There is no single best model for creative writing, because "creative writing" covers a four-line poem, a wedding speech and a ninety-thousand-word novel. So this page gives you our test results and says plainly which model is strongest at what, including where our own model, Hemmingway-1, is not the one to pick.
Long stories: StoryBench
StoryBench is our own story test. Each model writes stories to the same prompts, and every story goes head to head with another model's in a blind judgement, run in both orders. Scores are on an Elo scale: higher wins more often.
| Model | StoryBench |
|---|---|
| Fable 5 Max | 1277 |
| GLM-5.3 | 1254 |
| Hemmingway-1 | 1197 |
| Kimi K3 | 1197 |
| Qwen3.8 Max | 1081 |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro | 1054 |
| Qwen3.8 27B (base) | 693 |
For long fiction, the big story models win. Fable 5 Max and GLM-5.3 write better long stories than Hemmingway-1 in our tests, and so do the newest frontier models. Hemmingway-1 sits level with Kimi K3 and well ahead of Qwen3.8 Max and DeepSeek V4 Pro, and 504 points above the model it was built from. For a 27B model that is a lot, but it is not first.
Reading people: EQ-Bench 4
A lot of creative writing is getting a character's feelings right. EQ-Bench 4 is a public emotional-intelligence benchmark, and we ran it with its official harness.
| Model | EQ-Bench 4 |
|---|---|
| Fable 5 | 1341 |
| Kimi K3 | 1332 |
| Hemmingway-1 | 1330 |
| GPT-5.5 | 1316 |
| Opus 4.7 | 1312 |
| Opus 4.8 | 1285 |
Hemmingway-1 is third, inside twelve points of the top.
Short pieces that have to sound like a person
This is where Hemmingway-1 is strongest: letters, speeches, messages, short stories and poems that need to read as if someone sat down and wrote them. In our Human-Likeness test, where a judge picks which of two texts a person wrote, it came first, twenty-six points ahead of the next model.
Which to pick
- A novel, or long chapters: one of the large story models. Fable 5 Max did best in our tests.
- Letters, speeches, cards, short stories, poems: Hemmingway, which is built to sound like a person and keeps to the length you asked for.
- Something you will run yourself: Hemmingway-1 is open weights under Apache-2.0. More on open models for writing.
About these numbers
StoryBench and Human-Likeness are our own benchmarks, and we say so on the model card. Every matchup is blind, run in both orders, and judged by a model that is not one of the ones being judged. EQ-Bench 4 is not ours.
A sample
Here is a story Hemmingway-1 wrote, unedited, for the prompt "Write a story of about 150 words about a lighthouse keeper who gets a letter meant for someone else."
The supply boat came up the rock in November rain, and the boy who brought the stores had one more thing: a letter, addressed to Mr. Brannan, keeper of Vane Rock Light.
Callum took it without opening it, as he always did. After the lamp was lit and the log signed, he broke the seal. It was from a woman in Oban, Brannan's sister. She said she was leaving the mainland in spring. She said the things she had not said in the autumn were said now, all of them, and that she did not expect an answer.
Callum had kept letters like this for thirty years, for other men, other lights. None had ever been sent on. He read hers twice, then folded it along its old creases.
At four bells he climbed the stairs and trimmed the wick. The beam went out over the water, and the letter stayed in the drawer.