Hello out there,

I hope you’re all having a wonderful day! I’ve been a little busy the last couple of weeks. A lot of my creativity has been sapped because I’m writing a story over on Royal Road that I do the old-fashioned way. That and doing delivery tends to tire me out. (I’m not a young doe anymore!)

As you can tell by today’s title, I’m going to be talking about my adventures in writing a book with ChatGPT!

All things have a beginning and this is how my journey started.

Truth be told, I already had a story in mind that I wanted to tell. I chose fantasy right away.

Now we were getting somewhere! Only… it wasn’t somewhere I wanted to be going. To tell you the truth, I wanted ChatGPT to lead the way here but I decided that it would be our story, not just ChatGPTs.

While it’s suggestion was interesting, I wanted to be ChatGPT’s girl in the chair, while providing the creativity and only a little of the writing. I thought about what I wanted to write about and decided to see what ChatGPT thought.

A protagonist named Ava and a government agency called “The Division”? Yes, please!

This was an amazing start! It had a ton of aspects that I loved. However, I didn’t want the main character to know that she was hopping dimensions.

I’ll spare you ChatGPT’s response here because it was quite long.

This is where I found out that if I was going to do this that it was going to be a lot of work. Not only that, I quickly found out that ChatGPT has more limitations than I thought it did.

ChatGPT can only remember so much from a conversation before it starts forgetting things. This meant that I would have to summarize my conversations with it and feed it into a new conversation.

That’s not the only thing that was going to be a problem. If I wanted ChatGPT to copy my style, it wouldn’t be able to reliably mimic it. The biggest problem here is that I’m not one to plan my stories out as I write them. I tend to pick a small goal and work my way toward it.

This didn’t stop me, though. I spent hours talking with ChatGPT, trying to figure out how I wanted this story to go.

Here’s the plot so far:

There we have it! I ended up swapping the genre to Science Fiction because it fit much better than fantasy.

It took around five hours of work to get this far. We also had a long discussion about how to organize the data and I’m still not sure how I’m going to do it. I’m thinking about breaking out Scrivener and doing my organization that way.

I did work on an opening scene with ChatGPT, but I’m still not ready to share that just yet.

Last but not least… the name we came up with is “Parallel Aspects”.

This isn’t a really long post but I think it’s a really good beginning. I’ll try to keep you posted on how the story is going and give you samples of the work we produce.

Keep on Narrating Narrative Designers!
Katherine