In the warmth of her parents’ suburban home, under the glow of masterfully strung Christmas lights, Emma found herself the star of a celebration toast that she knew was coming. The family was gathered on the Saturday before Christmas, their annual tradition, and while she loved coming back home for the holidays, this time she felt different. At the dinner, her father initiated the toast. He looked across the table and said, “To Emma, and her incredible promotion to Associate at Madson Bailey. She’s always been our rock star.” Then he winked at Emma and added, “to her continued climb up the Wall Street ladder so that she can pay back private school tuition and help us retire.” Her dad had always cracked jokes like this. To her, she knew it was a party his harmless attempt to be funny sprinkled with some unresolved insecurities. In the past, these sorts of comments never bothered her but this time, his words felt heavy, like they contained some sort of explicit agreement about how she should spend her life.
Nice to see you giving fiction a go. I've written two books with ChatGPT and tested dozens of concepts. I can help you make your next story even better.
ChatGPT tends to go too hard with narration. The result is prose that reads like a log instead of painting a rich visual. I saw some of that here.
A lot of narration is fine, authors do it all the time. But it needs to be impactful. Every sentence needs a job. It either needs to: 1) reveal more about the environment 2) provide greater context to the events in the story 3) change the character somehow (make them react) or 4) move the plot forward.
You could probably copy and paste the above into your ChatGPT custom instructions and it might help the output be directed and focused (I haven't tried this yet).
Another thing the AI is weak at is dialogue. Good dialogue should either a) tell the reader something about the character (themselves, other characters or the world) or b) move the plot forward - that's it.
ChatGPT is bad at dialogue because it THINKS is understands how we communicate. It's read a lot of writing. But it doesn't understand the dynamic nature of human conversation. Sometimes it's awkward, jarring--it doesn't go in one direction or make any sense. It's hard for the AI to understand this, so without proper prompting it produces mechanical (theoretical) speech. It almost always sounds unnatural and/or painfully boring.
In your story, there are many opportunities to make Emma's speech reveal more about how she feels about her growing anxiety about her situation. Here's how you can do more of that next time:
-write your dialogue separately from your prose
It works like this, after you generate a part of your story, ask ChatGPT to ONLY generate dialogue. Ask it to do it like a TV script. This usually gives you something you can work with. It sounds a little more human. But to be honest, alone it's still pretty flat.
So you have to go in and rework it to make it match your characters and the events in the scene.
After you do that, copy and paste both the prose and the dialogue, then ask ChatGPT to combine them into a complete version. The result is a much stronger overall narrative that the average reader will probably be happy with.
If you want to take it up to the next level, go back through the output and rewrite or add your own words in there. You'll especially have to do this with scenes that include: highly emotional moments (arguments etc.), violence, offensive language, sex, criminal activity, or anything else the AI regards as taboo or sensitive. It will always get these wrong, ignore them, or refuse to write them.
So the only way to include it convincingly (to get into the shit of the human soul) is to write it yourself.
I hope this helps man. Looking forward to reading more fiction from you.
This post probably didn't do as well as your normal ones, but don't let that stop you.
The world needs more original stories like this. Happy to see someone else contributing to that.
This is good feedback. The original draft was pretty bad but this was a lot better. I think a lot of the opportunities come from me just not being that good at fiction yet
I can really relate to this thank you so much. Major cliffhanger. I hope Emma went back to Costa Rica ☺️
Nice to see you giving fiction a go. I've written two books with ChatGPT and tested dozens of concepts. I can help you make your next story even better.
ChatGPT tends to go too hard with narration. The result is prose that reads like a log instead of painting a rich visual. I saw some of that here.
A lot of narration is fine, authors do it all the time. But it needs to be impactful. Every sentence needs a job. It either needs to: 1) reveal more about the environment 2) provide greater context to the events in the story 3) change the character somehow (make them react) or 4) move the plot forward.
You could probably copy and paste the above into your ChatGPT custom instructions and it might help the output be directed and focused (I haven't tried this yet).
Another thing the AI is weak at is dialogue. Good dialogue should either a) tell the reader something about the character (themselves, other characters or the world) or b) move the plot forward - that's it.
ChatGPT is bad at dialogue because it THINKS is understands how we communicate. It's read a lot of writing. But it doesn't understand the dynamic nature of human conversation. Sometimes it's awkward, jarring--it doesn't go in one direction or make any sense. It's hard for the AI to understand this, so without proper prompting it produces mechanical (theoretical) speech. It almost always sounds unnatural and/or painfully boring.
In your story, there are many opportunities to make Emma's speech reveal more about how she feels about her growing anxiety about her situation. Here's how you can do more of that next time:
-write your dialogue separately from your prose
It works like this, after you generate a part of your story, ask ChatGPT to ONLY generate dialogue. Ask it to do it like a TV script. This usually gives you something you can work with. It sounds a little more human. But to be honest, alone it's still pretty flat.
So you have to go in and rework it to make it match your characters and the events in the scene.
After you do that, copy and paste both the prose and the dialogue, then ask ChatGPT to combine them into a complete version. The result is a much stronger overall narrative that the average reader will probably be happy with.
If you want to take it up to the next level, go back through the output and rewrite or add your own words in there. You'll especially have to do this with scenes that include: highly emotional moments (arguments etc.), violence, offensive language, sex, criminal activity, or anything else the AI regards as taboo or sensitive. It will always get these wrong, ignore them, or refuse to write them.
So the only way to include it convincingly (to get into the shit of the human soul) is to write it yourself.
I hope this helps man. Looking forward to reading more fiction from you.
This post probably didn't do as well as your normal ones, but don't let that stop you.
The world needs more original stories like this. Happy to see someone else contributing to that.
This is good feedback. The original draft was pretty bad but this was a lot better. I think a lot of the opportunities come from me just not being that good at fiction yet
Yeah it takes a lot of effort to get a good story out of it. Your fiction will get better and better over time
What a cliffhanger! I need to know what happens to Emma next (even though I’ve met people like Emma many times over the last 7 years).
lol it’s up to you how it ends
Also,I’d love to see the transcript of how you used ChatGPT to create this. Really cool stuff. 👍