Latest / If I'm Being Honest: Straight Talk About Book Publishing & Promotion / How to Use AI to Beat Writers Block and Write More with Plot Drive

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How to Use AI to Beat Writers Block and Write More with Plot Drive · If I'm Being Honest: Straight Talk About Book Publishing & Promotion

• 0:10
  Joel: Hi, everybody.
• 0:11
  Joel: My name is Joel Pitney.
• 0:12
  Joel: I'm the founder of Launch My Book and the host of If I'm Being Honest, which is our new podcast that we've launched to explore all things in the book industry: promotion, marketing, writing, everything from an honest, straight perspective.
• 0:24
  Joel: My guest today is someone I met in Las Vegas at the Author Nation conference last month.
• 0:29
  Joel: His name is Jay Rosencrantz, and he is the founder of Plot Drive.
• 0:33
  Joel: Jay and I had a really cool conversation in the meeting area over coffee or bookmarks or whatever we whatever we had.
• 0:42
  Joel: And uh and we talked, we were talking about AI, which is something I'm very curious about.
• 0:47
  Joel: I know a lot of people are curious about, especially in the writing world.
• 0:50
  Joel: Um, how is I how is AI disrupting the industry, this particular industry, like it's disrupting every other industry?
• 0:57
  Joel: Um, and uh I I wanted to follow up with Jay and have a conversation on the record.
• 1:02
  Joel: So welcome, Jay.
• 1:03
  Joel: Thank you for having me.
• 1:04
  Joel: Fun to be here.
• 1:05
  Joel: Awesome.
• 1:06
  Joel: I think it'd be really helpful, you know, to just understand what is plot drive?
• 1:11
  Joel: How does it work?
• 1:11
  Joel: I mean, I remember when we first met, you gave me this really compelling description.
• 1:15
  Joel: You said it was this it's this combination of Google Docs meets Scrivener meets Chat GPT.
• 1:22
  Joel: Yeah.
• 1:22
  Joel: Um, it's the environment to make you better and more productive.
• 1:25
  Joel: Well, it was your description.
• 1:26
  Joel: So um tell tell I'm just tell how does it work?
• 1:31
  Joel: You know, what is plot dog?
• 1:32
  Joel: How does it work?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so imagine a document, a word processor, front and center, your words.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can type into it.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Forget the AI.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Your words take center stage.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's a document.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's where you're looking at.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now there is a on the left side, there is a collapsible, expandable sidebar that's incredibly simple where you can create more documents and folders to organize them.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the structure of your book.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: You might have a document that's like story foundations or story dossiers, like your hook and pitch, your character profiles, your locations, your writing style.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then you might have another folder that's like your book draft, and you might have another folder that's editing notes, whatever.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you can import from anywhere, like all the different text file formats, Word, Google Docs, and you can export when you're done with the draft or whenever you want to get your stuff out, and you can share with other people.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Super simple.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: You can manage multiple projects.
• 2:29
  Joel: So, in that way, you've got your word processor, which everybody, you know, some people write in Microsoft Word, some people write in Google Docs, some people write in pages.
• 2:36
  Joel: So you've got that function, and you've got your organizational tools, which some people, like my dad, uses his desktop, but some people will use something like Scribner that's more sophisticated.
• 2:48
  Joel: So you've got like the writing environment, you've got the organizational tools.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And now plot drive becomes the engine, the LM-based engine to hold everything together and give you control.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the way, the way it does uh, every document in every folder next to it is this little toggle switch.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: You flip it on, the AI knows about it.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And when you flip it off, it doesn't.
• 3:10
  Joel: So the AI is like the it's almost AI is like the omniscient consciousness that's looking at everything that's happening, which you can turn on and off if you don't want it to see things.
• 3:20
  Joel: And you can all the things, yeah.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: At the top of the dogma, you can switch any model.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you can bring in uh OpenAI GPT, you can bring in Anthropic Claude, Sonic 4.5, Europa, you can bring in Google Gemini 2.5 or 3, and you can access OpenRouter and bring in hundreds of other models.
• 3:39
  Joel: So you're not actually you haven't built your own AI, you've built an interface that can use the AI technology of other tools to apply to this writing environment.
• 3:50
  Joel: Is that what you're saying?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And to know whatever context you want it to know at any given moment, you can flip on and flip off.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then the actual way this is expressed and helps you, we have on the right side panel, which you can hide or show at any given time, uh, a tool called Co-Writer, which is like a developmental editor, writing coach, ghostwriter, assistant, all rolled into one.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Co-writer you can brainstorm with.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the more you write inside Plot Drive, the more it understands what your goal is, who you're trying to reach, and all the context of your story, which becomes starts to become really, really powerful if you're a pantser and you're really bad at structure.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Co-Writer has like this advanced superintelligence of all structures and can help you figure out how to like what's trending and what tropes readers want, uh, tied to like what idea you're trying to express and help you find a good structure that you can choose and then bring into your your structure on the left hand.
• 4:50
  Joel: So if you're more of a stream of consciousness writer where you're good at you're good at building worlds and creating dialogue, etc., but you're not quite as good at like structuring the plot to deliver all that in the in the most compelling way to the reader.
• 5:03
  Joel: Plot drives AI tools can help you figure out how to do that based on popular modalities of structure, that kind of thing.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, anything you want to ask it about about your story, i.e., like, I mean, we view it as like almost like a block breaking writing studio.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the the block break.
• 5:23
  Joel: A block break, so writer's block breaking.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and a block can be anything.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Anything that is like immediately causing you anxiety or to get you stuck or stressed.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's like the the key to to that we've seen in authors making the meast most use of it is like a block is different for everyone.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: We actually ran like a virtual event with a lot of like top authors and Russell Nolte, who's a partner of ours, uh called Kurt.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: He's the capitalist, right?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he's written like 77 books, fiction, nonfiction.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I mean he's largely responsible for helping us identify that that's what it, that's what it really does, because it's about like raising awareness of what's blocking you, then talking to co-writer about that.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And co-writer busts the block for you.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And once you start getting into this flow, what you start to understand is that the real use of LLMs is not to generate text for you.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, even though it can, and plenty of people do, like co-writer can be a ghostwriter for you, can like follow your instructions and write in your style.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we've got these one-click tools that are like your favorite reusable prompts that you can hide and call on demand.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Russell helped create like 50 of them from his frameworks for fiction and nonfiction.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: They can help you generate write in the document with a button click or revise text right where you are according to your instructions.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And like you can build and customize your workflows.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: But the real power of LLMs is like the fact that you can talk to them in natural language and like they can eliminate, remove all the friction that the invisible frictions from your writing process.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And once you do that, what you get is this like continuous flow engine.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you can use it however you want, because some writers are like, I don't want AI to generate any words for me, but I want it to help me with structure.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: I want it to help me like write better conflict, give me ideas.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's really good for that.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when you put it right into your writing environment and you start to understand that it can do things like hold 80,000 words, hold 300,000 words in its head at once and keep track of your characters and call up whose eye color was green and what was that like werewolf's name in chapter three that I introduced in like the D plot.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it knows that immediately and can bust that for you instead of like the old way of doing things.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like what you start to get is this increased.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I've been thinking about it as like this idea of like throughput.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: This is it's this increased creative velocity that where you're spending more time, like minute for by minute in writing sessions, feeling empowered, feeling in control, feeling unblocked, feeling like you are that version of yourself that in the old world you kind of only felt on the days when inspiration struck from the heavens and you were like, oh my God.
• 8:17
  Joel: No, I I that that's very interesting because I, you know, the the creative process is so important.
• 8:23
  Joel: And what what I what I'm getting from what you're saying, every time that you that you have a practical thing you've got to figure out while you're writing is an opportunity for distraction and procrastination, right?
• 8:34
  Joel: So like if I you know I I'm more of a nonfiction writer, so and I and I do a lot of narrative nonfiction.
• 8:40
  Joel: So for me, it'll be like I'm built, I'm telling this story, uh, but I'm in chapter 10 of this book I'm working on right now, right?
• 8:48
  Joel: And I need to, but as I'm telling it, there's this little voice in my head saying, didn't I already tell this story?
• 8:55
  Joel: Or didn't I already make this point?
• 8:58
  Joel: Right.
• 8:58
  Joel: And so if what I what I what I would usually do is I would have to go back through all my Google Docs and go to the chapter where I think maybe I told that story, and I'll have to look at three or four different places to find the place that I made that I told that story the first time to make sure that I'm not saying it in a redundant way.
• 9:16
  Joel: I'm doing it in a way that, you know, either is not redundant at all or is, you know, strategically redundant, right?
• 9:22
  Joel: But in the meantime, I I could easily get an email, get a phone call, uh, have to go pick my son up at school, decide that I want to go have lunch, and then lose the truck lose the plot.
• 9:34
  Joel: Yeah.
• 9:34
  Joel: So what you're saying is that one of the big functions of plot drive is that that could all be dealt with instantaneously for me through the tools available to me.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: You just you talk to co-writer about it, or you build yourself a tool that's like check this or whatever.
• 9:50
  Joel: So I could say, I could even say to co-writer, hey, co-writer, I'm telling this story here, but I'm worried I already told it in another place.
• 9:58
  Joel: Can you help me do that?
• 10:01
  Joel: And that that's an example of natural me using natural language that it can understand.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And like we've we've developed it in a way where it given we've given it the tools so it can understand.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Joel, Joel wants me to check his work to find inconsistency.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let me think about what it what he means by that, and let me go look at the folders and documents he's toggled on.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because let me help him out.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and I think like, you know, like in that regard, I think like one of our like core beliefs is like community, and but it's community in a different way than I think like it's it's community through through plot drive itself, and that like I think fundamentally I don't believe that writers were meant to write alone, even though writers are it's coming from our minds.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So in a way we are alone, but I think like for plot drive, the way I view it is like we we are carrying the weight with you.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so when you're stuck in this regard talking to co-writer, like or just the interface itself, its abilities, and honestly, like it would not exist without the power of these models.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're so they're so damn smart and intelligent, like to be able to do that.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I do believe that like by having this engine under as the as the software to carry the weight, like it really like lifts a lot of that anxiety away because it doesn't sit with you.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's voices in our head, right?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's right, that's what it is.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And like the I think the thing that became like that I saw through like listening to all these author interviews around KraftCon about blocks is that like like it's not about talent, it's not about like creative ideas.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like we all have innate talent and creative ideas.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're all driven to tell stories that only we can tell.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is much more about pushing past the blocks of like the doubt, the anxiety, the voices in our head, and how they manifest.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so hard sometimes because life like puts a cloud over everything.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's just uh everybody's dealing with pain and and problems and and they manifest in so many different ways.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the thing, the real gift of AI to writers, I think writers and editors, anyone who loves storytelling, is like slowly waking up to this the more they start to both experiment on their own and think about this and get more experience with it.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's that like it helps manage this impossible state.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like just take a book, like there's like 50,000 different things you need to keep track of in a book, and like it's it's a massive undertaking.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and our minds, like it it is an ordeal to like train your mind to actually build the engine that can sustain that.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then for a career to do that again and again, you're like everyone's gonna burn out.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like one 100% of people will burn out at a certain point.
• 13:16
  Joel: Uh you know, it's it's fascinating to me because like I'm a philosophical guy, so and you're you're getting a little philosophical here, so I'm taking the bait.
• 13:26
  Joel: So the like to me, when you think about AI or any technology, right?
• 13:31
  Joel: You know, I'm for instance, I'm reading this book by Paul Kingsnorth called Against the Machine, right?
• 13:36
  Joel: He's he's a bit of a Leadite for me, but still he has the interesting philosophical take.
• 13:40
  Joel: I feel like I read a Paul Kings Kingsnorth book, actually.
• 13:44
  Joel: Like Yeah, no, he's he's he's become very popular right now, I think, because of the rise of AI.
• 13:49
  Joel: And any any new technology, right, there's this thing, there's this fear in the human spirit that it's gonna somehow, the technology will somehow replace something that's human.
• 14:00
  Joel: That's deeply and uniquely human.
• 14:02
  Joel: And I think writers, especially, I I think especially anybody who's in a creative pursuit, these stories, like that you so beautifully said, that only we can tell, they feel so authentic and deeply human to us.
• 14:13
  Joel: And so there's this fear that somehow AI will take away that thing or any new technology.
• 14:19
  Joel: I mean, people said this about the typewriter.
• 14:21
  Joel: They were like, the typewriter is gonna ruin writing because we it's better to write things in hand because you're more connected to the paper and the tactile.
• 14:29
  Joel: You know, everybody said this about every technology that came along.
• 14:32
  Joel: So there's this like fear that you will be replaced, or the fear that something deeply human will be lost.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And well, as they say in June, fear is the mind mind killer.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is the great lie that that that so much of the creative community is trapped in right now.
• 14:49
  Joel: Yeah.
• 14:50
  Joel: Yeah, and what I think is interesting is that I think there's j any miss any misunderstanding has truth to it, right?
• 14:56
  Joel: So there are examples of people who are using AI to just try and replace creativity.
• 15:02
  Joel: Now, I think anybody who's tried in earnest to really use AI to generate real writing has found that it doesn't really do that good of a job.
• 15:13
  Joel: And like you can't I don't know.
• 15:17
  Joel: It's it's not good.
• 15:18
  Joel: And so what I so uh so the framing that you're giving to me is more interesting, right?
• 15:22
  Joel: It's a it's a technology that can actually help us be more human, that can help us, that can be, we can be better at the things that we are that we're already good at, just like all, you know, just like the Gutenberg, the the the printing press and the typewriter and the and the microprocessor and the internet, there's there's been these pieces of that technology that have helped us to be more creative and more expressive and reach more people.
• 15:47
  Joel: And uh it just it's all about how you you see it.
• 15:51
  Joel: And I so I I love this, I love the way that you think about Plot Driver, at least the way you speak about it, as being a an environment that assists you, not replaces you.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, we we are we are the stories that we tell ourselves, right?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a really loud story being being tell, told by a lot of people uh from top to bottom, uh across the creative industry.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is, you know, AI is bad, it's unethical, it's gonna automate us out of existence, resist, resist, resist.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's one way of viewing things.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And like you said, there is there is truth in that.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like the way these models were trained is like a grievous wound on the creative, like it's traumatic wound on the creative community, right?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's not introduced in a way that if you could write the story of how this helpful technology would come to be, like you would get the buy-in from our most creative people and like find a way to bring it to society rather than just like rip all the books like that they could find and sort of use them to train the brain.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and that's kind of I think the like inciting incident of the AI story was was there for creative community.
• 17:05
  Joel: But I think I see what you did there, Jay.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you talk to the actual humans who love like their destinies to be a storyteller, they love writing, they love art, they love creativity, they resist capitalism because they found something more meaningful in the pursuits that they're doing, although they have to operate in the capitalistic world, but you know, they really connect with what they read and the stories that they write.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you talk to them, you just can't deny the truth of what they feel and what they know.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And as more and more creators experience that, like that it's a quiet, quiet building story, but it's what we're seeing firsthand from working with you know now thousands of of authors and more and more every day, and you know, aligning, aligning with folks who participate in KraftCon, like Melissa Storm and Novel Publicity, uh Russell Nulty, like many, many more of these incredible writers who are like you know, serious authors who have reader bases that um appreciate them being able to like deliver the stories they love with the characters that they love, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, too.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like Russell uses LLMs to help him with both uh nonfiction articles, it helps him sustain his output.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: But also, I mean, he had this mega epic fantasy series called Quest Girls, 800,000 words, that like he literally never he thought he would never write another fantasy book again because he was so daunted and like long COVID hit him and like he just couldn't handle like all the threads that you would need to deliver.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that was like his, you know, his sort of bread and butter fiction was like these big kind of fantasy worlds, and and because of plot drive like and an AI and Chat GPT Claude, it helped him like actually create create this series that would not have existed without it.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And like so many different stories of that.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I I mean I think like for plot drive, I think like in terms of like how I think about it and how like I just how I just think about all this in general, I feel like like that is summing up.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like writers are meant to create and we protect that calling, like baseline.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like what I said about like carrying the weight, like I think that drives how we think about development.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because we talk to so many writers using it, but I think about like what is where's the friction?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what is like making you like rage click or like throw your computer at the wall or whatever?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do we do that?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think also this is just something that like I believe like writing, and then this is true for myself, but I see it in everybody.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, writing is like spiritual and developmental.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think like we help writers grow into the fullest version of their voice.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like that is what we're about.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, not about automation, but about like what is what it what do you want to say and how can you say it the best possible way.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And what I've learned from a lifetime of writing since like the Atari writer is just like my voice is becoming clearer and clearer the older I get.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lifelong pursuit uh of an ideal, which is like I want to tell the stories that only I can tell in the best version of my voice based on like my human experience with like the people that I've encountered and what has resonated with me, and transmute that into something, at least what for me, at least one person might like laugh at, they might feel something about, like they might be like, that's a good idea.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think for us in terms of the service, like we serve writers by eliminating friction.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like that is like the administrative burden that steals their joy.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was like the big insight of of this technology is there's all these paper cuts that you wouldn't in the previous era, we just accept.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like and we we live with, but now we can eliminate them and remove them.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I think we help writers put more stories into the world, and I really believe stories change lives.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I believe that's like the best thing we could possibly do.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think like that's that's what we're about.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the program is a simple writing studio, and there's a free trial, and you should try it.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you liked anything that we've talked about, try it out for free.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Email me, jplotribe.com, if you have questions.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Happy to make you like a quick video.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I I I think that's what we're about, and I think like um that's the honest truth, to put it in your words.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I read Fabious Gods, by the way, from Paul King.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Up north and it is a creature.
• 22:01
  Joel: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:02
  Joel: No, it's it's uh so I I think I I think that's a really good place to end our conversation, um which has been super fascinating.
• 22:10
  Joel: And I want to have, you know, I'm gonna tell you right now, I mean, I'm gonna go sign up for Plot Drive today, and I'm gonna I'm gonna workshop it on my next on my on the chapter I was just telling you about.
• 22:23
  Joel: Um and what I'd love to do is have a conversation, another conversation with you, um after a period of time that I've had a chance to sink my teeth into it, and maybe we can take things a little bit deeper.
• 22:36
  Joel: But I feel like I feel like you've given a really interesting overview of the role that AI can have to actually make us more human as writers, which I think is beautiful.
• 22:45
  Joel: Um, and I'm excited to, you know, I've been inspired to sink my teeth a little deeper into something that I had been a little hesitant around.
• 22:52
  Joel: So thank you for that.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're welcome and and look forward to hearing your opinion and your feedback.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you if you run into any friction, uh, you know, open door, shoot me an email.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 23:06
  Joel: Awesome.
• 23:07
  Joel: All right, well, thank you, Jay.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Joel.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's yeah, fun to fun to talk about this stuff.
• 23:12
  Joel: Yeah, for sure.
• 23:15
  Joel: Great.