Sudowrite Review: Is This AI Writing Tool Worth Trying?

Like many creative writers, I’m generally skeptical of generative AI tools that claim to be able to fully write your stories for you. So when I first heard of Sudowrite, it didn’t initially sound like the kind of tool I would ever want to try. 

Fiction writing, after all, is a deeply personal and human endeavor. We write because we love writing, not because we want to churn out books as easily as possible—especially if it comes at the cost of plagiarizing other authors’ work, which is how a lot of generative AI tools are trained.

Still, I gave Sudowrite a shot to see if it could change my mind.

The short answer? Sudowrite has some useful features, but it probably isn’t the right tool for you if you actually love the craft of writing. 

Read on to see our review of Sudowrite and its pros and cons, so you can figure out whether this tool is right for you. 

What Is Sudowrite?

Sudowrite is a generative AI tool designed to help writers work on fiction projects, especially novels. 

It leverages advanced natural language processing techniques to generate text, provide suggestions, and help writers overcome creative blocks.

One of Sudowrite’s marketing hooks is “Write a novel from start to finish. In a week.” That hook played a huge role in my initial skepticism—it’s certainly possible to write a novel-length manuscript in a week, but you’ll inevitably be sacrificing quality, love, and care in exchange for speed.

Sudowrite’s capabilities include generating plot ideas, enhancing character development, and even drafting scenes based on prompts you provide. Some of its key features include: 

• Idea generation: offers creative plot ideas to help you brainstorm, such as name ideas for your characters

• Character development: suggests ways to add depth and nuance to your characters

• Rephrases: finds new phrasings based on your guidance

• Feedback and editing: provides constructive feedback on your writing and suggests improvements for style, clarity, and engagement

• Scene writing: generates scenes or even entire chapters based on your input

How Well Does Sudowrite Work?

The most unique feature Sudowrite offers is the Story Engine, which basically lets you generate an entire book from scratch.

Here’s how it works. First, you figure out the building blocks you want to use, like your genre, characters, or outline. You can either flesh out each of these pieces yourself, or you can click Generate to get Sudowrite to do the heavy lifting for you. 

Then, when you have your characters and outline in place, Sudowrite helps you generate story beats—a more detailed breakdown of everything that happens in each chapter. 

Finally, Sudowrite will help you create the prose itself. It will write a first draft of every chapter for you, almost instantaneously, in its main text editor. 

When I tried it, the tool did pretty much everything it promised to do. It generated several chapters for me, and I was surprised by how decent the writing was.

Still, even though the output was decent at first glance, it definitely lacked life and spark. There were a lot of errors that I needed to fix, and it often didn’t stick to the story beats I’d planned.

Also, crucially, the process wasn’t nearly as fun as my normal writing process is. It didn’t feel like it was really me writing the story, which takes away a lot of the joy and ownership of the creative process—all the reasons why I write in the first place. 

In some ways, using Sudowrite felt less like writing my own book, and more like mentoring someone else who’s writing a book. For me, at least, it ultimately wasn’t nearly as fun as just taking the time to write it myself. 

The Pros of Using Sudowrite

Now that we’ve described what Sudowrite can do, let’s break down the full list of its pros and cons. 

Let’s start with the pros of using Sudowrite. 

Speed

Sudowrite can quickly generate content, which is helpful for those times when you need to move fast and get the words flowing.

If your goal is to write a book as fast as you can, Sudowrite can certainly help you get there. You can give it your outline or your story beats and wait a few minutes for it to generate the text you need.

It might need a lot of tweaking to align with your style and the voice of your characters, but it’s still probably faster than starting from a blank page.

Inspiration

If you ask Sudowrite for some plot ideas, you might get some fun new creative ideas

When I tried this, the ideas Sudowrite gave me weren’t groundbreaking, but they provided a fresh perspective that helped me see new directions for my story. It was like brainstorming with a friend who always has a few extra ideas up their sleeve.

In that sense, I can see why a tool like Sudowrite might be useful for breaking through writer’s block. The AI’s suggestions can spark new ideas and directions when you’re feeling stuck. 

Structuring Your Ideas

The Story Bible is well designed for structuring your ideas. When you design each character, for example, it will ask you to fill out fields like Personality, Background, Physical Description, and Dialogue Style. 

Similarly, you can use the Story Bible to generate a Magic System, Item, Government, Economy, and more. 

So, even if you don’t end up using Sudowrite to generate your prose, I could still see the Story Bible being a useful system to help you keep all the pieces organized. 

Detailed Rephrases

Sudowrite’s “rewrite” tool is fairly impressive. You can ask it to rephrase text in a certain way, such as “add more description” or “add more internal conflict,” and it will generate new text for you.

You can even ask it to mimic the style of a different author, which is an interesting option. It’s a fun way to try out new styles and experiment with voice.  

The Cons of Using Sudowrite

Now that we’ve covered the pros, let’s look at the major cons of Sudowrite. 

Inauthentic Voice

One of the most crucial things about fiction writing is your ability to express your own authentic voice.

Sudowrite claims to be able to learn from your existing text and generate new prose in a voice similar to your own. However, its suggestions can sometimes veer off.

You need to edit carefully to ensure consistency, and even then, the text won’t sound fully like you.

Lack of Human Touch

While Sudowrite is good, it doesn’t fully grasp the deeper subtleties of human experiences. 

A lot of the character actions generated by the Story Engine felt unrealistic or forced. In one scene Sudowrite generated for me, two romantic interests suddenly burst into a heated argument and then went back to being genuinely in love again in the next scene, without any real resolution to the argument.

Similarly, a lot of Sudowrite’s character and story suggestions can sometimes feel a bit surface-level. I think the technology definitely needs to evolve a lot more before it can truly tell a human story.

Recurring Errors

Even within a single chapter, the Story Bible made several recurring errors that I had to catch and fix on my own.

One common error was that the Story Bible often repeated the same plot points. There were multiple points throughout the story where it would have the same characters doing the same things, just slightly rephrased.

Similarly, some characters will show up in locations where they don’t belong, and then seemingly teleport back into their proper locations. Or you might get some strange metaphors that make no sense to a human reader. 

Dependency on Tropes

Like all AI, Sudowrite looks for patterns in existing work. That means it tends to over-rely on common tropes within each genre.

I’ve always maintained that popular tropes are popular for a reason—many of them, like enemies-to-lovers or found family, are very fun to write and satisfy reader expectations. So, it’s not like tropes are necessarily bad. 

Still, you don’t want an entire book to rely entirely on clichéd tropes. It’s much more fun to subvert them, deepen them, or change them in a unique and original way—which Sudowrite doesn’t really do on its own. 

Ethical Concerns

Last but not least, a lot of writers have ethical concerns about using tools like Sudowrite, and I’m inclined to agree. 

One major concern is that Sudowrite is trained on other people’s writing without their consent. People have described it as a “plagiarism software,” regurgitating what it’s been fed. On their FAQs page, they claim “we do not use your writing to train Sudowrite or OpenAI’s AI models,” but they don’t provide any solid evidence of how they train their datasets. 

Another ethical concern is that if AI-assisted work is allowed to be published alongside human work, human writers will lose their jobs. This process is already happening in many industries and will likely only accelerate as tools like Sudowrite become more advanced. 

How Much Does Sudowrite Cost?

There are so many writing tools and resources out there, and only so much money to spend on them. So, with any writing tool, pricing is an important consideration. 

Sudowrite currently offers several pricing tiers to accommodate different needs and budgets. Each tier gives you a different number of monthly “credits,” which function like arcade tokens—you can use them to pay for AI features, like AI-generated words or suggestions. 

Here’s a general breakdown of Sudowrite’s plans. 

Free Trial

Sudowrite offers a limited free trial so you can test its features and see if it’s a good fit for you. The trial includes 10,000 credits, which gives you a small number of AI-generated words or suggestions—after that, you have to pay.

Hobby & Student Plan

Sudowrite’s Hobby & Student plan costs $19 per month. This plan is geared toward students and writers who are just using the tool for fun. 

It provides 225,000 credits, which gives you a moderate amount of AI-generated content each month.

Professional Plan

Sudowrite’s Professional plan is priced at $29 per month. This plan is aimed at more serious writers and includes a higher limit on the number of words and suggestions per month—450,000 credits—along with additional features like more advanced feedback tools.

Max Plan

Finally, for professional writers who publish multiple times a year, Sudowrite offers a Max plan for $59 per month. This plan gives you 2,000,000 credits, and unused credits can be rolled over into future months, so you don’t have to worry about wasting any.

How ProWritingAid Compares to Sudowrite

If you want to polish your manuscript while still preserving your own human creativity, try ProWritingAid. 

ProWritingAid is designed to be a collaborative tool rather than a stand-in for the writer’s creative process. It aims to enhance your work by offering a fresh perspective and helping you think outside the box.

Like Sudowrite, ProWritingAid can help you generate new ideas, edit your writing, and rephrase your text. Crucially, though, ProWritingAid doesn’t try to be a replacement for the human touch, and it never uses your work for training datasets.

You can try ProWritingAid’s free plan to see if it helps your writing process. Embrace it as a tool, not a crutch, and you might find that it adds a new dimension to your creativity.

Final Thoughts on Sudowrite

So, has Sudowrite changed my mind about the role of AI in creative writing? 

Not really. I still believe that the heart of fiction writing lies in the human experience, something an AI tool can assist with but can’t come close to replicating. 

Still, I can see how there could be a lot of things about Sudowrite that would make it an impressive tool. To people who want to create a book without putting in the work, Sudowrite could be a useful tool, offering inspiration, new ideas, and a quicker writing process.

For anyone who loves the art of writing for its own sake, though, Sudowrite probably isn’t the right tool for you. If you want to polish your manuscript while still preserving your own human creativity, try ProWritingAid.

Good luck, and happy writing!