ChatGPT Playtime

I had some fun with ChatGPT last night.

I’ve been playing with it over the last week or so, and I’ve been pretty impressed with what I’ve seen. It wrote a lovely Valentine’s Day poem for me, which I read to my wife, about beaches and love and sunsets. Then last night I gave it a few different assignments, and I thought it did really well.

The first was to write my 300-word mystery story, which it did very quickly, and it was a fun little read. But the key here, was that it hinted at the end that there was more to the story. Now, that was unexpected. So, I asked it to elaborate, and here came another 300 words that delved deeper into the story. And again, there was a little hint at the end that there was more to the story. So, I asked it to tell me more, and there came 300 more words that took me deeper into the story. By that time the story was over, but it was a brilliant ride. I was really impressed. I mean, how cool is that? I’d heard good things, seen some good things, and then there was this layered bit out of nowhere. Just totally unexpected.

After that, I decided to give it a short writing assignment to help me play with a plot idea for one of my books. It turned into sort of a conversation as I bounced my ideas off it and it gave me ideas back. It was like sketching out a scene or whiteboarding a lesson plan or having a conversation with my wife, who I talk writing and plots and characters with. Only this time, it was ChatGPT. Turns out it was a really cool experience — not to say that typing into a chat box to get an AI to produce something is anything like talking to my wife about writing fiction but you get the idea.

In my novel, my female detective from Baltimore travels to New Orleans with her friends for a bachelorette weekend in the Big Easy, but as usual there’s some kind of crime happening that my MC is compelled to investigate. I want the novel to involve illegal drugs, voodoo and a ‘voodoo queen’, and I have some ideas about that, but I didn’t quite know yet in my head what the inciting incident would be. A murder, most likely, or maybe a theft, but I decided to give my new AI buddy a chance to weigh in and put some ideas in front of me.

Turns out that ChatGPT decided it liked a murder, and that was cool, but it gave me something else I hadn’t expected. It told me that one of my MC’s friends would be implicated in the murder, and when I went back and forth with ChatGPT, we worked out that what was behind the murder and illegal drugs was a group of corrupt cops, trying to pin the murder on my MC’s friend to cover it up.

And voila! I have an unexpected plot element that spices up the novel and really ramps up the stakes. I hadn’t thought of that myself. To be honest, I hadn’t put a lot of work into how this novel would work. I’m still writing the novel before this one, but it was really cool to sort of have someone to bounce ideas off of and play with them, manipulate the conversation and elicit something new.

Anyway, I still have to write the novel. I won’t let ChatGPT do that. But at least if I need an idea generator, then here’s something I can use.