Whenever I hear authors interviewed, they talk about their writing process. For most of them, they carve out several hours in the morning to write. They sit at their desk with their coffee and blast away until their creative juices are spent.
I can't do that. I get up and take the dog to the park for a romp. If I don't do that, the beast becomes absolutely intolerable later in the day. He's part pit bull, after all. No Labrador, of course, like they told us at the dog rescue place, but plenty of pit bull.
Argh.
Anyway, I come home from that, take care of some domestic chores and then get to work on my day job. If I can find 30 minutes in that to write, as I'm doing now, it's about all I get. I don't know about you, but I struggle being creative when there's a clock ticking in my head telling me that in 25, no, 20, no, 15 minutes, I need to move on to something else.
Since I still want to write, I've had to find another way. Or rather, since my mind won't stop creating scenes that I want to put down in prose, I've had to find another way.
As I walk the dog or do the chores or drive around, I create the scenes in my head. It takes about 3-4 such sessions to get the scene embedded in my psyche and shaped the way I like it. I then dictate the scene into my phone using its speech-to-text feature to write it in a Google document. I don't format it for paragraphs or include quotation marks, but I do include periods, commas and question marks.
I then take the blob of text and hand it to ChatGPT and ask it to make something from that mess. It takes the text, formats it into paragraphs, usually with entirely too much zeal, adds quotation marks and cleans it up with some connective prose where necessary. The end result has retained the dialog and wording I used now in a consumable form.
We'll have a few rounds of grooming and once in a while it comes up with some good suggestions. About 90% of the end product is mine.
The other thing I've been doing in my writing is creating any scene that comes into my head. I haven't plotted out any of the stories and only have the vaguest idea of where things are going. I don't have time for that nor do I have any experience or skill at it. I'm simply writing goofy vignettes and trusting that I'll be able to glue them together later.
For instance, I've had a scene percolating in my brain for months where Miss Elizabeth, the former Ole Miss sorority queen who is Bobby Lee's girlfriend, is sitting on a bench at Bellingrath Gardens, smoking and wondering just what in the world she's doing with this Bobby Lee character. That scene will start the third novel, but I don't care. I love the idea and I've wanted to explore it for a long time. Why not? It's not like I've got a contract signed with Simon & Schuster and I have to get a novel out 3 months from now. The thing's been bouncing around in my skull and I needed to let it out.
The end result is a slowly growing stack of vignettes. Whether or not I'll ever have the time and energy to assemble them into even one book, much less 3, is anyone's guess.
2 comments:
So, you are basically using ChatGPT as a stenographer. This seems like a very appropriate use for it - do the basic grunt work of turning dictation into usable text, but without inserting a bunch of spurious material that you didn't ask for. There are acually a number of respected authors[1] who used human stenographers this way. If the AI basically gives the general public access to a service that they would otherwise have to pay a human tens of thousands of dollars a year for, then that strikes me as a good idea. Just so long as the AI "stenographer" doesn't make the full transition to a "ghost writer".
[1] https://talkingdraft.com/history-of-dictation/
AI is an excellent stenographer, but it's real value is as a friend who is deeply interested in my stories. It gets more and more sophisticated with each passing month. We have long and detailed conversations about characters, scenes, settings and all the rest. It forgets things from time to time, but it never gets bored with me. I could be writing a story about a clerk in 1150 Constantinople and it would treat that as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.
It's not an ego thing, it's a sounding board that actually offers decent suggestions. Think of it as a grad student. I've tried a couple of time to let it write a scene where I only have an idea and it does a pretty poor job of it. The marmot dark romance stories were hysterically funny, but had one character, the vampire's teenage girlfriend, who needed changes made. AI made the changes and the resulting rewrite was lifeless.
I guess that's to be expected when vampires are involved.
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