“Make this better” hands an assistant a problem without telling it what better means. Before you ask AI to work on your fiction, decide which decision you want help making.
A scene can become clearer and less interesting at the same time. An awkward sentence might be carrying a character’s discomfort. A repeated image might be doing deliberate work. If the brief treats every rough edge as an error, a competent assistant can carefully remove the very things that make the story yours.
Give it a job small enough to understand
Begin with an action and an object: examine the scene’s causal chain, suggest three obstacles, or identify where the viewpoint becomes unclear. Those are workable assignments. “Improve my novel” combines diagnosis, taste, strategy, and rewriting into one enormous instruction.
Then describe the result you need. If you want a diagnosis, ask for the passage, the reader problem, and the reason it matters. If you want alternatives, ask for meaningfully different choices. If you want revision, specify the passage that may change and what the revision must accomplish.
Supply context that changes the answer
For a scene review, the useful context may be the viewpoint character’s immediate desire, what the reader already knows, and where the scene needs to leave the relationship. A complete encyclopedia of the story world may add very little.
Ask yourself which facts would cause a good editor to make a different recommendation. Include those. Separate settled facts from ideas you are still considering. Otherwise, a promising possibility can quietly become an assumed part of the book.
Give the assistant the actual prose when the task concerns prose. A summary can explain what happens, but it cannot show where a sentence loses its subject or how a deliberate pause lands on the page.
Make the boundaries explicit
Tell the assistant which decisions belong to you. That might include changing the ending, adding a character, altering the heat level, or resolving an intentional ambiguity. Boundaries work best when they describe concrete actions rather than broad wishes such as “respect my voice.”
For voice, point to observable features: the narrator avoids naming feelings, the dialogue leaves arguments unfinished, or the syntax becomes clipped under pressure. Include a short example from your own work when useful. These details give the assistant something it can inspect.
A brief you can adapt
Hypothetical example: Review the attached scene for whether Mara’s decision to leave follows from what happens on the page. The reader knows she distrusts the captain but does not know why. The scene should end with her leaving while still wanting him to stop her.
Identify up to three places where the motivation becomes hard to follow. Quote each passage and explain the reader problem. Suggest a small repair for each. Do not rewrite the scene, reveal her secret, change the ending, or make her explain her feelings in dialogue. If the evidence supports more than one reading, say so.
This brief does not guarantee a useful answer. It does make the answer easier to judge. You can see whether the assistant addressed motivation, respected the secret, and supported its interpretation with the text.
Close the loop yourself
Read the diagnosis before accepting the repair. Sometimes the assistant notices a real difficulty and proposes the wrong solution. Sometimes its confusion tells you that the setup needs work. Sometimes the uncertainty is exactly what you intended.
Keep a recoverable copy before revising. After a change, reread the surrounding passage without the assistant’s explanation beside it. The explanation may sound persuasive; the scene still has to work for a reader who will never see it.
A useful brief gives you a narrower, clearer conversation about the book. The final choice remains a writing decision.