Writing and AI with Cameron Sutter from Plottr

Do you use AI tools in your writing?

AI is the hot button topic of the modern creative industry. No matter your position, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat is out of the bag, and Pandora's box is open. So how do we, as authors, decide where we stand and what our personal positions will be?

This week, we're thrilled to have Cameron Sutter—founder of Plottr—on the show to talk about his software but also dive into the world of AI tools and use cases for authors. We debunk common AI misconceptions, clarify the difference between true AI and machine learning, and argue for the irreplaceable human touch in art.

Cameron Sutter is a YA sci-fi/fantasy author, software developer, and the inventor of Plottr – the popular visual planning software for books and stories of all kinds. He's also the writer behind Real Human Writers, a substack newsletter that strives to demystify AI and show writers how to use it for their benefit . . . and when not to use it at all.

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Cameron Sutter
Website: http://cameronsutter.com/
Plottr: http://plottr.com/
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:37

Hi everyone and welcome to the AuthorWheel podcast. I'm Greta Boris, USA Today Bestselling Mystery Thriller. Author.

Speaker 2: 0:44

And I'm Megan Haskell, award-winning fantasy adventure author. Together we are the AuthorWheel. This week, we're excited to be talking with Cameron Sutter, the creator of Plotter, about the benefits of the software as well as the challenges and changes that are happening in the industry as a result of AI. It's a really great interview. So we talk about some really interesting. We go off on some interesting tangents in this one all about that AI and how it's affecting, how it can be used as a good tool. What are some of the debate around it. So it's a great interview. So stay tuned for that. But before we jump in, greta, how's your week going?

Speaker 1: 1:22

Well, much better than last week. That's good. I am on the mend, I know. I know I finally got silly old antibiotics and now I'm feeling a lot better. Also, amazon offered me a Kindle deal on Book 1 in the Mortician series. So for those that don't know what these are, it's when the Amazon gods smile on you and they offer to discount your book for a period of time but push it for you on their Kindle deals pages. So it's kind of like putting the strong algorithm of Amazon behind you. So last time they did it for me for just one day, but that one day was like a book launch. It was like my sales tripled on that one day, and then there was this nice long tail. So this time I have a whole month. So that's going to be great.

Speaker 1: 2:16

Hopefully. It started on March 1, and already I'm seeing a big uptick in sales, Not as big as the one day thing, and I heard that that is common, but you see an uptick all for the entire month and so it definitely adds up and it probably adds up to more income ultimately than the one day did.

Speaker 2: 2:39

Well, I would have to imagine too that it would benefit the algorithm in that you don't have a spike, so it would be more of a slow, steady increase, or leveling up, if you will, when it comes to your sales. That would then translate, hopefully, into a longer tail over time as well.

Speaker 1: 2:56

So that's great, that's awesome, and I did actually have a book launch as well on February 29. So that's nice. And so, if anyone is interested in dipping their toe in the Mourntition series, book one is only about 99 for the month of March, so you can go check it out on Amazon. And other than that, I have just started tearing into what will be book three of the Almost True Crime series, but just started. So what have you been up to?

Speaker 2: 3:31

Well, honestly, I'm just chugging along on all cylinders. So progress is being made on everything, but nothing really super exciting to share at the moment. I've got new art for the hardcover project for Last Descendant. That is taking more time than I expected just because there are so many detailed pieces that I didn't realize I needed to figure out and put together, but it's coming along. And I'm making progress on Aether Burned book three, so that draft is coming along and we're finishing up the courses. So it's all good.

Speaker 2: 4:06

However, I do have one piece of really exciting news that I want to share, and some of this is a kind of standard.

Speaker 2: 4:14

I knew I was going to be selling books at WonderCon, so that's happening March 29 through 31 at the Anaheim Convention Center and, for those that don't know, it's basically like a mini San Diego Comic Con and it's run in fact by the same people, same company, but it's just their spring show in Anaheim rather than the big one in San Diego. So I've done that for a few years sold books. That's great. But the exciting piece of this is that I was recently invited to be on one of the panels at the show, which is something I've always wanted to do but never figured out how quite to get in on that. So in and of itself that's going to be awesome. But even better, I just found out I'm going to be sharing the stage with Hugh Howie of Wolf fame, and I'm so excited I can't even begin to tell you Like. This is just over the top. So I'm going to have to work to not be too much of a fan girl, but I'm really excited about it.

Speaker 1: 5:19

Don't trip over your tongue. Yeah, yeah, talking to him.

Speaker 2: 5:23

Yeah. So if you're in the area and interested in tending, the panel discussion is currently scheduled for Saturday, march 30, at 11.30 AM, again at the Anaheim Convention Center, wondercon. You do have to buy tickets to WonderCon, the show itself, to get in, and of course that time and everything is according to the panel moderator. But the full schedule hasn't actually been posted yet, so it could still be subject to change. So just full disclosure. There is still some back and forth that's happening at this point. That being said, you can find out more about WonderCon, get tickets, get updates on the schedule, all of those things on the WonderCon website, which I will put the link in the show notes. So I think that's it for now.

Speaker 2: 6:10

On to the show. Today we are really excited to have Cameron Sutter on the show. Cameron is a YA science fiction and fantasy author, software developer and the inventor of Plotter, which is the popular visual planning software for books and stories of all kinds. He's escaped death by explosion, rock slide, disease and car accident. He lives near Oklahoma City with his wife, six kids, several furry friends and 97 pet turtles. That's a lot of turtles.

Speaker 1: 6:44

That sounds like a turtle's farm. Is this like a side hustle for you? Like turtle farming?

Speaker 3: 6:52

So actually it's pets in quote, unquote air quotes. There We've got this pond out back and we watch the turtles and when they come out to Sun Bay we count them and I've counted up to 97 at one point. But we don't do anything for them, we just watch them, you just watch them.

Speaker 2: 7:10

I see, I see, all right.

Speaker 3: 7:12

It's an interesting story to tell.

Speaker 2: 7:16

No, I was going to say 97 turtles. It must be a pretty big pond in the back.

Speaker 3: 7:20

It's not that big, surprisingly. It's really. We can't believe it. I don't know. It's trying to compare it to something. It's like the size of a tractor, maybe like a big tractor, so I'm really surprised that there's that many turtles in there. We went to the city once that they do turtle races and that was pretty fun. We thought about maybe doing that at our house, catching a bunch of them and hosting turtle races. So we'll have to see.

Speaker 2: 7:46

Oh that's funny. Oh, that's funny, that'd be fun, all right. Well, welcome to the show, cameron. We're very excited to have you. Yeah, I'm glad to be here, thank you.

Speaker 1: 7:55

I'm sure you're really glad to be here, because it sounds like if you weren't here it was because you were dead. We have explosions, rocks, slides, diseases and car accidents too. It's like I'm lucky to be here, You're a lucky to be a live kind of guy. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 8:10

Yeah, my friend and I used to joke about it and it just kept happening things like that. When I was 16, for example, I was washing dishes one day in a restaurant my day job well, my kid job and unbeknownst to me, they had forgotten to do something when they installed a new boiler. Oh, no.

Speaker 3: 8:30

And so I'm just washing dishes there and all of a sudden kaboom, and the ceiling starts falling down around me and insulation is flying everywhere and things like that, and luckily I didn't get touched at all. But the ceiling there was no ceiling around me anymore, it was down all around me. I had been somewhat in front of those big walk-in coolers and such, and so I was protected. Nobody really got hurt that bad. But yeah, I could not believe it. It was crazy. I had PTSD for at least a year afterwards. Any loud sound or if somebody flipped off the lights really quick, I would duck and cover. It was funny, oh, yeah, Wow.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Scary. So have any of these things made their way into your fiction?

Speaker 3: 9:16

You know I should do a better job at that. I really haven't. Yeah, I wish I could say to do I did, but no, unfortunately I need to do that yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:26

I mean next book Cameron. Next book Sounds good.

Speaker 2: 9:29

Yeah, if you write sci-fi fantasy, there's plenty of action in those, so you incorporate an explosion. You've actually experienced the visceral peer. I mean that should definitely make it into a story that should.

Speaker 3: 9:43

What was I thinking that could be my selling point yeah, there you go, there you go, you lived it, you lived it.

Speaker 2: 9:48

Well, why don't you tell us a little bit more about your writing and publishing journey and how you got here?

Speaker 3: 9:54

Sure, yeah. So I've been writing on and off my whole life. When I was in first grade, I like to tell that I was writing my first story and I was in English class. Right in the way, instead of listening to the teacher, and she comes over and slaps my hands with the old ruler and I always thought that was funny, because here I am trying to write a story in English class and I get in trouble for it.

Speaker 3: 10:18

But it's understandable. I guess from the teacher's perspective I should have been paying attention, but I think that was funny. So then in seventh and eighth grade, when everybody was in homeroom talking to their friends and being cool, I was in my little corner of the room writing and I wrote my first novel or at least I called it a novel back then. It was probably just like a short novella, but that's what really got me into it more and I felt so proud of it and I thought I was going to sell it. And I can't even find copies of it anymore. I know I had it on a disk somewhere, one of those old floppy disks, and I just said I can't find it anywhere.

Speaker 3: 11:01

So then I took a few years off and in 2010, I published my first book and then, a few years after that, I finally finished college and my last semester I took a class by Brandon Sanderson oh, wow, yeah cool and his creative writing class there at BYU and that got me really excited about writing again. So I started. I wrote a few novels then and during one of those I started Plotter, which we'll talk about, and because of Plotter I haven't written as much, but I'm fighting the good fight and trying to continue writing. So that's where I am these days.

Speaker 1: 11:39

So what was it like sitting under the amazing Brandon Sanderson?

Speaker 3: 11:47

Oh it was awesome. So you had to apply. So just about anybody could get into his course at the time. But you had to apply to be in this inner group kind of where he would actually read your stuff and critique it. But I didn't get in, so I just sat and listened to his course and the homework was to write a 50,000 word story by the end, and so it kind of forced us to write and it was just. It was so great to learn how he does things and how he thinks about writing and he would bring in some other writers to teach about marketing or short stories or humor and things like that. It was just the greatest course ever.

Speaker 2: 12:29

OK, that's amazing. That's, I don't actually know any. I know he teaches, but I don't know anybody else who's actually taking his classes. So that's, that's very cool, that's very cool.

Speaker 3: 12:39

Yeah, yeah, I always, I want to, always want to approach him and be like hey, have you seen Plotter? I took your course. You know, I should probably start with the other one first.

Speaker 1: 12:49

And how his teaching inspired you to create this amazing software for help so many others. Yeah, give him the credit and maybe he'll take a look at it.

Speaker 3: 13:01

There we go. That's a good idea, good strategy. I could have thought of that, yeah that is very cool.

Speaker 2: 13:08

So one of the questions that we always ask our guests is what was the roadblock that you faced in your own writing life and how did you ultimately overcome that? So we'll get into the plotter stuff a little bit later. I think that's going to be very exciting to talk about. But, but specifically within your writing, like what was the thing that you just had to had to somehow hurdle?

Speaker 3: 13:33

Yeah, I would say that I'm still hurtling it, but the hurdle changes, I guess. Yeah, but at first it was just doing something that was really important to me and that was creative and putting out in the world, even when I was afraid to even show my wife. You know, I was embarrassed about it to a certain extent, you know, just like I don't think this is going to be very good. And I got rejection letters from I was trying so back in 2010,. It wasn't that big of a thing to self publish yet, and so that was when I published my first one. So I was sending out query letters and getting rejected and that was.

Speaker 3: 14:16

That was really hard. And just thinking like I'm doing, I put in my what I felt like was my heart and soul into this thing and then just feeling like it wasn't going to be received very well. So that that was really hard and that might be one of the reasons that I didn't keep writing, and the rejection letters might have been part of that. And then it was, I guess, finding time in a busy life to do something creative and hard, and that takes months and months and you don't see a lot of fruits from. So that was. That was probably the next phase of life of trying to publish and then after that, when I started Flutter and writing the business and stuff like even more so just like trying to squeeze time in and make time for that, and I tripped over that hurdle. So I was still working on that one.

Speaker 2: 15:11

Yeah yeah, the productivity is is definitely tricky for people who have especially demanding day jobs or but really all of us, because we all have, you know, lives and kids and events and things. We were just talking about the holidays and how you know, it's now nearing the end of January and as we're recording this and I'm still trying to get get my head above water and everything you know, so so that is definitely something that you know, I know I've struggled with as well, and so you know a lot of our, a lot of our listeners probably do as well. What have you done to with a demanding, you know, entrepreneurial job? How have you actually found the time, Like, have you structured your day differently? Or what have you done to get those words on the page?

Speaker 3: 16:02

Part of it is just committing to actually do this and allowing myself to do it, even though it's it may not be as fruitful as the things I have to do, but it's something that I feel is important for me personally and long term. And so, just allowing myself the time to do it and then committing to do it to myself. It would probably be better if I were to tell my wife or tell somebody you know and say like, okay, this is my goal, right, and I've got to, I've got to commit to this, you know, but I guess I haven't gotten there yet, but just so, I would say those two things and then just showing up, just showing up every day.

Speaker 1: 16:45

So, cameron, you are on a podcast and there's a lot of people listening. If you would like to go ahead and tell them your goal. You got a lot of accountability right here, so I'm just putting that out as an offer. Don't put you on the spot or anything, but that is an offer to sponsor that view the course of the program.

Speaker 3: 17:04

Okay, that's a big challenge there. Yeah, there you go. So I do have a question though.

Speaker 1: 17:11

Do you think that? Well, first I have a statement and then I have a question, and I would think you you mentioned the word fruitful a number of times, and I think sometimes we think of fruitful, as you know, money in the bank, and that certainly is one aspect of fruitfulness. But there's more aspects to fruitfulness than just income, and I would think that part of the reason that plotter is a good tool is because you do write and so you understand the issues that writers have better than if you were just a software developer creating this program and you didn't really write and so you didn't really know firsthand. So I'm just encouraging you because I am my family calls me like a serial encourager. I can't help myself, so I'm encouraging you. That is a very fruitful reason to keep writing, which leads into my question, which is did plotter come out of your writing challenges?

Speaker 3: 18:19

Yeah, so let me respond to your statement first, thank you, that is really helpful actually that you're right. That is an extremely valuable thing for my writing to help other writers. So, yeah, I appreciate that. That's really cool of you to say that You're welcome and to answer your question, yes, it did.

Speaker 3: 18:41

I made plotter because I didn't like my process. I was rewriting books over and over, my notes were all over the place and I could just see in my head this visualization of how the threads of a story should weave together, and I wanted that in a tool. And so I was looking, I was trying spreadsheets, I tried scriven and I tried a bunch of different ones, word documents. None of them really had the way to visualize it that I could see in my head, and so it really did come out of my problems and it's totally changed my life in that aspect and I can definitely tell that my writing has. They help each other. My writing helps plotter, and every time I write a book I'm like, oh, I need to do this and plotter, this would make this so much easier. And so, and then plotter helps my writing, and the next time, you know, constantly. And so it's just the cycle of helping each other, so yeah, Like the author wheel oh yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1: 19:42

Smooth. Yeah, that's really good.

Speaker 2: 19:48

Well, and I have to say so, my husband actually bought plotter for me for Christmas this year, so I have been. He bought it was early, so I've been using it since, like like really using it, Because I did a trial a while ago and I started it a little bit, but then I've really been using it since late November of this year or last year, rather 2023. And I have to say I do find it. I was so impressed by Troy's, his setup, the way he did it. We did a masterclass with him and it was just amazing.

Speaker 2: 20:25

And so I've been slowly but surely building out my little baby version of that and I find it so useful and so helpful. Just, it's like a wick, your very own wiki for your book or your series, and I just I've really found it very valuable in the way that you've tied everything together and visualized the timeline and you import. You have all the different story structure, models and everything that you can just pop in there and apply to your story and it's just. It's been a lot of fun to play with. So I'm not an expert by any means yet, but it's been a great tool in my toolbox as I continue to write my series and so forth. So thank you for taking the time to create the tool.

Speaker 3: 21:10

You're welcome.

Speaker 1: 21:11

Yeah, I was just gonna say what? Because we have listeners who might not have less. But when we did talk to Troy who, by the way, for guests who didn't hear that or listeners who didn't hear that episode, we could put the episode link in the show notes. But he works with Cameron at Plotter and we mostly focused on the story Bible or the series Bible aspect of Plotter. But there's a lot more to Plotter than that. So I was gonna say why don't you tell our listeners, like all the things that Plotter does?

Speaker 3: 21:47

Yeah, yeah, let me talk about that. So I really like how you said it, megan. Actually it's like a wiki for your story, because I thought series Bible was a well-known term in the writing industry. But I've been getting questions about that and some people think does it have something to do with the Bible or what does series Bible mean? So maybe we need to come up with a better term. But a wiki is a great way to describe it.

Speaker 3: 22:14

So it has all your notes and everything for your whole series in one place. So all your brainstorming, backstory, world building, even project management type notes and things like that, title ideas, things like that. So it can have all your character information all the places in your story. So that comprises your series Bible and that's one of the biggest thing that Plotter does for you. And then the other big thing it does is it helps you to visualize your story. So you can think of it like sticky notes on a wall or index cards or maybe a colorful, friendly, easy to use spreadsheet where you can drag and drop and move things around very easily. So you've got your chapters across the top and then down the side are your different plot lines or character arcs, and then there's a line for each one of those that goes across the screen and at the intersection of each one of those you can put a little card there, a scene card, and you can add all the details you want about that scene and you can just move these things around and color them differently and things like that.

Speaker 3: 23:22

So it makes a very colorful, fun and easy to see your story come to life and it's really changes the game. Because if you have to read 100,000 word manuscript when you're trying to decide on setups and payoffs and plot holes and make sure you're not missing things or missing character details, it's just it's really hard to keep all of that in your head. It's like almost impossible. But if you're able to see it visually in just this very colorful, easy to use, organized way, you can easily see oh, this setup doesn't have a good payoff, or this payoff that I thought was set up wasn't set up very well, or, you know, this character doesn't have a very strong arc, or the side character is just dead weight and doing nothing, or the main character actually isn't a main character. She's kind of pushed to the side. So you can see all these things very easily just with a glance instead of trying to read 100,000 words and reason about it.

Speaker 1: 24:18

Yeah, so I would think for, especially for visual people, visual learners and visual people, this would be extremely helpful and probably for everybody, but I think for visual people. It's funny. We just did an interview with a woman who is a book coach and she has the book what was that called? The book incubator is her company and we were talking about that, like how do you keep all this information in your mind? It's like these stories are so long and complex and there's so many characters and so many places and you know all of those things said and really, like you said, it's kind of impossible unless you have some kind of you know, your Ken Jennings or something like. Can you have some kind?

Speaker 1: 25:09

of like photographic mind or whatever you know. You're not gonna so Exactly, yeah, so that just sounds like a great tool. So these are the things Plotter does now. Do you have like more plans and schemes going on for the future?

Speaker 3: 25:26

We sure do. I've got so many ideas that I want to, so many ways to visualize other parts of telling a story that I haven't even gotten to that I can't wait till we get the chance to. So that's in the works, but we're also really built since the beginning on people's input. Troy Lambert actually, I met him at a conference oof back in 2018 maybe, and maybe the year before that. We would go to the same conference in Utah every year and that's where he learned about Plotter the first time and he was like because back then it didn't have a series Bible, and that was one of the first suggestions that he made that it should be a whole series Bible, not just for one book at a time, and that has been revolutionary for us and, I think, for a lot of people that are writing, to have all the series in one place instead of book by book, and we've always taken feedback like that from other people. I've always been really open to that. So we've got this huge, long list of things that we're working on and that are in the works for the future, of ideas that people have had, writers that have given us ideas of things that we should do One of those that's coming up really soon here.

Speaker 3: 26:44

It actually might be published by the time this is published is search and replace. So when you want to change that character's name or something, instead of typing in your that's good, yeah, instead of typing it a hundred times over and over to change it, you can just change it once and it'll change everywhere in your project. And those are like the name of a city or something like that. So that's gonna be really awesome and just to be able to say like, oh man, where was that one character that had that one thing? I can't find them. What was the name? You know, in a list of hundred characters or something, you're able just to search and be able to find that one character that you couldn't remember very well. So that's gonna be really helpful, yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:26

I'm excited about that. Like I said, I just started using it, so I only have the beginnings of my current series that I'm working on input into there. But I can see, especially as you're going through like writing the next book or the fifth book or the 10th book in a series and you have like a side character that you maybe mentioned once somewhere that had like some point, but you wanna bring that character back. It certainly would be nice to be able to find them specifically, which scene they were in which then you could go back specifically to the book and find that the full passage that you wrote about it or whatever, or you know I can see that being very, very useful, so I'm excited.

Speaker 3: 28:11

Yeah, you don't know how many times people have told me oh, I accidentally changed the eye color of this one side character and all my readers wrote me and I don't even remember this stuff. But they remember better than I do.

Speaker 2: 28:23

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 28:24

Or this one lady told me she kept changing the gender of the dogs in the series because she couldn't remember from book to book. So one book was a boy, then it was a girl dog.

Speaker 1: 28:35

Well, that's very, that's a very woke I don't see. Yeah, thank you, yeah, thank you. She should just tell anybody who complains at her. She should just say my dog is woke, so my dog is the side and it's gender Exactly.

Speaker 1: 28:53

Yeah, oh, that's funny. Yeah, we. I was just I just mentioned this on another interview that I just read a review for book three in my current series where apparently the person said they enjoyed the book, except for there was one scene where they called this woman Connie and her name was Susie. For the whole rest of the book I'm like, oh, gee, yes, so yeah, these things happen. I have to fix that.

Speaker 2: 29:19

Yeah, they do, they for sure do.

Speaker 1: 29:22

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 29:23

So what else is what is also you working on or excited about?

Speaker 3: 29:28

Yeah, so one of the biggest things that we're releasing in the near future, in a couple of months, is some AI features, and I know that's a very controversial topic right now. There's some people really gung-ho about it and there's some people that are very angry about it, very scared of it, I guess. But we're in a really good position to use AI and plotter for a few different reasons. One of those is that you don't actually write your story in plotter. You plan it out, you edit it, you organize it. It's a wiki but you don't do the writing in plotter. So if you're using AI to write your story or if you think that's the devil's work or whatever, luckily that's nothing to do with plotter. It's not in plotter. But there are some really cool ways to use AI in plotter. And first of all I should say so I have a sub-stack, a newsletter that I write about AI and writing.

Speaker 3: 30:32

I go into some of the technical details of how it works and try and demystify them for writers and make them very easy to use. For example, one of the metaphors that I use is the AI. It has like a 3D map of words inside of it. If you think of like GPS coordinates, it has the latitude and longitude, and to find the shortest distance between here and pizza or something, it'll take all the destinations and here's latitude, longitude and the shortest destination to get there.

Speaker 3: 31:09

So the AI is kind of doing that in the background where it has this GPS coordinates for words based on what they're close to. So like cat and dog are more similar than cat and axolotl, they're more often close together in things that are written, and so it creates a 3D map of words and it's able to find the closest destination to make something that's coherent for you. And so when most people hear that, they think, oh, that's what it's doing in the background. That's not as scary as what I thought it was. Most people think it is actual artificial intelligence, but it's really just hype. That term is really just hype. It's not artificial intelligence yet it's just basically guessing the next word based on probabilities.

Speaker 2: 31:59

Yeah, so interesting. Just kind of go off that a little bit more too. My husband is also a software engineer, and so we've had this conversation many times Because it is it's a nomenclature thing. The funny thing is I'm the words person and he's the tech person, and so I'm saying, like that word AI does not actually describe what this is, and so it's got everybody up in arms and all confused Because the words artificial intelligence means something different than what the actual program is or is doing. It's really machine learning, but people don't like to say machine learning because it doesn't sound cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 32:46

Yeah. So let me ask a question, because I've had these conversations and I know I think I know that what these people are saying to me is incorrect, but I don't know enough to, so I just shut up and don't say anything. But what I hear from people. The fear factor is that it's all this plagiarism going on, that these AI programs are absconding with our words and creating this database of all of these people's stories and all these words that then it can pull on to create a new story. But the new story is really just a conglomeration of plagiarized bits and pieces.

Speaker 2: 33:40

It's a Frankenstein.

Speaker 1: 33:42

A Frankenstein Exactly A plagiarized bits and pieces. And then the same thing in the art world. I have relatives who are artists and they are feeling that way too about the art world that it's taking artists, techniques and this and that, and then it's sort of plagiarizing them and creating. So is that accurate or inaccurate, or partially accurate?

Speaker 3: 34:06

Yeah, I would say like, maybe partially accurate.

Speaker 3: 34:10

So what it's really doing is it's not like taking a sentence of Moby Dick and another sentence of Anna Green Gables and like putting them next to each other or taking all these books and putting the sentences in some order that makes sense. It's not quite like that. It's like Megan said, it's using machine learning, which is a lot more complicated than we probably want to get into. But basically it's this way of feeding a computer information enough to recognize patterns and then to be able to, and then the other part of it is being able to spit out a pattern that matches what it's already seen, and so in a way it's learning from what it's read quote, unquote but it's not really recreating what it's seen.

Speaker 3: 35:05

So it's not very good at taking, I like to say, a long term and short term memory. So when you feed it things and you train it, that is its long term memory. But when you give it a prompt and you say, write me a story with this character and you give a bunch of information about the character or the background of the setting, whatever, that's the short term memory. So it's really bad at like going into its long term memory and picking out individual memories Like I couldn't really do that unless it's something very distinct, and so it really just recognizes the pattern of its long term memory and tries to recreate something like that that fits your prompt.

Speaker 1: 35:47

So what you're saying is that if you fed it Anne of Green Gables and you fed it Bobby Dick, it's not going to come up with a really optimistic whale and write a whole new story, right?

Speaker 2: 36:00

Right.

Speaker 1: 36:01

I can't do that. But if you said I want to write a story about a child who's living on a farm in Canada which sounds pretty plagiaristic right there, but with adopted family or something, it's not going to go oh, I recognize that that's Anne of Green Gables. Let's give them that story, which would be plagiarism. It would come up with something that met that criteria but was not Anne of Green Gables. Is that correct?

Speaker 3: 36:37

Yeah, yeah. And in some of the lawsuits we've seen recently that it actually has been able to plagiarize when you specifically ask it, like you have to do the right prompt in the right way to get it to come up with something that's almost exactly what it was fed. But if you're not trying to do that, it's not going to. But it does work in a very similar way to the way our brains work, in that when we read Moby Dick and Anne of Green Gables, we learn from them and then our writing, whether we like it or not, is influenced by those things and we kind of write in the same way as what we've read. And that's why they always say it's so important to read a lot as a writer, because what you read influences what you write. And so we're kind of plagiarizing in the same way that the large language models are plagiarizing.

Speaker 1: 37:30

Yeah, oh, that's interesting and that is a good way, and that's true. If you think about it, with artists who are classically trained, back in the Renaissance, what they would do is they would have them replicate the masters and just paint Leonardo da Vinci over and over and over again until they could paint just like Leonardo da Vinci, or then they would move on to something else, and it was their training. And the same with musicians. I mean, you know, if you're a classically trained musician, you start by learning Chopin etudes, or you're practicing Mozart or something like they don't. People don't expect you to sit down at the piano for the first time in your life and come up with your own phenomenal piece of music. You know, like you have to feed the beast, you have to get it too. So that is an interesting. So what exactly then, since you're saying that Plotter doesn't write? You don't write in Plotter. So what aspects of AI will Plotter be helping people with? Like, how would you use it in Plotter?

Speaker 3: 38:40

Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you brought me back to that. So being able to generate random ideas is something that these quote unquote AI, these LLMs, are really good at. There's some controversy around that and some of the models are getting less and less creative on purpose. But those things aside, that's one of the things that's really powerful for writers to be able to do is just give, like get a list of ideas on a very specific thing.

Speaker 3: 39:10

So in Plotter, we're building into it so you can say give me some ideas for a supporting character in this story. And Plotter already knows, because you put in there, what genre your story is, what the theme of the story is, what the I can't think of the other, the premise of your story, those kind of and it knows the other characters, it knows the plot of your story and so it's able to feed those things to the AI and give you some, in better context, character ideas. Let's say so that's one thing and it'll give you like five ideas and you can choose from the best one and add more details to the characters that you like. So that's kind of the approach that we're taking of like give me some ideas and you, as the user, can choose the best ones.

Speaker 1: 40:00

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 40:01

And the ones you like, and so same thing for like scene ideas If you're in the hero's journey and you don't know what the dark. I'm blanking on some of the parts of the.

Speaker 1: 40:13

Dark night of the soul.

Speaker 3: 40:15

There we go. Yeah, If you can't think of an idea for that, you can push a button and Plotter will give you five ideas for how to do this scene, and then you can choose from the ones you like the best.

Speaker 1: 40:25

Or even combine or something. Yeah, combine, yeah.

Speaker 2: 40:28

Yeah, I was gonna say not only choose but modify, or it's a jumping off point.

Speaker 3: 40:33

Right.

Speaker 2: 40:34

So it's a place for you to hopefully fight off or overcome. Writer's block really is what it comes down to. It gives you that prompt for you then to take and run with and use your own creative mind.

Speaker 3: 40:49

So it's not taking the creativity from you, but it's letting you see options and things that you could have. I mean, we've had random character name generators for years and things like that and they're not too random but this could be and you can do. But it's also very specific on this. So like character names from Britain in 1600 that are surfs or something like that very specific things.

Speaker 2: 41:13

Yeah, well, that's great. So you've mentioned scene ideas, character name ideas or character description ideas Like settings are there? Like what other elements of story in particular are you looking to prompt ideas?

Speaker 3: 41:33

So settings is definitely one of them, maybe like magic system or other cultural type things that fit in with your story. Give me some ideas for things that could be in my story as far as, like the world building aspect of it and then also like feeling, taking the whole hero's journey and give me an idea for each beat of the hero's journey, or give me a few ideas, for I want a romance subplot. Give me some ideas for the beat for the romance subplot between those two characters, things like that.

Speaker 1: 42:05

Yeah. So you know what this kind of remains me of a little bit. It too is like Jennifer Hilt's trophthysauruses. She's just she has been like her own little mind works like a computer. Jennifer, if you're listening, I'm not saying your mind is little, it's amazing, but like she, her mind kind of works like that computer and she's just sort of like gathering the most common tropes that you see in the various and asundry genres and giving them to you in book form as a prompt. Like that's essentially what it is.

Speaker 1: 42:41

It's like, yeah, okay, I'm writing a mystery thriller and I'm feeling like it's a dragging a little bit here. What, what trope could I throw in here to yank things up a little bit? Here's a whole list of common tropes. I mean, I'm assuming that's sort of what the AI is doing. It's like it's just doing it very quickly. Yeah, it's saying, because it knows you're writing a mystery thriller and it knows you want something to jazz things up and it goes. Okay, ticking time clock, here you go. You know, boom, here's an idea, you know. So that's it, it's interesting.

Speaker 3: 43:17

And I met her at 20 books actually last year and we were talking about that of how we could add those tropes into Plotter and use them. So there might be some things with that coming in the future too.

Speaker 2: 43:29

That'd be great, yeah. And theme I was just thinking too, as Greta was talking about tropes, like you could also do themes too, common themes for urban fantasy, for example. And then you know, given a female protagonist, given this setting, what are common themes Like that would be potentially helpful too, just to kind of help writers focus their thoughts. Yeah, that's really what it comes down to, which I think is kind of the great thing about Plotter is it really does help focus what you're trying to do. Like you know, we have our whole system, the Clarify, simplify, implement system. This kind of is partially Clarify, a partially Simplify, in that you're able to understand what you know, see the whole project, see the whole series. So Clarify what it is you're doing and then Simplify it down into. Well, this is the beat I need to write for this story today and kind of break it down into smaller pieces. Yeah, so I really like it for that reason and I'm just going to fangirl a little bit, yeah.

Speaker 1: 44:31

No, I think it's great too, and I will say here I think that people don't often if they haven't written a novel or they're just in their first novel, I think some of this sounds very not artistic, it sounds very formulaic and they get, but the honest truth is that all of writing stories is some form of a formula.

Speaker 3: 44:58

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 44:59

So, whether the formula you know, whether it's because you studied it yourself and now you have all of that in your brain, or you're constantly using resources like books, or whether you're using AI, it's still just you know.

Speaker 2: 45:14

So we'll probably get some emails about this one, but you know, I think it's an important conversation to have because I see the dangers of AI or machine learning, particularly as it gets better and better at producing longer format or more complete art, if you will, whether it's visual art or written word. I can see how there are some dangers there or could be some dangers, but also I can see how it can be used as a tool to increase your own productivity and doesn't take, necessarily doesn't have to take, anything away from the art. It doesn't have to take anything away from you as a creative professional. In fact, I would argue that without people behind the scenes still being creative, still writing, still producing high quality art in any form, the AI will ultimately fail because it won't be creative. It can't be creative. It can only regurgitate to some extent the ideas that it's already seen. So it requires human interaction.

Speaker 3: 46:22

Yeah, and in fact, if we only make AI generate content and that's what it's learning from it's just going to get worse and worse on more rabbit hole into what it's created. But yes, humans need to have this to keep exploring creativity.

Speaker 2: 46:40

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 46:41

Yeah, like multiplicity, that movie where he just makes clones himself and every clone gets down the road. Each clone gets more and more ridiculous and unintelligent.

Speaker 3: 46:55

That's exactly. Oh, I got to write an article about that. Yes, that's a great way to describe it. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1: 47:01

I love that movie. I've watched it several times just because it just cracks me up. The whole thinking thought process is so brilliant. On that, and I will say, as a musician that has also worked with a drum machine, versus a drummer, which is kind of like a drum machine, it's kind of like an AI drummer, right, yeah, they have not replaced drummers. I mean sometimes for short periods of time, but boy oh boy, you got to keep up with that drum machine. It is not a person, yeah.

Speaker 3: 47:34

It's good to hear.

Speaker 1: 47:37

Yeah, I don't think we need to be too afraid.

Speaker 2: 47:40

Yeah, oh, that's interesting. Oh, I could take that analogy further too. That's a good one, because then you get DJs who use drum machines and they incorporate other samples of other people's work and they put it together to create something. You could take that a whole different direction.

Speaker 1: 47:56

I am so glad that I'm giving you two ideas for your sub-stack articles, which I'm not going to write any sub-stack articles, so I feel like I'm contributing in summer's regard.

Speaker 2: 48:06

Oh, funny, yes, yeah.

Speaker 1: 48:11

Well, I know we went off a little bit, so is there any other lovely features or things that you'd like to tell our listeners about Plotter that we didn't touch on?

Speaker 3: 48:21

Well, one thing about AI really quick that I want to mention about Plotter is one of the reasons it's going to be great in Plotter is because you don't have to take the time to learn about prompting. You just have to click a button. Yeah, and for power users, they're going to be frustrated about that. For people that don't want to take the time to learn it, it's going to be so much easier. You don't have to worry about what model, what prompt, what to put in. Just click a button, which I think is going to be awesome for people.

Speaker 2: 48:49

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 48:51

So that's my little plug.

Speaker 2: 48:52

That's actually. Another thing we haven't really talked about, too, is that AI requires intelligent prompting, like it's not just give me this and have it spit out something perfect at the other side. It takes iteration, it takes practice. You have to know what kind of prompt to put in. That's why I can't use the art ones, because I don't want to learn how to prompt it and I am not good at it. It comes out with really weird, creepy stuff. But some of my artist friends, who are artists and are trained in that and then spent the time to learn the prompting, are able to produce beautiful stuff using AI generative tools and then they finish it themselves. But it takes that prompting first.

Speaker 2: 49:34

So that's actually something, too, that you're going to have power users, as you called them, that are really into the nitty gritty on what makes a good prompt and how do you get what you want out of it, but for the most of us, I think that's not going to be something we want to spend time on.

Speaker 1: 49:51

Yes, not me yes definitely yeah.

Speaker 3: 49:55

Yeah, you want to be creative, right? You don't have to learn this new skill. You've got enough skills to learn with marketing and book cover and blurbs and things like that.

Speaker 2: 50:04

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, that's wonderful. I'm very excited to see where you go with it. So anything else before we do our usual sign off let's see.

Speaker 3: 50:16

So the act structure is another big thing in Plotter. We don't talk about much, but you can see, you can split it up into the act chapter and scene if you want to, and so you're able to visualize in a couple of different ways, which is kind of cool. You can see the different what's in act one and then break it down into chapters and scenes. So that's really cool. A lot of people really love it, but we don't talk about it very much. So trying to think if there's anything else, but yeah, I think that's a pretty good run down of what Plotter can do for you. Amazing.

Speaker 1: 50:45

And there is a free trial period, correct?

Speaker 3: 50:49

Yes, yep, there's a trial period where you can try it out for free, and then we make it a little stupidly cheap. It's probably too cheap for what it should be, but you can get it for like 40 bucks a year or $99 for life, and that price is changing so by the time you get published and there's deals and things like that. But yeah, that's our general price range, so yeah, Wow, that is, you're right.

Speaker 1: 51:17

It is not an expensive product for, especially considering everything that it does Pretty amazing. So if you'd like to check out Plotter, we will have the link in the show notes. But why don't you tell everybody, cameron, where to go if they want to find out more about Plotter, and you yeah.

Speaker 3: 51:40

So on our website, plottercom and plotter is spelled without the E. We're trying to be trendy. So PLOTTRcom and you can get the free trial there. You can learn about it Also. Our YouTube channel, youtubecom slash plotter has tons of videos so you can learn about it. And then to find out about me or to read my AI newsletter, for example, you can go to realhumanwriterssubstackcom, or just CameronSuttercom will take you there.

Speaker 1: 52:13

Okay, and we will have those links in the show notes for everybody. So if you want to learn more about you yourself, the human writer, we suggest that you jump on over to theotherwheelcom and pick up our three course Seven Days Declarity. Uncover your author purpose, and that will lead you through the process of some self-evaluation, writing your author mission statement and turning that into a tagline. And, as I said, it's free. It's Seven Days of emails and then you'll just be brilliant at the end. So go on over and grab it.

Speaker 2: 52:56

Can you say so yourself? I do say so myself.

Speaker 1: 52:58

I'm just making these promises here. So, anyway, thanks for joining us today and until next time, keep your stories rolling.