No Mans Land

I spent a lot of time writing an outline of a story that I really want to tell. With a little over 2,000 words, I started to wonder if there is a limit to the input characters. I checked and apparently it’s around 25,000. I say apparently because I can’t find a definitive answer. There is a difference between the online version that I’m using and the API, and users of both have complained that this character limit is far lower for them.

I then searched for how exactly I should go about interacting with ChatGPT, to get the best result from what I have. Although I went to sites which claim to know, the writing is vague, no-one gives examples and no-one gives prompt examples. I asked Bing.

Bing told me to give ChatGPT the outline and ask it to generate text to fill in the gaps. So I did. I told it I wanted the story told over twenty chapters, gave it the beginning of chapter one and told it to continue from there.

It gave me four very short but well written chapters and then stopped. I then asked it again to elaborate and give me an example of how the story should progress. It gave me a more detailed progression of the story but it ended at chapter eight.

I’m sure this sounds like a let down but it’s not, I’m very pleased with what I got but more pleased than I can express with what came next.

The story is about a young man and woman who meet in what they think is a dream. They find themselves involved in a magical contest and each of them have a creature which they can command to cast spells. They are Simon and Sonnet. Their creatures are called Nomads. The Nomads can’t cast spells by themselves and have to bond with humans in order to work magic.

All of them must become stronger and more experienced and they do this by competing in contests. There’s a lot more to it but I’m going to write it so I’ll just write what’s necessary to explain the next bit.

I asked it what kind of contests they might take part in that would test their abilities and it gave me some really good ideas. I also asked for riddles that they might be asked, to test their mental agility and it responded with some awesome stuff

There is no dialogue so far and no detailed interaction with any characters but I have the full story outline, with better idea’s than I had to begin with and I have the basis for at least a couple of contests.

I love stories and I’ve read many thousands of them; being an Old Man that’s not as impressive as it sounds. I’ve never written a book before and only really played at story telling but I do think I can tell this one, with the help of ChatGPT of course.

So that I could post some pictures, I pasted a paragraph or two of the story into Midjourney and here’s what I got:

I’ll post more of the story when I’ve written a chapter properly and update on the interactions with ChatGPT as they occur.

Cheers,

Old Man