This is the process I wish someone had handed me three years ago when I started using AI to write fiction. It is the same six-phase pipeline that produced the Shattered Crown trilogy — Awakening, Ascension, and Dominion — in roughly 90 working days. None of it is magic. All of it is reproducible.

Why 90 Days, And Why It Took Three Years To Get There

Before the 90 days that produced Shattered Crown, there were three years of failed first drafts, abandoned scenes, and chapters that read like AI wrote them (because AI did, and it showed). The 90-day timeline was not the result of a sudden breakthrough. It was the result of finally accepting that “use AI to write a novel” is not one task. It is six tasks, in a specific order, each with its own kind of work, its own kind of quality bar, and its own way of failing.

Skip a phase and the manuscript will tell you. Reorder them and it will tell you twice. The order below is not theory; it is what I arrived at after enough painful rewrites that the order itself became non-negotiable.

Phase 1: Premise Pressure Test (Days 1–3)

Before you generate a single chapter, the premise needs to survive three questions: What does my protagonist want? What is in the way? What does the reader feel when they finally collide? If you cannot answer all three in one sentence each, the manuscript will wander, and AI will help it wander faster.

For Shattered Crown, the answers were: a lost king wants his throne back; the regent who replaced him sees himself as the only person willing to do what the kingdom actually needs; the reader feels every blow because both men are right about something. That last clause — “both right about something” — is the load-bearing wall of the whole trilogy. Without it, Draven is a cartoon and Kael is a Mary Sue.

How AI helps in this phase: have it generate twenty premise variants, then argue against each. The arguments expose what is missing. Pick the one whose weaknesses you have the most interest in solving.

Phase 2: Worldbuilding As Constraint, Not Decoration (Days 4–10)

Most beginner worldbuilding mistakes the world for the story. A 200-page magic system bible will not write your novel. What you actually need is enough world to constrain the plot — rules that make certain choices impossible and others inevitable.

The Shattered Crown magic-rank system (F through SS, color-coded by element) was not built first because it sounded cool. It was built because the plot needed a way for Kael to be objectively weaker than every adult around him at the start of Book 1, and for the reader to feel his growth measurable in something more concrete than “he got stronger.” Ranks gave us that. They are also the reason readers can argue online about who would win in a fight between Draven (SS, void) and Lyanna (S, lightning). Constraint generates engagement.

How AI helps: give it your premise, ask for three competing magic-system frameworks (cost-based, lineage-based, knowledge-based), pick the one that creates the most plot tension, then let it stress-test the edges. (“What happens if a rank-F user defeats a rank-S user? Under what conditions could that happen without breaking the system?”)

Phase 3: Scene-Level Outline, Not Chapter-Level Outline (Days 11–20)

This is the phase most writers skip, and it is the phase that determines whether AI generation produces usable prose or polished mush. A chapter-level outline is too coarse: “Kael meets Mother Miriam” is not enough information for AI to write a scene that actually moves the story forward. A scene-level outline is granular: Kael enters the temple believing X. Miriam says one thing that contradicts X. He leaves believing Y. The reader leaves believing Z.

For each scene I wrote a four-line card: what changes for the protagonist, what the reader learns, what tension carries to the next scene, and what concrete sensory detail anchors the moment. About 300 scene cards for a 90,000-word novel. The cards took five days. Generating prose from them took ten.

Phase 4: Generate, Then Revise In Two Passes (Days 21–55)

Pass one: generate prose for each scene from its card. Pass two: rewrite it. Both passes are necessary.

Generated prose has predictable failure modes — over-explaining feelings, generic sensory description, dialogue that sounds like AI dialogue. (“‘I see,’ he said softly.” If you have ever read AI fiction, you have read that sentence hundreds of times.) The revision pass is where the prose becomes yours: tighter verbs, sharper subtext, the kind of specificity that comes from actually picturing the scene instead of describing the category of scene it belongs to.

I keep a banned-words list (currently 47 entries) that I run on every chapter. “Suddenly,” “barely contained,” “in disbelief” — all gone. Replacing them is half the rewrite work.

Phase 5: Continuity And Read-Through (Days 56–70)

Read the whole thing out loud. Yes, all of it. Yes, even the boring middle. The mouth catches what the eye skims: dialogue that sounds wrong, paragraphs that bog, scenes whose stakes evaporated somewhere in revision.

Then build a continuity matrix — character / chapter / what they know / where they are. This catches the “wait, when did Vex find out about the prophecy?” errors that ruin reader trust faster than any prose problem.

Phase 6: Cover, Copy, Publish (Days 71–90)

The book is the product. The cover is the ad. The blurb is the landing page. None of them survive being an afterthought. Budget at least three weeks for these — not because they take three weeks of work, but because the iterations between drafts need to sit overnight before you can see them clearly.

For Shattered Crown the cover went through eleven rounds. The blurb went through nine. The trilogy launched simultaneously across all three books because launching staggered is launching three times as much marketing work for less than three times the discoverability.

What This Process Is And Is Not

This process is a way to produce a publishable fantasy novel with AI assistance in roughly 90 days of disciplined work. It is not a way to skip the writing. The generation step is the smallest of the six phases. Most of the work is in the cards, the revisions, and the read-throughs — the parts that are still entirely human.

If you want the full toolkit — banned-words list, scene-card template, continuity matrix, cover-iteration framework — the AI Novelist system documents every step. See how it works here.

And if you want to see the system’s output, Shattered Crown: Awakening is the first book this process produced. Read it on Amazon or free with Kindle Unlimited.