Four prompting strategies to enslave AI chatbots as your creative writing minions
A prompting toolkit for fiction writers
When it first came out, ChatGPT was pretty terrible at fiction writing. It did well at writing the first chapter of Genesis in the style of a corporate memo—the sort of comic writing you’d find on message boards or Reddit—but it couldn’t write a short story to save its life, and it would flatly refuse to write any scene with even mild violence or sexual charge.
Over the last year, that’s been quietly changing. Many of the guardrails that make AI unusable for genre fiction are being removed. ChatGPT will soon be allowed to write scenes with profanity, violence, and even erotica. And the big AI firms are paying a small army of contractors $20–40/hour to revise and annotate a large volume of training data, including for creative writing. Ask ChatGPT today to “write a short story in which a T-rex wants to play baseball, but his arms are too short,” and the output is reasonably well-written and pretty adorable. Competitor models like Anthropic’s Claude may be even better.
You’ll still find, though, that LLMs have a default “voice.” The T-rex prompt is what we call a “zero-shot” writing prompt—a prompt that doesn’t include examples. As always, you can get better outputs with better prompts. So here’s a prompting toolkit for creative writers, to help them make the most of LLMs.
1. Provide specific guidance and examples
In general, AI chatbots will do a better job of fiction writing if you can provide detailed guidance, including style guidelines, plot summary, and character notes. They also benefit from examples. Let’s try the T-rex prompt again, this time with a little more guidance and a relevant example:
Write me an excerpt from a novel about a T-rex who wants to play baseball, but his arms are too short. The rex lives outside a compound inhabited by time-traveling human scientists. It has enviously watched human children play baseball through the high, electrified chain-link fence that encircles the compound. In this scene, he is making his first experiments with the sport. I’d like the scene to be written in the style of Beverly Cleary’s grade-school novel Mouse and the Motorcycle. Here is a scene from Cleary’s story that explores a similar theme:
“Boy!” said Ralph to himself, his whiskers quivering with excitement. “Boy, oh, boy!” Feeling that this was an important moment in his life, he took hold of the handgrips. They felt good and solid beneath his paws. Yes, this motorcycle was a good machine all right. He could tell by the feel.
[… excerpt continues]
This time, the output is significantly better. Below is a short excerpt; for the whole thing, click here.
He decided to improvise. Carefully, he nudged the bat with his snout, positioning it upright against a large rock. With a delicate balance of his massive head and agile tail, he managed to keep the bat steady. It wasn't perfect, but it would have to do.
"Now for the ball," he said, scanning the ground. There it was, a bright, white sphere lying innocently a few feet away. His eyes narrowed with determination. He nudged it with his nose, rolling it towards the bat.
He positioned himself behind the bat, trying to line up the shot. "Just like the kids do," he murmured, lowering his body as much as his towering frame would allow. With a quick flick of his tail, he sent the ball rolling towards the bat.
The ball struck the bat with a satisfying thunk, and T-Rex watched in awe as it flew through the air. "I did it! I hit the ball!" he roared triumphantly, his voice echoing across the empty plains.
But the celebration was short-lived. The ball didn't soar as high or far as he had hoped. Instead, it landed with a plop just a few feet away.
2. Write the first part of a scene and ask AI to complete it
This is my favorite technique, because LLMs are, more than anything else, prediction engines for completing text. This is what they’re best at. Besides, what better way to get a passable first draft written in your unique personal style than to go ahead and write the first part of the text yourself? Here’s an example prompt:
Let’s write a short story about a tyrannosaurus rex, in a jungle during Earth’s Jurassic Era, who suddenly receives some kind of vision—a time-traveling baseball broadcast. Enraptured, he tries to play baseball with a tree trunk, but his arms are too short. The story should be written in a realistic style—the sort of thing Michael Crichton might write if a whimsical mood struck him. Below, I’ve written the first two paragraphs. Please complete the story.
A hulking shadow shoulders through the towering cycads and thick vines that drape from the canopy like the tangled innards of some colossal beast. A massive head swings, cavernous nostrils snuffling humid air.
[… excerpt continues]
These are the real premise and opening lines of a short short story I wrote, which will be published next year. The completion from Claude isn’t completely up to my standard, but it might have made a passable first draft to jumpstart my writing. Here’s an excerpt:
Suddenly, an odd sound pierces the jungle stillness—a strange, rhythmic cadence mingled with raucous cheering. The tyrannosaur's head snaps toward the noise, slit nostrils flaring. Through the dense foliage, an inexplicable vision shimmers into view—a vast, manicured field bordered by towering structures teeming with puny, hairless creatures. Figures in garish raiment scamper across the plain, wielding elongated sticks to bat a spherical object. The ball arcs through the air trailing a ghostly contrail, as the bizarre beings roar their approval.
The tyrannosaur stares, transfixed by the phantasmagoric display. Some deep, primordial instinct stirs—the urge to join in this mystical ritual of pursuit and dominance. Its massive tail thrashes through the undergrowth as it sizes up a fallen kapok tree trunk. With an ear-splitting bellow, the colossus rears onto its haunches, stubby forearms pinwheeling futilely. It topples forward, jaws snapping shut on empty air inches from the makeshift "bat." The tree trunk remains maddeningly immobile.
3. Ask the AI for writing critique with guidance on what to look for
With the file upload feature now available in most LLM chat interfaces, it’s possible to simply upload a Word document with a short story you wrote and ask the AI for feedback. In designing a prompt to solicit feedback, make sure to let the AI know what you’re weak on and what kinds of things you want it to pay attention to. Here’s my favorite prompt for soliciting writing feedback, which I give in full so you can try it out yourself:
Please provide a constructive critique of the following short story, as if you were a member of a writing group comprised of accomplished published authors. Structure your feedback by first highlighting a few key strengths of the story. Then offer suggestions for improvement focusing on the following areas:
Pacing and structure: Does the story move at an engaging pace? Is there a clear beginning, middle, and end? Are there any parts that feel rushed or dragged out?
Characterization: Are the characters believable, consistent, and well-developed? Do they have distinct voices and motivations?
Dialogue: Does the dialogue sound natural and authentic? Does it reveal character and advance the plot?
Show don't tell: Does the author bring the story to life through vivid descriptions and character actions rather than simply "telling" the reader what is happening?
Continuity and consistency: Is the story internally consistent? Are there any contradictions or plot holes?
Setting and world-building: Is the setting vividly conveyed? Does the world of the story feel fully realized?
Emotional impact: Does the story evoke emotion in the reader? Is the desired emotional effect achieved?
Theme and message: Is there a clear theme or message? Is it conveyed effectively without being heavy-handed?
Wherever you see room for improvement, provide specific and actionable suggestions. Illustrate your points with brief examples.
Aim to uphold the following standards of great storytelling:
Stories should have narrative arcs with compelling stakes
Active voice should predominate over passive voice
Showing should predominate over telling
Every element should serve the story
The theme/message should be authentically woven into the narrative
Wrap up your critique by reiterating the key strengths of the story and the most promising opportunities to make it even stronger. Remember to provide encouragement and support along with your constructive feedback.
Here's an example of what your feedback might look like:
"This story has an intriguing premise and the vivid imagery really brings the setting to life. I was particularly impressed by [excerpt with strong imagery].
I did feel the pacing lagged a bit in the middle. Perhaps consider condensing the description of [x event] to keep the plot momentum going. Additionally, the dialogue between [character y] and [character z] didn't quite ring true to me. When discussing events you’ve just lived through, you don’t normally preface your remarks with explicit stage-setting like 'When we went to the store to buy bread'. Could this information be conveyed more organically through action or subtext?
The story also does a lot of 'telling' in places where you might increase emotional impact by 'showing'. For instance, instead of telling us 'Jane was sad', you could show her gripping a photo and weeping.
Overall though, this is a poignant and promising story with a powerful message. With some polishing to pacing and a tad more 'showing', I think this could be a very publishable piece. I look forward to seeing the next draft!"
I will say that while the AI’s feedback is often on point, it sometimes says stuff I don’t agree with. In follow-up conversation with the chatbot, use your discernment and make sure to ask for specific examples so you can evaluate the feedback yourself.
4. Ask for targeted, conservative rewrites
I’ve noticed that if you ask AI to rewrite something, it will almost always overdo it. Frequently, ChatGPT will completely change the voice of a passage it’s editing, and the result turns out much worse than the original. So I highly recommend that if you have ChatGPT or Claude directly revise or rewrite a passage of writing, you do one or more of the following:
Let the model focus on just one thing at a time. For instance, “I’ve been told that I use the passive voice too much in this story. Please edit it to increase the use of active voice.”
Instruct the model to edit “conservatively” and in a highly targeted way. In fact, sometimes I put pretty stringent limits on how much it’s allowed to change: “ You have permission to edit only three sentences in the passage, so choose them carefully. Do not include the whole text in your response; you only need to include the original versions and the revised versions of the three sentences being edited.” This way you stay completely in control of what’s happening to your text.
Ask the model to “annotate” your text instead of changing it. For instance, “Annotate the passage by adding suggested revisions in bold text immediately after each sentence that contains inappropriate passive voice.”
Provide instructions to help the model discriminate between good changes and bad changes. For instance,
Roy Peter Clark, in Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, commends the active voice but notes that passive is sometimes appropriate. Quoting a passage from John Steinbeck, Clark notes, “I count thirteen verbs in that passage, twelve active and one passive … . The litany of active verbs heats up the scene … . The active verbs reveal who is doing what. The author sees a man. The man wears a hat. The author pulls up to talk with him. They brood at each other. Even inanimate objects perform action. The rifle leans against the fence. Dead animals lie on the ground. Embedded in all that verbal activity is one splendid passive verb: ‘His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare.’ Form follows function. The eyes, in real life, received the action of the sun, so the subject receives the action of the verb. That’s the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action. A few paragraphs from the one cited above, Steinbeck wrote, ‘The night was loaded with omens.’ Steinbeck could have written, ‘Omens loaded the night,’ but in that case the active voice would have been unfair to both the night and the omens, the meaning and the music of the sentence.” In your revisions, aim for a high ratio of active to passive verbs, but leave any passive verbs that contribute to the music or meaning of the writing by highlighting the receiver of action.
You might be genuinely surprised how well AI can implement this sort of advice given appropriate instruction and examples!