Using ChatGPT to Generate Story Ideas
Write a Novel with me using ChatGPT — Part 2!
Welcome back wordsmiths and dreamers… and all those of you who hope AI can write a bestselling novel for you to rival the success of J.K Rowling, Jane Austen and Stephen King all bundled into one!
Snickering all by myself here… yeah. I don’t think it’ll happen soon.
But let’s see what we can do to refine and analyse the story ideas that ChatGPT generated for me in the first part of my project.
My goal was to see if I could generate some ideas that tickled my creative bone (snickering again… hey, I’m a spicy romance writer, okay?).
And it did.
Prompting for Story Ideas
We saw in Part 1 of my project’s series, I crafted my prompt in broad strokes to generate 5 story ideas for a horror novel. I used my personal experience as a writer to craft this prompt, but I am no ChatGPT prompt expert and do not claim to be one.
As you can see, I gave what I consider a super basic instruction for ChatGPT to craft story ideas. All I wanted to ensure was that it would create a supernatural monster threat, a setting as well as a general idea for a hero/heroine. I could have chosen to refine this prompt much, much further, but I was interested to see if ChatGPT would vary the types of monsters and story ideas it generated for me or if it would give me slight variations on a single theme.
This particular interaction is giving me the itch to see how far ChatGPT can take the process of story idea generation, but since it is outside the scope of this particular experiment, I will table it for future use.
Analysing the Story Ideas Created with AI
Going back to the 5 story ideas generated by ChatGPT and listed in Part 1 of my project, let’s refine the story ideas and select one for writing a full lenght horror novel.
Since I’m based in the US, I am going to story idea #5, because it is set in the UK. Write what you know is a good old golden rule of novel crafting and I’m going to stick with it.
REALLY, REALLY reluctantly I will be doing the same thing for story idea #3, as it is set in the artic and relies on knowledge of climate change, the artic in general and the building of a monster requiring scientific data. It’s a super awesome idea and I think it would make a hell of a story, so I’ll put it on the backburner of my brain and let it stew there. Maybe it will still be edible when this project is over, who knows?
So, we are left with 3 story ideas for this experiment. Let’s take a closer look at them:
I must say the bot did a good job on all levels except for the title generation. Pretty much none of those titles would be a choice of mine, although some are close to a first draft of a title.
My Choice and Why
Here comes the hard part and I’ve been staring at my screen for a good hour now!
I don’t think there is any way AI can help with choice paralysis or the overactive imagination of a person like me, so I have to put my virtual foot down for the sake of this experiment and make a choice!
BUT, I have to say it’s been hard!
Drum roll please… thank you! I’m going to go ahead with Story Idea #1!
But, why? Well, I chose Story Idea #1 for a couple of reason, based, again, on my experience as a writer and my HI (that’s Human Intelligence). I’m a big fan of the Save the Cat method for writing a novel (full credit to Jessica Broody for her bestselling non-fiction book, Save the Cat Writes a Novel. I have her to thank for being a published author!). I’ve based myself on her core principles for selecting what she aptly calls a “Monster in the House” idea.
Let’s see what we have to work with here
- A supernatural monster with true evil at its core. Yes, I am pretty sure I can create one here. In fact, I can create more than one and it’s what I’ll do…
- A “house”, or confined setting. Since we’re writing this story with a young historian in a small town, the setting will be restricted and we can craft many reasons why our heroine won’t simply skip town and leave the evil spirit to its evil deeds behind. This will increase the conflict, the tension and make for a good old scary time.
- A “Sin”. Now, this is the part that I consider both the most important, trickiest and most interesting in crafting a horror novel. The sin at the core of the story, the reason why this evil spirit is haunting our dear heroine and her beloved small town has to be tied to her. And I know just how we can do this.
Conclusion and Next Step
Okay, readers, we have our story idea, generated by ChatGPT for me using a simple, broad stroke prompt. I used my HI to select one of these story, based both my personal taste and a vision I have for this story.
So far, so good with ChatGPT and its usefulness in helping create story ideas.
The next step will be to refine this story idea into an enticing outline and synopsis.
Stay tuned for Part 3, coming up tomorrow!
If any of you want to take these and make a run for it… have at it! Make my day! Write on, I say, write on!
