From Story Idea to Outline Using ChatGPT
Write a Novel with me using ChatGPT — Part 3!
In yesterday’s episode, I’ve selected one of the story ideas generated with a very broad prompt on ChatGPT.
I used the same general lines for this as when I create story ideas from my own imagination, usually centered around an external conflict or main threat, followed closely by a vision for a main character and a setting. I go with my guts there, my mind instinctively reaching for story ideas with “legs”, those that have the most potential for both internal and external conflict and can keep a reader on the edge of their seat for 300+ pages.
If you are a pantser, then I guess this is where your process of planning would stop. I am, however, a meticulous planner and I will keep true to my creative process during the lenght of this experiment.
This is a rather lenghty process for me usually, as I let the idea simmer and take shape inside my brain over a long period of time. This time around, that process was shortened to just a few minutes, then another few hours of my subconscious quietly working in the background, assessing the potential for every story.
As a writer, I can say I am happy with the way this turned out and I do plan on integrating story idea generation into my regular brainstorming session when it comes to my romance author career. It was fun and gave me a wider “net” of ideas that what my brain usually comes up with.
Now comes the fun part.
From Story Idea to Outline
To refresh your mind or to help those readers who might just stumble only this experiment, here is the story idea as generated by ChatGPT.
This is a good story idea with plenty of legs for depth, theme and a lenghty and chilling battle against a malevolent spirit.
My Outlining Method of Choice
I chose this idea because it had potential for a lenghty novel filled with conflict, tension and plot twist. I based myself on my favorite novel writing book, Save the Cat Writes a Novel, by Jessica Brody, which adapts and expands on the ever popular Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. Can’t go wrong with this and it served me well in my writing career. This is my process, one that I honed during the writing of my 8+ romance novels and one I am comfortable with.
If you’re a writer, published or not, and you never heard of that one, please go grab a copy. It’ll be worth its weight in tears in the end!
This story has everything needed to build an interesting “Monster in the House” novel and I will be using the Monster in the House Beet Sheet which can be found here to continue forward. This is true to my usual creative process, since I am one who likes to outline my novels in lots of details before even thinking of the opening line.
If this isn’t how you usually do things, then take a look. It might interest you, or not. Think of ways to use AI to help you along in your own process, too, if you’re not keen on following a beat-sheet from one particular method.
This is my first horror novel, so I will be following the beat-sheet pretty closely in the beginning stages of writing this novel.
Prompting ChatGPT to Write an Outline
I wasn’t sure what would happen if I asked ChatGPT to create outlines based on Save the Cat beat-sheet, but I did anyway, if only to see the results.
Here is what I ended up doing. I opened a new ChatGPT (I have ChatGPT4, btw), and inputting the story idea generated previously.
I then asking the bot to create an outline based on Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat beat-sheet for a Monster in the House story. I didn’t specify anything to the bot, leaving it up to it to create the entire outline for me.
Here is the result:
As you can see, the bot correctly identitied the beat sheets of the Save the Cat method and created a general outline that follows the methodology.
The outline as given by ChatGPT is not bad, but I will have to refine it much, much further to make it to the writing stage of this experiment.
Since I wanted to see how well the bot understood themes and explore the way ChatGPT can help me refine what truly makes a good Monster in the House story, I asked the bot to state the theme of the story he outlined for me and this is the result:
What do you think of the value added here by ChatGPT? A theme of reconciling with historical truth seems mightily appropriate in today’s current political and social reality and I am interested in seeing how this can be incorporated in a spine-chilling story.
Even though I sense that I could push and blindly follow the bot to create an entire outline in record time, I’m going to let this sit in the backburner of my mind for the rest of the day.
Conclusion
In conclusion, ChatGPT is able to create a broad outline following a well known method for outlining a novel and understand the concept of theme enough to suggest ideas for a story that can prevent future slugs in a writer’s work, such as a confusing theme or even a total lack of it.
It gave me very good pointers and ideas for the different beats of this story as well as hinted at a set of supporting characters. All these are important in building up a successfull novel and I am please with the usefulness of the bot so far.
What ChatGPT did not do is flesh out all these parts for me at this stage, but pointed my imagination in the correct direction. Hopefully, it will save me time and heartache in the future.
In tomorrow’s installment, I will refine this outline, using both my own creativity and ChatGPT to develop a set of characters, give them their much needed shards of glass, flesh out our monster, the malevolant spirit, and refine the setting to tie it to the theme of reconciling with historical truth.
While we’re at it, I’ll also be changing the title, since I don’t like what the bot came up with!
Stay tuned, my friends!
