Words. They can teach you, and they can trick you. They can move you, and they can manipulate you.

If you're a writer, you are probably adept at doing all of the above. If not, you can learn these techniques. Few people are "born writers". The majority of us have to develop those skills. Listening to what people say, reading books, watching Netflix can all help with this. (Now you can pretend you're doing "deep research on writing craft" when you're binge-watching a new series on Netflix).

When you're reading a book, take note of how the author achieves their goal of taking you with them on the journey. See what works and what doesn't. Same with movies, newspapers, TV shows, advertisements, political speeches, arguments in the pub, everything. Are you being led step by step with multiple snippets of information like breadcrumbs so minor that you're less likely to question them? Are you feeling emotional (angry, sad, whatever), and why is  that - what strings are being pulled and what buttons are being pushed for you? What is the credibility of the information? Are you being manipulated? Are you being lulled for a while, only to be hit with something so unexpected that it catches you by surprise?

Question everything. Pull it all apart, analyse it all, figure out how it's working and what it's trying to do to the reader, the listener, the viewer. Work out the techniques and how they made you feel and react. You can apply that to whatever you write, whether it's fiction or a column in the local newspaper or your next Etsy listing.

It's not just what is said that's important. It's the subtext, the subtle suggestions underneath that aren't clearly expressed, the hints, the "reading between the lines" that imparts the sense that there's more to know, there's some unvoiced truth that's just beyond your grasp. That's working on your subconscious, even if your conscious mind doesn't get it yet. The subtle message is doing its work. Are you aware of it?

And I haven't mentioned what is being left out. What isn't being said in the political speech or TV ad, what information is the newspaper missing, what is the hidden link that will lead the TV show detective to the killer instead of to the obvious but wrong suspect. Maybe you don't know what's being left out. But you can consider whether something might be missing, whether you're getting all the information in the story, the news report, the TV ad, and so on.

Highly skilled orators can make people do almost anything. Entire empires were affected by the public speeches of the most famous Roman orators and statesmen. As a writer, words are your tool. They're powerful. Lead your readers the way you want them to go. Make them laugh. Make them cry. Make them want to turn the page.

Simple techniques can grab the reader or the listener. Here's one - notice what's common in the snippets below (all are famous). Plus, I did it above to demonstrate.
Friends, Romans, countrymen.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Faster, higher, stronger.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Snap, crackle, pop.

Don't forget context. It's everything. You can totally mislead people without context if you want to. In fiction, you might want to do that. Have someone think they're being cheated on because of a confusing phone call. Have the detective come to the wrong conclusion because they're missing a vital piece of the puzzle. Sometimes, you'll let the reader know, but the not the main character, so you can have the reader scream in their heads, "No! Don't leave! She's not cheating on you!" or "You're arresting the wrong guy!" and they have to read on to make sure it all works out in the end.

Without context, if I tell you that I once gave speed to a kid in the playground at primary school, what do you think? That I'm a drug dealer? No, I'm not. I'm a conscientious parent. The full context is that one day my young son forgot to take his prescribed ADHD medication (amphetamines), and I had to rush to school with the pills so he could have them.

Here's another example of how you can be easily influenced as a reader. Note these two brief book blurbs:
Book 1: A weather event causes a young girl and her dog to travel to a mysterious world inhabited by fantastical characters.
Book 2: A young girl goes on a journey, kills the first person she comes across, then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
Which book do you prefer? Doesn't matter. They're the same book, The Wizard of Oz. It's just a different angle on the same story.

You've surely heard the expression "The pen is mightier than the sword." In medieval times, you may have been able to influence a few people with your two-handed broadsword. Today, by typing mere words on your keyboard, you can influence the entire world. As a writer, your books can do that. Give it a try.

I came back to Sudowrite after a long break from writing, and I’m genuinely impressed by how much functionality the creators have added. This is the “real deal” as an AI writing assistant. It’s so practical and has many tools to help you write your novel, story, or non-fiction book.

It’s a credit-based system. You use your allotment of credits as you use the AI tools. The subscription plans include a generous number of credits per month. There’s a free trial available with enough credits to see how Sudowrite works.

While it is possible to write an entire novel using the AI, Sudowrite is best viewed as the “junior writing partner”, offering help when you need it, whether that be generating a new chapter draft, adding evocative description, editing your draft, keeping your worldbuilding and character notes in one place, and much more.

The user interface offers a clean writing workspace with formatting, find/replace, and a straightforward Projects setup. Projects can contain multiple Documents, and you can organize them with Folders. It’s simple, but it matters: writing gets messy fast, and Sudowrite is clearly built for people who juggle drafts, chapters, experiments, and side notes without wanting to wrestle their file system into submission.

When you generate AI output in Sudowrite, it appears as Cards in the right-hand history panel. That means you can review, compare, collapse/expand, and choose what to insert into your document, rather than having the entire thing jammed into your document as it is.

And when you do insert any generated AI text, it shows up in a different colour first, then changes to the normal colour once you edit it. That’s a small feature with big psychological value: it keeps you oriented. You’ll always know what you edited versus what the AI suggested.

The toolbar tools are exactly what you need when you’re stuck:

• Write: This is AI autocomplete. It reads the context and previous chapters and generates a continuation in the sidebar, and you can insert all or part of it. That’s incredibly useful when you know the story needs something… but your brain is currently made of toast.
• Guided Write: This is clever. You can nudge the story continuation with plain-English direction, or ask for suggestions and choose a suggestion. This creates a great starting point for quickly generating part of a draft, ready for editing.
• Rewrite: You can select a passage and get rephrases or custom rewrites (like switching POV or changing the tone or style of writing). You can also set it to generate multiple options at once.
• Describe: A genuinely helpful sensory-detail engine. Instead of bland “add description” advice, it generates visual/smell/sound/etc. prompts you can cherry-pick from. It will even offer metaphors if you want them.

Sudowrite includes two quick tools that work right inside the document:

• Quick Edit gives you inline edits with a strike-through original and an updated version beneath it, and you can accept/reject the suggestions instantly.
• Quick Chat is basically “chat with your manuscript,” including selected text. You can ask questions, get alternative openings, give feedback, iterate, and refine.

These tools don’t cost credits. That makes them perfect for brainstorming and iterative refinement without that nagging “every click costs me” feeling. If you want higher-quality results, you can toggle a “higher quality” mode that uses credits—but you’re in control.

Sudowrite lets you choose different Prose modes (and even pick specific underlying models in advanced settings, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and several more). It shows recent activity so you can see what each action cost in credits. That transparency is huge. It turns “AI usage” from a vague anxiety into a predictable budgeting decision. It also gives an estimate of how many credits are needed before you use a tool.

The three main writing modes in Sudowrite (other than the individual models) are Muse, Excellent, and Basic. Basic uses the least number of credits and generates usable text that may require a bit more editing. Excellent generates (you guessed it) very well-written text. Muse is Sudowrite’s own AI, specifically trained for writing fiction, and it creates well-structured and more descriptive prose. I wrote some chapters using Muse and Excellent and saw the writing style of each mode was quite different.

Sudowrite has a Plugin system where the community can build tools that write, analyse, or transform text. These let writers customise Sudowrite into something that fits their workflow, quirks included. It’s basically “build your own writing sidekicks”. There are a huge number to choose from that users have created and shared. Everything from removing dialogue tags to “show, not tell”, changing tone, changing POV, and so much more.

Story Bible is the feature that makes Sudowrite stand out from all competition. It’s a structured place to store your synopsis, characters, worldbuilding, and outline, all of which get referenced by the AI when it generates text, so it stays consistent and doesn’t hallucinate its way into imagining non-existent characters or places and wrecking continuity. It also supports a generative workflow: start from a rough idea, brain-dump what you already know about your planned story, then use it to generate a synopsis, characters, world elements, and a full outline.

As mentioned before, the AI can give you a draft structure, but you should edit it, rewrite it, and shape it afterwards. The AI tools will help you do that, but you’re in control of the final manuscript.

Once a Story Bible outline exists, the Draft tool can generate scenes for a chapter and then generate prose based on those scenes. There’s even a “pre-flight” step that estimates how many words and credits it will take, plus warnings if a scene is too thin.

And the integration is thoughtful. You can link a document to a specific outline chapter, so Draft knows which summary to use. You can also set chapter continuity, telling it which prior chapter a document continues from, so it has better context and avoids repeating events (or resurrecting dead characters like a soap opera).
That’s not just “AI writing.” That’s a workflow.

You can also import your existing documents if you’ve got something written in Word or Scrivener. There are two import paths:

• Importing inside a project brings in a document without AI processing (just getting the words into Sudowrite as they are).
• Importing from the homepage (Import your novel) can read a manuscript or notes and build a Story Bible automatically—synopsis, characters, outline, worldbuilding—up to about 130,000 words, and it doesn’t use credits.

That’s a strong onboarding bridge for anyone with an existing draft.

If you write in series, Sudowrite’s series folders share key Story Bible elements—characters, worldbuilding, and even access to outlines from other books. That’s exactly the kind of support series writers need, and it’s implemented in a way that feels conceptually clean: book-specific stuff stays book-specific, series information stays shared. You can switch off whatever isn’t relevant for the next book.

In summary, Sudowrite is a cool high-powered writing environment built around one core idea: help you keep moving without stealing the steering wheel. The tools are focused on the exact friction points writers actually face: momentum, revision, sensory richness, continuity, and organization. The Story Bible and Draft pipeline in particular is a powerhouse tool once they are dialled in, and there are many different paths on offer to accomplish the same goal (toolbar, selection menu, quick tools, plugins), so you can work with whatever you prefer for your process.
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In short: it doesn’t try to replace your writing. It tries to keep you writing. And honestly, that’s the best kind of AI magic.
 
You can try Sudowrite for free here.