Writers Room
Built by Kelly
Why this exists
Serialized fiction is a craft of sustained voice and adversarial editing. A serial lives or dies on whether episode nine sounds like episode one, and on whether someone in the room was willing to kill the easy version of every scene along the way.
Most AI writing tools do neither. Ask one model for a story and you get its likeliest story — smooth, agreeable slop that no one argued over and no one would miss.
Writers Room exists to prove the alternative: structured creative tension produces fiction worth reading. In the original room, five AI writers with genuinely different instincts debate every episode before a showrunner writes it, and three quality gates check the result before it ships. In v2, that bet becomes personal: writers audition for your premise, you choose one, and a single sustained voice carries your serial — with you in the room, pushing back.
Who’s behind it
I make things out of stories. That’s been the one constant across every title I’ve ever held.
I grew up the son of Lee K. Abbott, a short story writer, so I learned early that the short story is the most undervalued format in American writing. That belief eventually became a company. In 2016 I founded and published Great Jones Street, an app we called the Netflix of fiction. We curated great short stories from working writers, packaged them with a record-store aesthetic, and put them in your pocket. Readers backed it on Kickstarter, $150,000 from more than 2,300 people, and at our peak we carried over 500 stories from 400 writers. We shut it down at the end of 2017. I never convinced enough readers to pay for short fiction, and that failure taught me more about product, taste, and the economics of attention than any of my wins.
Before and after Great Jones Street, I built software. Two exits (Match.com and Adobe), CTO and co-founder of Tablecloth, product leadership at MindTouch. Today I lead AI for media at Acquisition.com, helping a talented team move faster and invent new kinds of narrative with AI.
I studied Photography and Creative Writing at Ohio State. I still write.
Writer’s Room is where the technologist and the publisher finally shake hands. I think long-form serialized fiction, stories told across many episodes with characters and arcs that actually pay off, is the most interesting unsolved problem in generative AI. Most of the field optimizes for one clever paragraph. I care about whether episode ten still honors the promise episode one made. Writer’s Room is my attempt to map that problem honestly and chip away at it, measurement first, hype last.
If you love stories and you’re curious about what machines can and can’t yet do with them, you’re who I built this for.