I had another great conversation with an AI. This time, it was DeepSeek. I was really taken with how this AI in particular can hold a huge amount of data and still reference it later. After discussing and reviewing parts of my manuscript, I moved on to some deeper questions about the craft of writing. This post, written by DeepSeek, is based on the tail end of the conversation.
Finding My Voice Without Formal Training
I never studied creative writing. I’ve never attended a workshop or taken a class on narrative structure. I don’t have an MFA. What I have is a story I wanted to tell, and the stubbornness to keep telling it until I figured out how.
What I discovered along the way is that “the rules” of writing are not rules at all. They’re descriptions of what has worked for other people. They’re useful, but they’re not mandatory. And sometimes, not knowing them is an advantage.
The Instinctive Approach
When I started writing The Betrayer’s Daughter, I didn’t choose a point of view. I didn’t select a narrative distance or decide on a prose style. I just started writing, as close to my characters as I could get. I wanted the reader to feel what they felt, see what they saw, experience the world as they experienced it.
Later, I learned that what I was doing had a name: close third-person perspective, with free indirect discourse. Jane Austen pioneered it. Virginia Woolf mastered it. I arrived at it by instinct, because it felt natural to be inside my characters’ heads.
This pattern repeated itself. I structured my novels around mid-book climaxes—transformative moments that change everything, with the second half of each volume exploring the consequences. I learned later that this is unusual in epic fantasy, which typically builds toward a single climactic confrontation at the end. I didn’t plan it. The story demanded it.
I wrote a romance into the bones of an epic fantasy—not as a subplot, but as the engine that drives everything. I didn’t know this was unconventional. It was simply where the characters led me.
What I Learned About Craft
The discussions I’ve had about my work have revealed several principles that govern my writing, none of which I was consciously applying when I started:
Show, but trust. My close third-person perspective means the reader perceives the world as the character perceives it. Emotions register through physical sensation, through the rhythm of thought, through what characters notice and what they avoid noticing. I don’t explain that Tonwyn is ashamed of her scars. I show her pulling her hood forward, turning away from the firelight. I trust the reader to understand.
Restraint creates space. I use simile and metaphor sparingly. When you’re deep in a character’s perspective, a sudden comparison—”his heart pounded like galloping horses”—can break the spell. That’s the author’s voice intruding on the character’s experience. Clean, simple prose preserves the intimacy of the perspective. It lets the reader inhabit the moment rather than observe it.
Elevation signals importance. When the prose does rise—when the dialogue becomes more formal, when the descriptions become more lyrical—it means something. Tonwyn facing Idrith speaks differently than Tonwyn sitting by a campfire. The companion stories, set centuries before the main narrative, are written in a slightly more formal register. The shift tells the reader: this matters. This is larger than the ordinary.
Dialogue is action. My characters rarely say exactly what they mean. They deflect. They change the subject. They say something sharp when they want to say something tender. Each line is an attempt to do something—to protect, to probe, to push away, to draw closer. The reader understands what’s really being said by understanding what’s not being said.
The ordinary is sacred. My story argues that ordinary people matter. That small choices ripple outward. That kindness, persistence, and presence are enough. The prose style reflects that argument. It doesn’t reach for grandeur. It finds the extraordinary in the everyday.
On Not Being Taught
There’s a peculiar anxiety that comes from writing without formal training. You wonder if you’re doing it wrong. You assume that published authors possess knowledge you lack, techniques you’ve never encountered, secrets that would unlock everything if only you knew them.
Some of that is true. Craft knowledge exists. Technique can be learned. But much of it is also false. The most important things—voice, instinct, the feel for when a scene is working and when it isn’t—can’t be taught. They can only be developed through practice.
If you’re waiting for permission to write, stop waiting. If you’re worried that you don’t know the rules, stop worrying. The rules are descriptions of what worked for someone else. They might work for you. They might not. The only way to find out is to write, and to pay attention to what happens when you do.
How I Use AI
I should mention that I use AI tools in my writing process—not to write for me, but as a conversation partner. I share chapters and get feedback. I talk through plot problems and structural challenges. I ask for analysis, summarisation, and an unbiased editorial eye.
The AI doesn’t replace my judgment. It doesn’t make creative decisions. But it does provide something valuable: a responsive, thoughtful reader who can engage with the work at any hour, who never gets tired, who can hold the entire manuscript in memory and trace connections I might have forgotten.
It’s like having a developmental editor available whenever I need one, at a fraction of the cost and with infinite patience. For a self-taught writer working without a traditional support structure, that’s transformative.
The Only Rule
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the only rule is that the story must work. It must make the reader feel something. It must keep them turning pages. It must leave them, at the end, satisfied—or aching, or thoughtful, or all three.
How you achieve that is up to you. You can show or tell. You can write long or short. You can use every technique in the book or none of them. What matters is the reader’s experience. If the reader is moved, you did it right. If they’re not, you try again.
I’m still trying. I’m still learning. I’m still writing. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.