Forum: Author Hangout

I'm enjoying playing with AI, mostly ChatGPT 4, though Gemini Ultra may be a contender, as an aid to writing. I haven't found AI to be good at actually writing, and I eally hope I never will, but will cross that bridge when I come to it.

I'm working on a new project while letting my primary one sit for a bit and, 8 chapters in, I realized I didn't like the overall approach. I've got a custom GPT that has a document with my version of Larry Brooks' story structure. It also has a lot about this WIP, including character sheets, plot summary, worldbuilding documents, etc. (All a very new approach for me!)

So, I sat down with ChatGPT on my phone and just dictated in what I was thinking for each section. In my interpretation of Brooks' format, the first major chunk of a story is "Muddling." The status quo ante, before the story gets going. The second is "Jolt" -- what is sometimes called the inciting incident. The thing that really kicks the action off and gets the story rolling. Then there's Flailing, Failure, and more -- all the way to Victory State.

I'm trying to write a science fiction romance, so there are both the plot and the relationship components. Plus, there's a bit of love triangle (think Han and Luke with Leia in Star Wars, but way more developed and also resolved before the end of the book), and set ups for future books in the series. (Yeah, I tend to complicate things. Life-long characteristic!)

I didn't like the approach I had taken through the first 8 chapters or so, so I just sat down with ChatGPT on my phone and talked about the Muddling chunk as I'm now imagining it, then asked the AI to organize my rambling into coherent chapter notes for that Chunk. Boom! Done! Then on to the Jolt, Flailing, and other chunks. Then I had it organize all of that into a downloadable Word document that I stuck in the Plot folder for that WIP. Now, I'm going back and expanding or making chapters where my notes weren't sufficient.

ChatGPT was like a smart, eager, and super-fast intern. Pretty good, but not perfect. But, as a first pass, WAY better than doing it myself. Leaves me free to focus on the more creative work of actually thinking through what happens in each chapter and writing it -- dialogue, descriptions, action sequences, etc. I get to do the "big picture" creative thinking and the "execution" creativity of writing, and get help with the drudgery of cleaning up my thoughts and organizing them into the structure that's most meaningful to me. I found it very helpful.

Would love to hear from others who have tried anything similar, whatever the results. Or, other ways to use these tools as aids to writing, not substitutes.

I've used ChatGPT to 'generate' two things:

1) A fictitious fiction. A story within a story. I fed it the basic details I wanted and asked it to 'elaborate' on my 'notes' version. Took a lot of poking and proding to get something I actually thought I might write myself. The actual plot of this FF is already in the back of my mind. What I was doing was 'stiching together' a few disprate ideas into something with enough flow that I could then re-intergrate it back into the main story.

2) A list of 'support' characters with their names and descriptions. I generated a fairly long list and broke out the bits I liked. All these characters play incidental rolls, Just a few lines of dialogue here or there or are used to flavour a scene with 'floaters' that place the character in a fixed space but I wasn't sure about the w/w/w/w of them in the early stages. I further went with AI image creation to make a portrait of each character based on internal preconseptions to use as references for these essentially filler characters. Basically making a name, and one paragraph of backstory several times over till I found people I thought could be in the orbit of my main characters.

I don't see this as 'cheating' I already know a bit about these outer orbit characters but don't have the mental capacity to make them all 'real' or 'fleshy'. I also really suck at deciding on character 'names', outside of the core characters who may need a nickname etc. I've always 'stuggeled' to come up with these extraneous names.

Not sure if that's the sort of thing you're after but I find it's good for taking breadcrumbs and turning them into a few markers that I then fill out more as I go on.

Best of luck with the LLM's and their black box magic. I've only scratched the surface so I'm sure there are many other 'legitimate' uses of them.

Till next time, F.

Not the thread I was looking for but…

I was just starting to reread The Healer by QM. In the very first paragraph he states

Art in the Empire was generally big business, multibillion credit displays by technical experts rather than talented, if often poor, struggling individuals. Yes, there were tri-dees, both visual and written in the form of novels, but these were more often than not cobbled together by AIs for corporate media.

I have a feeling that that will be coming if the future. If you are old enough (or have some) compare the story content of the half hour B & W TV programs with those of today.