How Writers Should Use ChatGPT (and Where the Line Is)
When people picture writing with ChatGPT, they imagine typing a prompt, hitting enter, and watching a finished book appear. Anyone who’s tried it knows it doesn’t work that way. I’ve performed developmental edits on books where folks stitch together the limits of ChatGPT’s output. These manuscripts are a mess of ideas that don’t connect, references to concepts that sound like they’ve been addressed earlier in the book but don’t exist, conflicting themes, and a dozen other head scratchers that readers will hate.
When someone mentions writing and AI, too much of the conversation around AI swings to extremes: either it will replace human creativity or it’s useless. The truth is in between. For writers, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for background tasks. It won’t draft your next bestseller, but it can make the process smoother and more efficient.
ChatGPT shouldn’t be a replacement for writing good copy, but that doesn’t mean AI writing tools don’t have their uses. What AI can do is handle the grunt work that eats up a writer’s time and focus. Think of it as a very patient assistant who never complains about repetitive chores.
Here’s a few ways I use AI tools in ghostwriting.
Formatting and Structuring Data
Every writer runs into messy notes, jumbled lists, or disorganized research. ChatGPT can step in here. It will alphabetize a string of words, turn a rough list into clean bullet points, or even build a simple table that matches different data fields. It’s not glamorous, but it keeps your working files clear and your head free to focus on actual writing.
A publishing company called me to finish up a print layout for a non-fiction book after the original designer dropped out. The author had made some changes to the text that required additional citations. Without getting too nerdy about using static and dynamic endnotes or footnotes in InDesign, I had to add references and renumber the endnotes. That’s a time suck of epic proportions, but ChatGPT had my back. I fed the endnotes into the AI hopper and told it what I wanted. A moment later, I had all of the endnotes in sequential order with correctly formatted numbering.
If you’ve ever spent an afternoon cleaning up formatting instead of writing, you know how draining that can be. Handing those tasks to ChatGPT puts time back on the clock.
Organizing Research
Research-heavy writing can feel like drowning in information. Whether it’s pages of interview transcripts, historical documents, or technical sources, they all need to be organized before they can support your argument or narrative. ChatGPT can help by summarizing big chunks of material and sorting them into digestible notes.
I recently completed a Business to Business (B2B) Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing book for a client. The client wanted to use tons of SaaS platforms as examples, I’d never heard of. I fed each of the SaaS products into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize what that platform did, what the key selling points for the SaaS service were, and key URLs from the SaaS company’s website that provided that information. With twenty-plus sites I was unfamiliar with, doing that legwork would have taken me all day. I had all of that information at my fingertips with places to verify the summaries within a few minutes.
Was all of the information 100 percent correct? Hell, no, it wasn’t. Did that list give me enough information to know what SaaS platforms would be good examples for the marketing plan my client was presenting? Absolutely, it did. That one step alone made outline creation a breeze. Now, would I use that list and information when writing those sections? Other than the URLs I asked for to start my research into these SaaS platforms and the vague overview, not at all.
It’s also handy for citation support. You can ask it to format sources in Chicago style, MLA, or APA, then double-check its output against your own notes. AI tools are not a replacement for careful verification, but it speeds up the tedious parts of the job.
Administrative Efficiency
Writers wear more hats than they’d like. Beyond writing drafts, there’s billing, tracking hours, and keeping project records in order. These tasks don’t feel creative, but they’re essential if you want writing to be more than a hobby. With the right prompts, ChatGPT can generate reports, convert time logs, or clean up invoices into something that looks professional.
I downloaded a phone log last week for billable hours. I instructed ChatGPT to add up the call time for a specific phone number. Within minutes, I had a CSV file with the calls and hour count to bill the client.
Using AI tools as a writer isn’t about handing off the creative work. It’s about clearing out the clutter that keeps you from the creative work.
Where the Line Is
This is the part that matters most. ChatGPT is excellent at handling background tasks, but it isn’t a writer. It doesn’t know your voice, lived experience, or emotional weight you bring to the page. Those are things only you can provide.
If you try to let AI carry the writing, the result will feel hollow. Readers know when something lacks a human touch. The goal is to let the tool take care of the background noise so you can put your energy where it counts — on the story itself.
The Takeaway
ChatGPT doesn’t make writing easier by removing the challenge of making a good argument or penning the perfect line of dialogue. Writers who treat ChatGPT as a shortcut usually end up disappointed. Writers who treat it as an assistant often wonder how they managed without it. Formatting, research organization, and administrative chores are all fair game. The storytelling is still yours to do.
If you need help telling your story, I’d be happy to help. Drop me a line at:
