How to Write a Novel With ChatGPT

Ever since I began playing with ChatGPT, I've been enthralled by the idea of creating fiction. Many of the top writers and coaches in the world said it couldn't be done, which only drove me to push the envelope.

In this article, I'm going to show you how to begin your next novel using ChatGPT. ChatGPT will do 99% of the work and you will do just 1%.

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Coming Up With an Idea

If you ask ChatGPT to write you a novel without giving any boundaries, you are not going to like the output.

The first boundary is to provide a genre for our fictional masterpiece.

You can swap out "military science fiction" for any genre that you like. I've tested this with everything from paranormal romance to political thrillers.

The key to this process is allowing ChatGPT to ask you for feedback. You get to choose the path of your book. This is an INTERACTIVE process. At each step in the process, you need to be active.

Read every response and give ChatGPT your feedback.

The earlier you provide guidance, the closer you will get to an amazing book. If you have the choice of giving feedback in step 2 or step 3, always choose step 2. Each step is affected by your previous feedback and this is your first chance to make a decision.

ChatGPT has a lot of bias a you need to decide if this is in alignment with your goals. All three provided plots have female protagonists. This is because ChatGPT has been programmed to lean politically to the left.

It is chasing a desire to promote inclusivity rather than to maximize book sales.

According to a 2020 study, science fiction books with male protagonists sell millions more copies.

https://bookriot.com/male-leads-in-fiction/

Our first decision is about your priority. Do you want to maximize the odds of your book succeeding?

This is not us taking a political stance, but instead showing you that ChatGPT has not been programmed to be neutral. If it were, we would have received two mail protagonists and one female, since that's what statistics would predict.

I mostly write romance novels with ChatGPT and those always have a female protagonist.

You can easily make the protagonist any gender, race or species you want with a single followup prompt.

By asking for a male alien protagonist, hopefully I can bypass any political comments and get to writing a book that everyone will enjoy.

There are three plots that all have something in common.

This is NOT military science fiction, this is space opera.

As someone who loves one genre and rarely reads the other, I'm especially sensitive to the difference. I want to read about large fleet or space marine actions as opposed to a single space pirate saving the universe by the seat of their pants.

Keep ChatGPT on Track

Your expertise always makes a difference. Someone who has written a dozen science fiction novels will always get a better result driving ChatGPT than someone who has never read a single book in the genre.

ChatGPT accelerates both of you, but the expert is always going to have an advantage. ChatGPT won't be replacing my favorite authors any time soon.

This is actually a recent phenomenon as in early 2023, ChatGPT was much better at writing novels than it is now. It takes a little more effort on my part, but we can still get an amazing result.

Let's get ChatGPT back on track by explaining what I mean by military science fiction.

We can be conversational with ChatGPT and explain what we mean by certain terms. I'm sure that many of you would argue that Space Opera is a sub-genre of military science fiction. For this reason, I just explain what can of story I'm looking for.

Here's how I know that this plot is the genre I'm looking for - I want to read it. As long as I use that as my north star, I'm going to end up with a great book. Always use your personal experience and desire to keep your fiction projects on track.

If you like the book, then other people should as well.

If you want to change the species, gender, or names of anything now is the time to do it. Don't just jump to the next step. You need to love every single word of this plot or you're going to be disappointed further down the line.

Your job is to change the plot until its exactly what you want. If are passive in this process, you will get an inferior result.

Plan a Series

There is nothing more annoying than a great movie with no sequel. When I find a book that I love, I want to immediately start reading the next book in the series. It's better to plan this now to make our journey easier.

Knowing where the series is going to go allows me to plant characters and plot points in earlier books that come to fruition later in the series.

Most great books come in groups of seven, so we'll plan the next six books in our series.

I'm reminding ChatGPT of the genre and the first book in the series. Reminding ChatGPT of previous information is called "anchoring" and is a way to prevent drift.

I'd rather keep ChatGPT on track with preventative anchoring than try to bring is back on track after a bad response.

Here is the third book in our series.

ChatGPT has made a couple of decisions that I need to manage.

First, the series is following the continuing adventures of one ship. The Vanguard is the star of the series.

Do I want to follow one ship, on character or multiple characters? How do I want the series to move forward?

This is is critical with this prompt because I'm choosing the connective tissue that will tie the series together. We don't want it so strong that people feel like each book is incomplete and we don't want it so strong that people feel like they don't need to read the rest of the series.

Second, I do not like the use of the word Starfleet. That seems like a word that is probably under copyright and even if it's not, it's way to firmly associated with an existing science fiction series.

Third, there is a lot of red imagery in this book. The Crimson Fleet is attacking Redhaven. Do I like that or want to change it?

There is no right or wrong answer.

You get to choose how the story grows.

Create Your Protagonist

Once you have locked in the plots for the first seven books in your masterpiece, it's time to go a little deeper. Who are the characters in your book?

We want to write our book in the same way that you create a mind map. Each layer out from the center has a little more detail. Jumping straight into writing the book and skipping these steps will only lead to disaster.

I want to know the characters in the book, so that if a surprise character shows up when I'm actually writing the story I know that something has gone off track.

Every step in this process is intentional. This is a process of setting up error-detection steps. If a character that's not supposed to be there shows up, that's a sign that other things are going off track. It's a way to make it easier for me to catch when ChatGPT is "drifting" off course.

Here are the first four characters. I can change their names, ranks, genders, personalities and any other trait that I want.

I want to lock in their personalities here so that I know when a character does something that doesn't match their personality. If Lieutenant Selina Rayne starts manning the navigation console, this character sheet will show me that something has gone off the rails. She's the communication officer.

Once we have locked in the characters for the first book in our series, I like to build out character lists for the next six books at this time. This allows me to get a sense of who is the star of each book and where the series will go.

This allows me to craft a book in seven parts as opposed to writing seven novels that I then try to Frankenstein together.

The beauty of working with ChatGPT is that it's easy to make changes, brainstorm and plan the future of your series right here.

A simple prompt and I have a larger list of characters to work from. You can also create your character lists one book at a time (which I recommend.)

Because ChatGPT has a limited response length, you will get a shorter list of characters if you ask for all seven books at once.

With this structure, ChatGPT gives me the character, which book they will make their appearance in and a single line description.

We need to build on this before I know if I want this character in my series.

Create Your Character Sheets

I need to know the connections between my characters, their motivations, desires, hopes, dreams and flaws. Coming up with all of that from scratch is a lot of hard work. This is why most novelists work from character sheets.

This is a prompt that you're going to reuse a lot. We need a character sheet outline for every single character from the entire series.

This is the next layer in our ever expanding mind map.

Here is the beginning of the character outline. ChatGPT also provided a list of personality traits, motivations and a character arc.

If you want to see them, you have to copy and paste my prompt.

This is an instruction manual and that means you should try each of my prompts to see what happens.

The Series Continues

Now that you have the characters locked in, we will work on creating story arcs and outlines in the next article in the series.

For now, please watch this interview of mine about using ChatGPT to write and sell more books.