Hit Me With Your Best Prompt

Time for some practical guidance. In an earlier post, I talked about the somewhat reassuring exercise of asking ChatGPT to write a chapter novel. I’m actually pleased to see that it did a rather poor job, even with a lot of source material to reference. I’m not at all a fan of AI being used to write novels, screenplays, etc. And I’m sure I’ll share more of my opinion on this later.

On the other hand, I’m a big fan of AI acting as a personal assistant, and it can certainly be used in ways that increase the quality of someone’s writing, without being the creative generator itself. Let’s walk through a few ways one can use AI in this manner. Keep in mind, though I’m focused on novel writing here, these general concepts could apply to any number of other types of projects.

I’m going to start with a few things specific to ChatGPT. Here’s the structure of your user interface:

• A query is a single interaction with the AI agent. Ask a question, give a direction, whatever.
• A conversation is a collection of queries. This is great for organization. In the ChatGPT navigation bar, you can edit the names of your conversations. Hence, you could have one conversation per chapter. I have one conversation called “Trivial Questions,” where I ask ChatGPT to look up stuff like, “When did Poco last perform live in Dallas/Fort Worth?”
• A project is a collection of conversations. Generally the project will be a longer effort, or broader.

Persistence and continuity are really important concepts. First, keep in mind that file uploads in one conversation are not accessible by ChatGPT in other conversations. So, if I’m uploading one chapter at a time as I write, and I use different conversations for each upload, each conversation can only reference the upload within that conversation. I’ll come back to that in a moment, when I discuss project notes.

Persistence also matters. ChatGPT itself is very inconsistent with its claims/performance on persistence, so I’ll share two things that do seem to be constant: first, while ChatGPT can parse many file types, it performs better with structured data (like an Excel file) and seems to work far better with text that’s cut and pasted in, rather than uploading a Word doc or PDF.

Second, it appears to retain cut and paste text far longer than files. I’ve been experimenting with uploads and copies from months ago, and though the agent tells me that the files are still available, when I ask questions that reference the files, I invariably get messages like, “The code environment was reset, please re-upload the file.”

And that leads to one of my favorite practices when using ChatGPT as a writing assistant: the project note. ChatGPT is quite good at retaining information when told explicitly to do so. Also, if you tell it to consider an instruction at the project level, the info is retained in a way that spans conversations.

One of my current uses for this is the project note. For example, “Please make a project note: at some point I need to mention that Phil got a full-ride scholarship for playing triangle in the marching band.”

Eight chapters into the novel, I upload the full novel so far, then ask, “Please check the project notes, indicate whether each note has been completed or not.”

Extremely helpful. This is the kind of operation that was far more tedious when I was using just written notes and my own review.

I’ll sign off with a couple of other quick suggestions for using your AI writing assistant. Keep in mind, the more you’re uploading your content as you go, the more helpful the agent will be with these prompts:

• “How old did I say Dave and Gwen were when they met?”
• “Create a list of typographical errors, including enough surrounding text to easily locate them in the manuscript. If you’re uncertain whether a word contains a true error or is stylized, note it and I’ll provide feedback for future reference.”
• “Please list all the historical figures referenced so far in the manuscript. Let me know if any are mentioned more than once.”
• “Give me a character profile of Middy, from the viewpoint of a casual reader.”
• “Add to the project vocabulary list: ‘zagnard’ is the Elven word for back pain specific to over practicing with the long bow.”

Oh, and don’t forget, since we’re talking novels and authoring here: if you’re enjoying the blog, I’d certainly appreciate you checking out my novel, The Ghost Wife Journal. It’s on Kindle Unlimited, as well as available for Kindle or print purchase. Go enjoy it after the blog!