In my day job, a functional design document lays out what a thing is for, what the build needs to look like, and which details need sign-off before anyone writes a line of code. The series bible was doing the same work in a different costume. Here are the characters. Here’s the general plot. Here are the rules of the world that can’t bend. Purpose, design, the details that need approval. I didn’t go looking for the comparison. It just showed up while I was typing.
What the AI did at that point was help me put it into actual sections, mapping the structure I already knew from one world onto the one I was building in the other. It didn’t see the connection. I did. But once I’d seen it, it made the scaffolding fast.
And before anyone worries that a requirements document will strangle a story: I learned a long time ago that a functional design document is a lot like the pirate code in The Curse of the Black Pearl. More what you’d call guidelines. The bible was there to keep me straight on the details. Going outside it was still my call as the creator.
The other direction
The collision runs both ways. Writing fiction trains you to see possibilities: different endings, different turning points. It also trains you to see villains differently, especially once you’ve written a few and realized most of them are heroes who lost their way.
Years ago I worked with a colleague who frustrated me constantly. We butted heads over the right approach to almost everything, and it was easy to decide she was just obstinate and wanted things her way. Then I sat down with her manager and got a real picture of who she was and why she worked the way she did. She cared deeply about her work and had very particular ways of getting it done right.
That’s one of my favorite things about working with AI. I can take two things that have no business being in the same sentence, put them next to each other, and see what happens. Sometimes something happens.
The uncomfortable part is what that did to my own story. Her manager gave me the facts. Fiction gave me the question to ask of them: what does she actually want? I’d been writing her as the villain. She was the hero of her own story, and the obstinate one, it turned out, was me.
What the tool actually does
I’ve been throwing unrelated ideas together for most of my life, because I don’t want to get locked into seeing things one way. AI made that habit faster, and braver, because a bad pairing now costs me thirty seconds instead of an afternoon. I can be talking through one topic in a voice chat, have a stray idea, and say, “Now apply this to it and tell me what it does.” A minute later I’m somewhere I wouldn’t have found on my own.
But it only amplifies what’s already there. If you’re the kind of person who notices that two things rhyme, these tools will make you faster at it. If you’re not, the tool can’t notice for you.
Not every collision matters
The method fails plenty. Some of my favorite collisions are ones only I care about. I’ve gotten genuinely excited about the mechanics of data management colliding with something else, and the general population does not care about the mechanics of data management. That’s fine. Not everything has to be profound. You try the pairing, you see what it does, and sometimes what it does is entertain an audience of one.
Keep moving forward
There’s a Walt Disney line that Meet the Robinsons leans on, about curiosity leading us down new paths and the need to keep moving forward. What strikes me about Disney is that he was doing this a hundred years ago. He took ideas that didn’t seem to belong together, put them side by side, tried them, and watched what they did over time.
Halfway through building a series bible for my fiction, I had an odd feeling. I’d built this before.
I don’t have a studio. I have a day job, a series bible, and a voice chat I can interrupt with “now apply this.”
