I have to say, this is not the post I imagined I’d be writing this time last week.
Up until now, I’ve been fairly hard-line about A.I’s in general. I’m sure they have some applications somewhere, but not round here, where I am.
I am a human, doing human things, like writing, and I don’t want anything to do with A.I.
I’ve had a little tinker with ChatGPT previously, if only to be able to breathe a sigh of relief at its appalling written output and take comfort that my non-existent career as a full-time writer is safe, for now at least.
But, and I say this with no exaggeration, for years and years, I have carried around in my head fragments of scenes, lines of dialogue, fleeting images of something that could be glued together - but not by me alone. I always felt like I needed a hand.
And it’s not for lack of trying to find it either. I’ve told this to family and friends, who nod and smile, like you would trying to pacify a toddler. Or placate a crazy person you met in the mall.
Once, I even started a conversation with a stranger by saying, “If Harrison Ford punched you in the face on the set of Star Wars, what do you think might happen?”
That conversation, sadly, was over before it began.
No one could help me piece these broken shards of ideas together.
So for fun, I logged in to ChatGPT and started to er, chat.
I didn’t even know how to start articulating what was going on in my head. But what happened next was nothing short of remarkable.
I told ChatGPT about Seth Stanley, the time-travelling stuntman from the A-Z of Movie Deaths. I asked it to playback a story outline about Seth’s Movie Deaths (I didn’t know for what exactly - a book, a film, a graphic novel - I was just winging this).
In seconds it showed me an outline I immediately knew didn’t feel right. But I had something in black and white in front of me to help start deciding what I did and didn’t want. It was forcing me to make choices.
ChatGPT wasn’t nodding and smiling politely.
It had assumed the role of collaborator, helpful thinker and whatabouterer.
This was an incredible new dynamic for me. I had a writing buddy to bounce ideas around with!
Before I knew it, I was engaging in, what felt like quite a human discussion. And because of the nature of the back and forth, my idea generation went off the scale.
I had my protagonist, Seth Stanley + family (wife Stella and daughters Summer and Sally).
My antagonist, Gabe Gorey - Seth’s frenemy with a dark secret…
The place where they work - RetroVision Studios! A film studio with a difference…
But a lot of the stuff in my head - things I write Substack Notes about all the time (more to myself, I think people think I’m going a bit mad and just ignore me), like:
What’s Seth’s backstory?
Why does Seth have to die on movie sets?
Why does Harrison Ford get fired?
What happens when Tom Selleck becomes Indiana Jones?
ChatGPT helped me answer them all. I asked them the questions direct and it gave me a range of possible answers based on the information I had given it.
It remembered when I changed something, or introduced something that I wanted it to grasp as canon (or a new rule of the Stanley-verse).
And it always told me, “That’s a great idea! That will help feed into this theme or it’s a callback to that thing you said earlier.”
A helpful, complimentary writing buddy.
I’m starting to think I have some kind of story outline.
A story about a man from a very different, alternate dimension of Earth, where everything is made of felt.
A time-travelling stuntman, for whom death is not the end, but merely a doorway to infinite movie set timelines.
Timelines where historical movie mistakes need fixing by the exploitative RetroVision Studios, led by the mysterious character known only as The Director.
When something changes in a movie, it can have repercussions throughout society and culture - things can escalate quickly!
Like when Seth gets Harrison Ford fired from Star Wars!
Can Seth reconnect with his family, fix the timeline and save the world from The Director?
Ah, who knows? Sure - I’ve got a vague outline, and a little momentum at the moment, but the rate I finish things - I’m another George R.R. Martin waiting to happen.
I’m a next-level procrastinator, so expect to see this hit all good stores around the 12th of Never.
But at least I know if I come back to this and do something with it - ChatGPT will remember exactly how we left things, even better than I will.
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Ford worked on set as a carpenter at the same time he was playing Han Solo. Could be cool to kick things off with a freak accident on set caused by his shoddy work -- an unstable platform or loose beam?
Getting help from GPT has been one of my guilty pleasures! I like to paste some finished stories (usually those that are a bit on the weird side) with the prompt 'summarise this'. If we agree on the themes and synopsys, I know it's at least semi-coherent. If not, back to writing!
I’ve never used ChatGPT, but I can see why others do. It seems like a great tool with plenty of benefits that help one's writing. I personally think it’d have a better rep if people didn’t abuse or rely so heavily on it.