The draft is where creative control is most often lost, and it is lost politely. You ask for a draft, it arrives whole and fluent, and from that moment you are editing someone else's piece. Every later change is a negotiation with a version that already exists. The way to keep control is to decide, before the first draft, what the assistant may propose and what is already yours.
This workflow does that with a few habits: you write the hardest paragraph before the assistant writes anything, you take one draft at a time, you edit in keep, cut, and change-only turns, you branch or reset on purpose instead of arguing with a drifting chat, and you keep the master copy outside the conversation from the first turn.
The running example is the owner of a bicycle shop writing a 1,200-word post for his shop's site about raising the price of a tune-up from 75 to 110 dollars, after which nine regular customers left. He has the numbers, the two emails he received, and a paragraph he dreads writing.
When to use it
Use it for
- You have an outline you chose and material to fill it, and you want a complete draft in one sitting
- You write slowly and the blank page is the problem, not the ideas
- A piece in your own voice, where you can tell on reading when a paragraph is not yours
- You have been burned by whole-draft rewrites that drifted, and want a turn structure that holds
Not for
- You have no outline. Drafting from a topic produces a typical piece. Build the outline first, even a rough one by hand
- The piece is short enough to write directly: an email, a caption, a paragraph. Write it, then use a bounded edit if needed
- You are drafting something you do not understand well enough to judge. The assistant will sound confident. You will not know when it is wrong
What you need before you start
- The locked outline, with sections marked as locked or free to move
- Your raw material, already attached to sections
- Voice notes or a Voice Sheet, and a banned list
- A document outside the chat, open, with the title at the top and nothing else
- A sense of which paragraph you have been avoiding
The steps
Each step names who does the work, the decision you make before moving on, and the prompt to use where one helps.
- 01You15 minutes
Write the hardest paragraph yourself first
Every piece has one paragraph it lives or dies on: the admission, the claim, the turn, the thing you are slightly afraid to say. It is also the paragraph a model will handle worst, because it will soften it. Write it now, before any prompt, badly if necessary. Fifteen minutes. It does not have to be good. It has to be yours.
The shop owner's hardest paragraph was the one that said he had underpriced the tune-up for six years because he was afraid of exactly the nine customers who then left. He wrote it in four plain sentences. It was the best paragraph in the piece, and the assistant never touched it.
- 02You10 minutes
Brief the session: outline, your paragraph marked 'mine,' and the turn rules
Open a fresh chat with the mega prompt filled in, then add the outline and your hardest paragraph, marked 'mine' and 'keep.' State the turn rules plainly, even though the brief contains them: one draft when asked, no options unless asked, OLD and NEW for any bounded change, no invented facts, [VERIFY] for gaps, no closing summary.
Also say what the assistant may not do: reorder locked sections, alter the 'mine' paragraph, or strengthen or hedge any claim. The more precisely you state what is already decided, the less the draft wanders.
Send this Here is my locked outline and my raw material. The paragraph marked MINE is written and final; place it where the outline puts it and do not alter a word of it. Sections 1 and 6 are locked in position; sections 2 through 5 may not be reordered either unless you tell me first and I agree. Use only facts from my material; write [VERIFY: what is needed] for anything else. No summary paragraph, no call to action. When I ask for the draft, give me one draft and nothing else. Confirm in two lines that you understand, and ask any question that would change the draft. Do not draft yet.
- 03AI proposes10 minutes
Ask for one draft, then judge the spine before you touch a sentence
Full prompt for this stepSay 'Draft it. One draft, nothing else.' Then read the whole thing once, as a reader, without editing. You are deciding one thing: is the spine right? Does the argument run in the order you chose, with your facts, around your paragraph? If yes, it is worth editing. If the draft reorganized the piece, filled gaps with confident generalities, or rewrote your 'mine' paragraph, do not fix sentences. Reset the session with a tighter brief. Fixing a wrong spine sentence by sentence costs more than a second draft.
The shop owner's first draft was structurally right and tonally wrong: it had turned his plain admission into a lesson about 'knowing your worth.' His paragraph was intact, but the two around it had drifted toward that lesson. That is a draft worth keeping, because the fixes are bounded.
- 04You and AI20 to 30 minutes
Work in keep, cut, and change-only turns
Three kinds of turn, and only three. Keep: name a paragraph and it is locked for the rest of the session. Cut: name a paragraph and it is gone. Do not ask for a replacement unless the outline needs one. Change only X: name the one problem, its effect on the reader, what may change, what must stay, and ask for OLD and NEW on the touched sentences only. One problem per turn. 'Make it better' is not a turn.
After each turn, examine the difference. Did the change do what you asked and nothing else? Paste the accepted version into your master copy. If something else moved, paste the master copy back into the chat and ask again.
Send this Keep paragraphs 1, 2, and 5 as they are for the rest of this session. Cut paragraph 7. Change only paragraph 4: the problem is that it turns my price decision into general advice about 'knowing your worth,' which my readers will hear as a lecture. Rewrite it to describe only what I did and what the two emails said, in my sentence length, with no advice to the reader. Keep the 75 and 110 figures exactly. Show OLD and NEW for the sentences you change, then wait.
- 05You5 minutes to decide, 10 to reset
Branch or reset on purpose, using THREAD
A chat drifts. Rejected ideas come back: the 'knowing your worth' phrasing reappears in paragraph six after you cut it from four. The THREAD check gives you the vocabulary for what to do. Branch when you have two valid directions for a section and want to develop both without disturbing the version you accepted: open a second chat with the master copy and explore the alternative there. Reset when rejected ideas keep returning, or when explaining the old chat would take longer than writing a clean brief.
A reset is not a failure. In a fresh chat, paste only the original material, the accepted decisions, the master copy, the open questions, and one next task. Do not paste the old transcript. That is how the rejected ideas get back in.
- 06You2 minutes per turn
Keep the master copy outside the chat, from the first turn
The chat is a workshop. Your document is the manuscript. From the first accepted turn, every kept paragraph lives in your document and the chat holds only proposals. This is what makes branching and resetting cheap, what protects your 'mine' paragraph from silent regeneration, and what lets you close the session at any point without losing anything.
Practically: after each accepted turn, copy the accepted text into the document and note in the ledger what changed. When you paste text back into the chat, paste it from the document. If the chat and the document ever disagree, the document wins.
- 07You10 minutes
Call the draft done, and do not polish
A draft is done when every section of the outline is filled with material from your notes, your hardest paragraph is intact, and nothing in it is a confident placeholder. It is not done when it is beautiful. Polishing in the drafting session is how a piece gets smoothed into nobody's voice. That work belongs to the rewrite workflow, after a gap, in a fresh session.
Close with a ledger entry: what was kept, what was cut, which [VERIFY] tags are open, which critiques you expect. The shop owner's draft had two open [VERIFY] tags (the exact date of the price change, the number of tune-ups in the prior year) and one note to himself: 'paragraph 3 still sounds like a consultant.' That is a finished draft.
Where it goes wrong
The assistant quietly rewrote the paragraph you marked 'mine.'
Paste your version back with 'This paragraph is mine and final. Restore it exactly.' Then check that the brief stated the 'mine' and 'keep' rules rather than implying them. If it happens again, reset. A session that regenerates locked text will keep doing so.
You asked for the draft and got three versions with commentary.
Reply: 'One draft, nothing else. No options, no explanation.' Then say which of the three to discard. Multiple drafts at this stage turn you into a judge of a beauty contest and cost you your plan.
Every change-only turn loosens two other paragraphs.
Insist on OLD and NEW for touched sentences only, and paste the master copy back each turn so the assistant works from your version rather than its own last output. If drift persists, reset with the master copy and a shorter brief.
A phrase you cut keeps coming back.
That is the rejected-ideas problem the THREAD check names. Add the phrase to the banned list in the brief, and if it returns again, reset. The old transcript is where it is coming from.
The draft is finished and you cannot find a sentence that sounds like you.
Your hardest paragraph was skipped or handed over, and the voice notes were thin. Write the paragraph now, by hand, and then use the rewrite workflow's voice step. For the next piece, do step 1 first. It anchors everything.
You polished for an hour in the drafting session and the piece got smoother and emptier.
Stop. Smooth is the model's default direction, and every polishing turn moves toward it. Call the draft done, close the chat, and rewrite in a fresh session after a gap, where critique and voice work are the point.
Before you call it done
- The hardest paragraph was written by you before the assistant wrote anything.
- The brief states the outline, the 'mine' paragraph, the locked sections, and the turn rules.
- You asked for one draft and judged the spine before editing a sentence.
- Every edit turn was keep, cut, or change-only, with one problem named and its effect on the reader.
- OLD and NEW were shown for every bounded change, and you examined the difference.
- You branched or reset deliberately when a correction failed twice.
- The master copy lived in your document from the first turn, and the chat never became canonical.
- Open [VERIFY] tags are listed, not resolved by the assistant.
- You stopped at done and did not polish in the drafting session.
Questions
Why write the hardest paragraph first instead of letting the AI draft everything and fixing it?
Because the hardest paragraph is the one a model handles worst. It softens admissions, generalizes claims, and turns a specific moment into advice. If you write it first, the draft is built around something unmistakably yours, and you have a sample of your own voice in the session to judge the rest against. Fixing it afterward means arguing with a smoother version that already exists.
What is the difference between branching and resetting?
Branching keeps the accepted version safe while you explore a second valid direction in a separate chat, and both may survive. Resetting abandons a chat that has drifted and starts clean with only the material, the accepted decisions, the master copy, and one next task. Branch for comparison, reset for drift.
How many bounded-edit turns is too many?
When the same correction has failed twice, or when a turn no longer has a clear job. Ten focused turns on a 1,000-word draft is normal. Thirty turns of 'a bit better' means the piece should have been reset, or finished by hand.
Do I really need a document outside the chat if the chat keeps history?
Yes. The history includes every rejected version, and later turns can pull from any of them. Your document holds only what you accepted. It is also what survives a lost session, a model update, or a browser tab you closed.