I’ve been writing for almost as long as I’ve been reading. I’ve also imagined continuing adventures for the characters when I hit the final page of many favorite stories. Daydreaming has never been difficult; the challenge has always been organization.
I’ve always been a pantser when it comes to writing. For those unfamiliar with the term, it means writing by the seat of your pants rather than from a carefully prepared outline.
I’ll imagine a character, an interesting situation, or part of a scene—Maggie trapped in a decrepit warehouse while she’s being hunted—and simply start writing from that point. I have a loose sense of where I’m going, but sometimes I feel like one of those guys using a dowsing rod to find water. I wouldn’t say that, as a pantser, I slip into the character’s pants to experience that imaginary world because… well, because that would be weird! But I am there, in the scene as an observer, caught up in the action, and I go where it takes me.
That worked reasonably well for a rough story draft or for non-sequential chapters in the same imagined world. But while the individual chapters may seem promising, stitching them together into a coherent whole always eluded me.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated piles of notes and scattered chapters, lost parts of them, and accumulated more. My approach has been on-again, off-again—off because I eventually get frustrated by my inability to organize it all. Focusing too much on structure causes me to lose the muse. But that muse, left to its own devices, was never going to finish a story. Eventually, except for the odd bit of prose or a blog post, I gave up.
ChatGPT
I use ChatGPT a lot at work, so maybe it was bound to happen.
I was cleaning out old folders on Dropbox to get a little more storage space and found some of my old writing. I worked through virtual stacks of .rtf files and other formats used by Scrivener and writing software I no longer owned. I fed ChatGPT the chapters, notes, and fragments and asked it to organize the events into a timeline of sorts. That seemed to light the pilot on the old burner again.
At the end of that first pass, I had a better-organized pile. One of the larger groups of related chapters I had was set in a world called Alcheron. It still had big gaps between chapters, piles of notes, and plenty of contradictions, and I needed a way to keep track of all that information: people, places, history, politics, technology, magic, and so on.
I needed a world bible.
A world bible, or lore bible, is a reference collection describing the world in which your stories take place. It can contain everything you’ve established or just the details you need to keep consistent. You can set it up however it works for you.
Giving the world a home
Since I could connect ChatGPT to WordPress, the content management system this site is built on, I used ChatGPT to create a collection of private pages organized by subject—characters, geography, races, and so on—with cross-links and an index. I had ChatGPT give each entry a reference number and a designation to distinguish between established ideas and those still needing resolution.
I know a little bit about a lot of things—not enough to strut around with my head held high, which, as big as my head is, would strain my neck—but enough to work out a proposed approach with ChatGPT. It sliced, diced, structured, sorted, and formatted, and in surprisingly short order the Bible came to be.
I confess to feeling more empowered. I’ve begun writing a bit every day for the first time since 2014.
Addressing the inconsistencies
ChatGPT compiled a list of inconsistencies from the data in the Bible. I started addressing them by reading and writing explanations, then having ChatGPT review, suggest, and update the world bible.
The process does work but felt a bit slow given the number of facts already accumulated, so I began using an interactive Q&A format with ChatGPT. I asked that it supply one inconsistent item from the list at a time. I responded, and it updated the record and kept track of the status designation, indicating which were resolved and which still needed work.
For example:
You’ve referred to this character’s father by three different names. Are these the same person, or three separate characters?
Or:
You describe this location as being beyond the mountains, but another chapter appears to place it near the coast. Is this the same place?
Those are illustrative examples, but they’re typical of the questions we worked through.
I tried this approach speaking into the microphone and found ChatGPT did a very good job of transcribing, which allowed a little more free flow to the process. Sometimes the answer was a quick detail. Sometimes we had to thrash it out for a bit. I couldn’t resolve every issue off the cuff, but we whittled down the pile.
ChatGPT is a tool
ChatGPT isn’t always right. As astonishingly useful as I find it for accelerating my work and problem-solving, it sometimes makes assumptions, misses nuance, or excessively “polishes” a fact. It might add details to a multipart entry that, on review, are slightly off target or weren’t meaningful enough to include.
I worked with ChatGPT to add rules to how it handled the editing and to ensure I reviewed each item before it was committed.
Want to try it out?
You could start with a few chapters or your collection of notes or pictures. Ask ChatGPT to construct a timeline, identify characters and locations, and list questions or apparent contradictions without resolving them on its own. If you have a fair amount of facts, I would consider suggesting that it generate a unique reference number for each fact. Then work through those questions one at a time.
I’m still writing and working through the accumulated material, so I can’t tell you how well this will hold up over the long term yet. There are plenty of gaps to fill, and I expect I’ll discover or create more inconsistencies along the way.
But it has helped me begin writing again, and I’m taking joy in that process.
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