How I Wrote a Full Novel with AI (The Right Way)

About this video

Dale Roberts walks through how he wrote his full novel The Shoe Horn with AI, ’the right way’ — meaning with heavy human help. The book grew from an old short story about a mother and spoiled child devoured by shoes in a small-town shop; drawing on about 20 years in healthcare working with older adults living with dementia, he reframed it so the shop steals memories rather than flesh. Using Dibbly Create, he generated an outline in minutes, then spent several hours over several days refining characters and sections, reviewed detailed character profiles, and used the image generator to visualize the cast. He generated 40 chapters in two parts of 20; he says generation took less than 2 hours and used just under 5 million tokens across two drafts. He judged the first draft decent but cold and mechanical, so he used Dibbly’s AI humanization services. Ghostwriter Eevee Scout found scenes out of order, repeated beats and almost no dialogue, and suggested rebuilding; instead they tested regenerated chapters with a tense tone and instructions prioritizing dialogue and action, then she reshaped chapters, cut redundancies, fixed continuity and deepened emotional beats. After a plagiarism scan with only minor flags, editor Bailey Ans did a line and essential edit. Roberts then proofread himself, cutting over 1,000 em dashes to under a hundred and fixing continuity errors and repeated words and imagery, and removed an epilogue to keep a closed ending. His main lesson: do not rush — test chapters in small batches before generating a whole book, because AI provides a foundation but human judgment gives the story purpose, rhythm and heart.

Key takeaways

• Process: outline and character profiles in Dibbly Create, heavily refined by hand, then 40 chapters generated in two batches of 20
• Creator says the two drafts used just under 5 million tokens and generation itself took less than 2 hours, mostly waiting
• The raw AI draft was out of order, repetitive and dialogue-poor; adding instructions for dialogue and action beats changed the results
• A human ghostwriter and editor reshaped structure, continuity and emotion; a plagiarism scan returned only minor/common-phrasing flags
• His own proofread was extensive — e.g. cutting 1,000+ em dashes to under 100 — and he advises vetting chapters in small batches instead of rushing a full draft

Episode details: published November 13, 2025 · 17:31 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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