generate, generate, generate, and I could step through that process. SudaRite's going to execute and do its job. It's going to create a detailed synopsis, ultimately a complete outline. And then I can go through and rely on generation of scenes, generation of prose. I could hit my, you know, 3,000 words a chapter, and I could do all of that. And the end result will be

something that looks like a novel in essence, but reads sorta miserably. It's gonna be boring, it's gonna be cliched, it's going to lean heavily. A good thing to, like, a mental context to have about AI is it's a probability engine, right? And so what it's going to do with minimal human intervention is do what it knows. It's gonna execute, it's gonna hit all these boring notes.

and the results are going to be readable, but not anything worth writing home about.

Teddy Smith (36:45.736)
Yeah, no soul. think it's kind of the...

Michael (36:47.68)
Yeah, exactly. No soul. And this is the counterpoint to that is remembering through every step of this process that you're the human, you're the author, you're in the driver's seat, everything, challenge what it gives you. I think that you get the best results by reading each chapter summary that it proposes for the outline and saying like, I don't think that should happen in this chapter. Or I think this should be this other character. And you just go through and you make these like spot edits to

Every single thing that the AI generates and again, you don't have to but by doing so you're sort of resting control and making sure it's executing on your vision and and the words that you read on the page at the end of this process even if you are generating scenes and generating prose if you've been involved in that setup process the end result or the Maybe not end result, but the intermediate result winds up a lot better

Teddy Smith (37:43.346)
Have you seen any authors become a bit too dependent on AI?

Michael (37:51.694)
I will say no, but that's only because I think that's sort of a survivorship bias, right? I think if you're too dependent on AI, one of two things happens. Either I don't know that you're using AI and you're keeping a great lid on it and you're doing a great job with it and nobody knows. Yeah, in which case, good for you, but you kept that from me. Or...

Teddy Smith (38:13.672)
In which case, just carry on.

Michael (38:21.039)
Yeah, or you're just sort of not in our, so I work with our community at SudaWrite. We've got a Discord server of like 16,000 plus authors, humans in there. And it means if you're too dependent on the AI, you're not showing up in our server, you're not writing into support, you're not, you you're just off in your silo, right?

So I will say I have not seen any authors become too dependent on AI. That is not to say that some authors may not be, but I also have a hard time other than the examples I cited where it's like, okay, I was lazy and I left evidence in my book that hit, you know, the Kindle store. Other than that, I don't know how I would even know.

Teddy Smith (39:03.454)
Yeah. Perfect. And last one is, because obviously with AI, and it goes back to our first question about the worst ways of using it, because everyone's kind of using these same models, is there any risk of everyone's writing starting to sound similar if you're being lazy, I suppose?

Michael (39:28.79)
Yes, I will say that that was a risk before AI, and I will say that it is maybe even more an acute risk after AI. As you know, there's only so many different AI models. And while those models may sound different due to their training, the...

Teddy Smith (39:36.189)
Yeah.

Michael (39:57.975)
the actual sort of like words that you get out of them, again, are probabilistic. And so what that means is that the way the AI works, it wants to sound convincing. And so I do think that like if you're not involved enough in the process, and being involved in the process can look like different things. It can look like the sort of style prompting that you're giving it. It can look like.

that or it could be that thorough last edit to make sure that the voice actually sounds like you. And yeah, if you're not sufficiently involved in that process, I think you get something that is middle of the road mainstream prose that might actually be what a mainstream reader would want because it was sort of what it was trained on.

but would not be exceptional, would not be maybe authentic, right? We begin to lose authenticity if we depend too heavily on these tools without being involved in the process.

Teddy Smith (41:00.072)
I love that advice. think that's the main thing with all of these tools and it's the trends that I keep coming back to with writing with AI. It's just, you can't just outsource yourself. Like you're still the main part of this process.

Michael (41:10.319)
Yeah. Exactly, exactly. You're essential to this process. I would encourage all authors, regardless of the tools that they use, whether or not AI is a part of their process, all authors should consider themselves essential to the work being done and act accordingly, right?

Teddy Smith (41:37.626)
so much for coming on. I mean, I love sudo write. It's one of my favorite tools out of all of them, and I don't say that to everyone. So thank you so much for coming on. Could you just walk us through a bit about how the pricing and how sudo write works in that sense, and also joining the Discord and all those sorts of things? How does the whole working with sudo write process look like?

Michael (41:56.11)
Yeah, for sure. So, we're at suitorite.com and we have a seven day sort of like risk free trial, right? So you go to suitorite.com, you sign up. We have plans that range from $10 a month up to $60 a month. The sort of spectrum on that, these three different plans is like, how much do you expect you'll be asking the AI to do? So it's sort of a credit space pricing, which...

a of years ago was less familiar to folks, but now with Claude and with all these other things that are sort of like necessarily measuring based on the work that's being done for you, it's a little bit more familiar. So if you're just gonna be using a little bit of help from the AI, you'll be at one end of the spectrum. If you wanna write two books a month, you're probably gonna be a max user at the $60 a month end of that spectrum. So you select a plan, try it out.

If you don't love it in seven days, can drop our support team an email and we'll refund you for that. And yeah, it's very easy to get started. We do free daily live classes. So I work with 12 teachers over here and we rotate through different topics and sessions. We have a weekly welcome session we do every Tuesday or early in the week each week that gives the sort of nuts and bolts introduction to SudaWrite.

And then a ton of live programming from the things you were asking about, developing better characters, to writing non-fiction, or things that I mentioned aren't necessarily sort of like core to Sudoright. So yeah, we do that. And then also our Discord's free to join. It's just discord.gg slash Sudoright. You join, you don't have to be a Sudoright user to get in there and figure out what all the cool AI kids are talking about.

Teddy Smith (43:51.582)
Brilliant. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been really helpful to hear all that and I'll see you again soon.

Michael (43:56.578)
Yeah, thank you, Teddy.