AI as Thinking Partner:
Author Sovereignty in the Age of AI
A Three-Session Workshop for Novelists, Memoirists, and Screenwriters
Mondays, August 17, 24, and 31, 2026
8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern (5 to 7 p.m. Pacific)
Imagine an assistant who has read everything, never sleeps, and will cheerfully reorganize three years of notes at two in the morning. Now imagine that same assistant occasionally lying to you with total conviction—and declaring every word you write to be a masterpiece.
That is AI.
This course is about making good use of the first part without being fooled by the second, and plenty of other tricks and traps you’ll want to know about along the way.
In three practical sessions, you’ll learn how to use tools such as ChatGPT and Claude without surrendering the imagination, judgment, and voice that make your work your own.
The principle at the heart of the course is simple:
You originate. AI responds.
You bring the ideas, the characters, the pages, the problems, and the creative questions. AI may help you examine, organize, challenge, and expand what you’ve created. But it does not become the writer.
In this class, no technical expertise is required. Before the first session, you’ll receive a short setup guide so you can create a free ChatGPT or Claude account in advance.
Each session combines demonstrations, guided exercises, lively discussion, and practical tools you can begin using immediately.
Faculty
Brian Landwehr is a screenwriter, podcast host, and Story Summit faculty member whose career spans storytelling, film and video production, and technology. After a regional College Emmy win, he worked as a digital film production specialist, then founded and led a software company before returning his focus to screenwriting. He hosts Living to Write, a podcast in which accomplished authors and screenwriters discuss how writing careers are conceived, built, and sustained.
Brian is neither an AI evangelist nor an AI alarmist. Through Story Summit, he leads sessions for writers who range from deeply skeptical to highly curious, with an approach that emphasizes clarity, craft, and agency: understanding what these tools are and are not, and using them ethically and responsibly—without surrendering voice, taste, judgment, or artistry. His thinking about pattern, structure, and the creative process traces back to an early fascination with Gödel, Escher, Bach, and it still shapes how he talks about storytelling and technology today.
How the Course will Unfold
SESSION ONE: GETTING STARTED
Tools, Setup, and a New Way of Thinking
What’s the difference between ChatGPT and Claude? Do you need a paid account? Is there anything you shouldn’t share with an AI chatbot? And why does AI sometimes sound so certain when it’s spectacularly wrong?
We begin by taking the mystery—and some of the melodrama—out of the technology. You’ll learn what the leading tools offer, how prompting and conversations actually work, and how to make sensible decisions about privacy.
More important, you’ll see the difference between:
Write this for me.
versus
Help me think more clearly about this.
That distinction is the spine of the course.
We’ll also meet the two recurring characters in the AI drama: hallucination, which means AI invents something—a fact, a quotation, an entire book—and delivers it with magnificent confidence, and sycophancy, when it decides that you and your pages are brilliant, and every creative choice deserves an award.
Learn to recognize these two, and you are most of the way to using AI well.
You will then ask AI to interview you about one of your own projects. It asks the questions. You remain the storyteller.
We’ll explore: ChatGPT and Claude; free and paid access; privacy and data controls; prompts and conversations; thinking-partner versus ghostwriting requests; hallucination and sycophancy; asking better questions about your work.
SESSION TWO: AI AS READER AND ANALYST
Seeing What’s Actually on the Page
Every writer has asked a trusted reader some version of: “Tell me honestly. Does this work?”
AI will happily answer. Unfortunately, it may also tell you that the scene is “compelling,” the characters are “richly drawn,” and the themes are “deeply resonant.”
So we will learn to ask better questions.
You’ll use AI for coverage-style feedback, first-reader reactions, and focused analysis without asking it to rewrite your work. Where did the reader become confused? Where did the energy drop? Which character controls the scene? What promise does the opening make? What’s the strongest objection to this story choice?
We’ll examine structure, theme, character, pacing, and continuity while learning to catch generic praise, false certainty, and “memories” of lines you never wrote.
AI feedback is a hypothesis, not a verdict. You test it against the page, your own instincts, and human readers who can recognize irony.
We’ll explore: Manuscript and screenplay coverage; first-reader response; structure, theme, character, pacing, and continuity; sharper evaluative questions; escaping the flattery trap; challenging generic or invented feedback; combining AI observations with human judgment.
SESSION THREE: RESEARCH, REVISION, AND THE MARKETPLACE
Managing the Beautiful Mess
A writing project rarely remains neat for long. Research spreads across folders. Notes multiply. Reader comments contradict one another. Somewhere there is a document called “FINAL,” another called “FINAL FINAL,” and a third called “USE THIS ONE.”
This is where AI can be remarkably useful.
You’ll learn how to use it to build a research plan, identify gaps in your knowledge, organize sprawling notes, recognize patterns, and turn a heap of contradictory reader feedback into a practical revision plan—sorted into structural problems, line-level concerns, continuity issues, and matters of taste.
By now you know that AI invents things. Research is where that habit becomes dangerous. So our rule will be:
AI can help create the question list. It is never the answer key.
You’ll learn to verify information through reliable and primary sources, and to organize your material without letting AI add ideas that were never there.
We’ll close with a frank discussion of ethics and the marketplace: privacy, disclosure, copyright, and the professional world in which writers are now making these choices. For screenwriters, that means the Writers Guild of America. For book writers, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. For everyone, the guidance and reports of the U.S. Copyright Office. These are not legal footnotes. They define what publishers, guilds, contests, and marketplaces currently permit.
And because these rules will continue to evolve, this course will not pretend to hand you one permanent answer. Instead, you’ll learn where to look, how to check the current rules, and what questions to ask before submitting, selling, or publishing your work.
All of this reinforces the governing principle of the course: Author sovereignty means more than controlling how AI is used during the creative process. It also means understanding and protecting what happens to your work after you’ve created it.
We’ll explore: Research planning; fact-checking and primary sources; organizing notes; sorting reader feedback; building a revision plan; ethics, privacy, copyright, and disclosure; the WGA, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and the U.S. Copyright Office; checking current marketplace rules before you submit, sell, or publish.
What You'll Walk Away With
By the end of the course, you’ll know how to choose and use an AI tool with confidence; protect your privacy; generate useful reader-response and coverage-style feedback; examine structure and character; ask questions that produce something more useful than applause; plan research without trusting AI as a factual authority; organize a mountain of notes; turn conflicting feedback into a revision plan; recognize flattery and false certainty the moment they appear; and know which guilds, publishers, and government offices to watch as the rules evolve.
You’ll also leave with the beginnings of a personal AI writing practice: what to use it for, what to keep fully human, and where to draw the line.
The Writer Remains In Command
AI can be startlingly useful. It can also be strange, overconfident, literal-minded, insightful, maddening, and occasionally hilarious.
Used well, it can help you see more possibilities, test assumptions, organize complexity, and ask questions you had not yet considered.
But it does not know which choice is right for your story. The sovereignty over your story—every choice, every word—stays with you.
You originate. AI responds. You question. You choose. You write.
Today's Price: Only $187 for 6 Hours of Instruction
Story Summit Members: This Class Is Included at No Additional Cost
Story Summit Membership subscribers receive this class at no additional cost. Just register and the discount will be applied automatically. Please make sure you're logged in to receive the discount. Not a subscriber yet? Join here.
Please note: Our classes are designed specifically for live participation, so your attendance is important. If you need to miss a class for any reason, you’ll receive a passcode-protected link to watch the recordings after the course is over.
