How to use AI to Write a Chapter or Two for the Best Result

Here’s something nobody tells you about writing your first chapter—it’s supposed to feel hard. I spent years thinking I just wasn’t cut out for fiction because I could never get past page three. The opening felt wrong, the pacing felt off, and by the time I rewrote the first paragraph for the sixth time, I’d completely lost the will to keep going. That’s why when you know how to use AI to write a chapter, your book-writing journey will change forever, and it was the same for me.

Then I started using AI to help me write chapters. Not to write them for me—that’s an important distinction we’ll get into—but to help me break through the paralysis and actually get words on the page. And honestly? It changed everything.

According to a 2024 survey by the Authors Guild, over 30% of working writers now use AI tools as part of their writing process. So if you’re curious about how to use AI to write a chapter—especially your first one—you’re in very good company. Let’s walk through it together, step by step.

Whether this is your very first attempt at fiction or you’ve got three abandoned chapter ones sitting in a folder somewhere, this guide will get you unstuck. Bookmark it—you’ll want to come back to it. Writing or using AI to write a chapter will help with the book writing process.

Why Your First Chapter Is So Hard (And How AI Helps)

Let me tell you something I wish someone had told me years ago: first chapter paralysis is real, and it happens to almost every writer. It’s not a talent problem. It’s a pressure problem. We put so much weight on that first chapter—it has to hook the reader, establish the world, introduce the character, and set the tone—and suddenly it feels like the most impossible thing in the world to write.

I remember sitting at my desk one afternoon with a story idea I genuinely loved. I had the character in my head, I had a rough sense of the plot, and I typed the first sentence about eleven different times before closing my laptop and going to make a sandwich. Sound familiar?

Here’s where AI changes the game. When you use AI to write a chapter—even just a rough draft of one—you eliminate the blank page entirely. You now have something to react to. And reacting is a thousand times easier than creating from nothing. That’s the core insight. AI doesn’t write your chapter for you. It gives you raw material to shape into something that sounds like you.

The key mental shift is this: stop thinking of AI as a ghostwriter and start thinking of it as a really fast first-draft machine. You’re still the author. You still make every creative decision that matters. AI just helps you get the clay on the table so you can start sculpting.

What You Need Before You Ask AI to Write a Chapter

Okay, here’s where a lot of people go wrong—and I definitely did this in the beginning. They open up ChatGPT or Claude, type “write me chapter one of my novel,” and then wonder why what comes back feels so generic and flat. The problem isn’t the AI. The problem is the prompt. Garbage in, garbage out—that rule applies here more than almost anywhere.

Before you ask AI to write a chapter, you need three things nailed down: your character, your setting, and your central conflict. That’s it. You don’t need the whole plot figured out. You don’t need a complete outline. You just need those three anchors.

Your character prep should answer: Who is this person? What do they want right now, in this scene? What are they afraid of? Even two or three sentences on each of those questions will dramatically improve what AI gives you back.

Your setting prep just needs to answer: Where are we, and what does it feel like? Time of day, weather, physical details, emotional atmosphere. A diner at 11pm feels completely different from a diner at 7am. Those details matter, and AI will use them.

Your conflict prep—and this is the one people skip most often—needs to answer: What is the tension in this chapter? What does your character want that they can’t quite have yet? Every good chapter has a push and pull. Give AI that friction, and the output will be so much better. Use AI to write that chapter, and you will see the difference.

I also recommend writing what I call a “scene brief” before you prompt. It’s just a few sentences—almost like a director’s note. Something like: “Opening scene. Sarah arrives at her childhood home for the first time in ten years. She’s hiding something from her sister. The emotional tone is tense but controlled. End the scene on an unresolved question.” That’s your scene brief. Hand that to AI and watch what happens.

How to Write Your First Chapter With AI Step-by-Step

Alright, here’s the actual process. This is the exact workflow I use now, and it works consistently well. Five steps, no shortcuts skipped.

Step 1: Write your scene brief. Before you touch the AI, write 3-5 sentences describing what happens in this chapter, who’s in it, where it takes place, and what the emotional tone should be. This is your north star for the whole process.

Step 2: Write your opening prompt. Take your scene brief and turn it into a detailed AI prompt. The more specific, the better. Include character details, setting details, the conflict, the POV (first person or third person), and the tone. End your prompt with an instruction like, “Write this as the opening chapter of a literary fiction novel. Aim for 600-800 words. End the chapter on an unresolved note that creates curiosity for chapter two.”

Step 3: Review and react to the output. Read through what AI gives you without editing yet. Just read it like a reader would. Note what works, what doesn’t, what feels true to your character, and what feels off. Highlight the lines you genuinely like—there are usually a few good ones in every output.

Step 4: Inject your voice. Now go through paragraph by paragraph. Keep the sections that feel right. Rewrite the parts that feel generic or flat. Add your character’s specific thoughts, the sensory details that only you would think of, and the rhythm that sounds like your writing. This is the most important step. This is where the chapter becomes yours.

Step 5: Refine your hook and your closing line. The first sentence and the last sentence of your chapter are the two most important lines in it. Go back and make sure your opening hook genuinely grabs attention—not with a cheap trick, but with genuine intrigue or emotion. And make sure your closing line creates a pull toward chapter two. Ask AI to give you five alternative options for each if you’re stuck, then pick the one that feels right and rewrite it in your own words.

That’s it. Five steps. The whole process usually takes me two to three hours for a solid first chapter draft, compared to the weeks I used to spend staring at a blinking cursor.

The Best AI Prompts for Writing a Chapter

Prompts are everything. I’ve experimented with hundreds of them at this point, and these are the formats that consistently produce the best results.

For an action-packed opening scene:
“Write the opening chapter of a [genre] novel. The scene begins in the middle of action—[describe the action]. The main character is [name], a [brief description]. Write in [first/third] person. Tone: urgent, fast-paced. 600 words. End with the character making a split-second decision.”

For a slow-burn character introduction:
“Write the opening chapter of a [genre] novel that introduces [character name] through their daily routine. Reveal their personality, inner conflict, and one secret through subtle details and internal thought rather than direct description. Tone: quiet, introspective. 700 words.”

For adjusting point of view:
If the output comes back in third person and you want first person, just add, “Rewrite this in first-person present tense. Keep all the same events and dialogue but change the perspective entirely.” AI handles POV shifts really well.

For adjusting tone:
If the output feels too formal or too casual, add: “Rewrite this with a [darker/lighter/more urgent/more lyrical] tone. Keep the plot beats the same but adjust the emotional register throughout.”

One thing I’ve learned: if the first output isn’t right, don’t scrap it and start over. Iterate. Ask AI to adjust one specific thing at a time. That gets you to a good draft much faster than starting from scratch every time.

Common Mistakes When Using AI to Write a Chapter

I’ve made all of these. Every single one. So learn from my pain.

The biggest mistake is accepting the first output without editing. I did this with my first AI-assisted chapter and published it—and looking back, it reads like a robot wrote it. Because I didn’t actually do the work of making it mine. The first output is always a starting point, never a finished product.

The second mistake is writing prompts that are too vague. “Write a chapter about a girl who discovers she has magic powers” will get you something serviceable but generic. “Write a chapter about a 17-year-old girl named Mara who accidentally causes a blackout in her school cafeteria and realizes, with horror, that she did it—and that two people saw her do it” will get you something specific, tense, and interesting. Details are everything.

The third mistake—and this one’s subtle—is letting AI choose your character’s voice. AI will default to a kind of neutral, pleasant narrative voice unless you push back against it. You have to tell it exactly how your character thinks and speaks. Give it sample sentences in your character’s voice. Tell it your character uses dry humour, or short clipped thoughts, or run-on sentences when they’re anxious. Otherwise every character will sound the same.

And the fourth mistake is expecting AI to handle emotional depth on its own. It can’t. Not really. AI can describe emotions, but it can’t feel them, which means the emotional resonance in your chapter has to come from you. That’s the part you can’t outsource. It’s also the part that makes your writing worth reading.

How to Make AI-Written Chapters Sound Like You

This is the section I wish existed when I started. Because nothing is more deflating than finishing a chapter and thinking, “This doesn’t sound like me at all.”

The fastest diagnostic tool is reading your chapter out loud. Seriously—out loud, not in your head. Your ear will catch things your eye misses. AI has patterns. It loves starting sentences with character names. It over-explains emotional states instead of showing them. It uses phrases like “she couldn’t help but feel” and “it was at this moment that” constantly. When you hear those out loud, they stick out immediately.

Once you’ve identified the flat sections, use what I call the “delete and rewrite” method. Don’t try to patch AI writing—delete the paragraph entirely and rewrite it from scratch in your own voice. It sounds drastic, but it’s actually faster than trying to salvage generic prose line by line.

Replace broad emotional statements with specific physical details. Instead of “he felt nervous,” write “he kept checking his phone even though no one had texted him. ” Instead of “the room felt tense,” write “nobody was looking at each other. ” Specific beats generic every time.

Add your character’s internal monologue in your own words—not AI’s. This is where your character’s unique perspective lives. Their observations, their dark humour, their self-doubt, their weird little fixations. That stuff can’t come from AI because AI doesn’t know your character the way you do. Write those sections yourself, drop them into the AI-generated framework, and suddenly the whole chapter lifts.

It takes practice. The first few chapters I wrote this way still had too much AI in them. But by chapter five or six, I had a workflow where the finished product genuinely sounded like me—and the AI just helped me get there faster.

Conclusion

Using AI to write a chapter isn’t about shortcuts. It’s about removing the obstacles between you and your story. The blank page, the paralysis, the endless rewriting of sentence one—AI takes all of that off the table and lets you focus on what actually matters: the creative decisions, the emotional truth, and the voice that only you can bring.

Follow the five steps. Write your scene brief first. Prompt with specifics. React, rewrite, and inject your voice at every turn. Avoid the mistakes. And keep going past chapter one—because that’s where things really start to get good.

Your story is in there. AI just helps you get it out. Now go write that chapter!