The Process of Great Writing

Zach Kazanski · February 16, 2026

Every great writer has a process. Mostly composed of self editing. Famously said: “Write drunk, edit sober”. The writing is the pure expression from the mind, jumbled, unrefined, and incohrent. THe process of editing is much more difficult and great artists have multiple techniques they use as they go over each paragraph. Or at least that’s what I imagine.

Imagine a dinner party with five of the world’s greatest authors of all time. You have Hemingway, Camus, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare. At this dinner party you’re the host and you’re in charge of facilitating conversation and you ask questions such as: if you had a character in the middle of a battle scene that needed to express their outlook on existentialism as a philosophical framework, how would you do it? Or you ask: if you have a husband and a wife in a conversation about how to raise their children and you want to invoke anger at the patriarchy, what techniques of writing would you use? I guarantee that every author will have their own techniques that they use to evoke these emotions and convey the ideas. Someone will do it by omitting things. Others will do it by how the sentences are written themselves. Still others will use metaphor and other techniques like describing the scenery to impart the emotional state of the subjects, and a variety of other ways. The point is every author has spent years honing different techniques to convey the emotions and the feelings and the ideas and the perspective that they want.

The process of great writing, not including coming up with a great idea for a story which is the subject of a different post, but the process of great writing of great prose is a continuous loop and application of a wide variety of self editing techniques by these authors. No one can hold every technique that they know in their mind for every sentence that they write. They use the techniques they know to the best of their ability as they draft, but after, when they reread and revise, they’re looping through different questions in their head. For example, does this show and not tell? Is every word in the sentence serving a purpose? Is the tone of the narrator true to their internal sense of self? Is there continuity in this chapter from the previous? Did I use the motifs correctly? Did the things I avoid saying convey the right message? And on and on and on. Each of these questions are asked inside of the author’s head as they reread and reread what they’ve written.

This process is the same process that we’re applying to our AI tool. We create well defined skills that embody each of these various techniques. Some skills even reference when to use other skills. For example, on pacing: if the scene is full of action the structure of the sentences and how to convey that action is done in a different way than atmospheric and self reflective scenes. These are two separate skills that are governed by a single skill that decides when and where to use particular pacing structure. When we run our authoring and editing loops (the authoring loop), compelling the AI step-by-step through each skill that it should apply in each sentence, deciding which ones it needs and then using them to author and edit, because this is similar to the internal dialogue and process of an actual author.

Some of you may feel skeptical or even repulsed by the idea that the creative process can be boiled down into a set of repeatable rules. And I can’t say I don’t feel that way as well at times. It gets down to a fundamental question about human nature and creativity. But I don’t think we can just dismiss it as not being possible and I think we owe ourselves the time and the space to think about the creative aspects of what goes into building those rules and skills as well as the emotional and human element of the inputs that get pushed through the system. Similar to action painting where there’s lots of randomness and less control over the outcome than a traditional paintbrush, the artist still puts forth their own experience and their own taste into the techniques they use for dripping the paint, for smashing the bottles, for performing the action painting process.

Because of this, I think with enough work and experimentation and refinement of prompting, the idea of a prompt artist can be a real thing. You can get to the point where the output from their particular prompting work can’t be replicated and is easily recognizable because of their techniques. As far as I’m aware at this moment, I haven’t found any prompt art that exists in this way, but this whole project is an experiment in doing just that. Pushing the boundaries of what we call art and exploring a new medium of expression that’s available to humanity. Thanks for following along.

Zach