Over the last year, advances in artificial intelligence have been moving at a mind-boggling rate.
AI has clearly arrived, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
In fact, as more and more software—everything from Zoom to MS Word—incorporate AI into their interface, it has become almost impossible to avoid.
That means it’s time for writers to stop being afraid of AI and instead try to embrace the ways we can use it as a tool to support our imagination, creativity, and storytelling.
In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I explain how authors can harness the power of ChatGPT to improve the environmental descriptions in their writing.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #192 Show Notes
Registration for the March 2024 edition of Story Plan Intensive is now open!
The Writing Coach Episode #192 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
We are gearing up for the March 2024 edition of Story Plan Intensive. We’ve got hundreds of folks signed up. I am excited.
Story Plan Intensive is my four-week free email training program where every day, Monday to Friday, I send you emails with links to writer’s craft training videos, culminating in a creativity-inspiring assignment on Fridays, all of which leads to the development of an incredible outline for your book by the end of the month. If you haven’t done Story Plan before, now is the time. Get signed up today.
A while back, I did an episode of the podcast called Should Writers Fear AI?. It was when AI was just getting on my radar. I wasn’t all that familiar with it, and I was just tentatively dipping my toes into the water of the world of AI and exploring it and seeing what was what. That was maybe six months ago.
Then, three months ago, I taught a webinar where I went over how I was using AI in terms of research and some other techniques that I was incorporating into my workflow. Even then, I was still hesitant about it, tentative about it, fearful of it certainly.
While I perhaps remain fearful of it, it’s been not even a year, but it’s now completely unavoidable. AI is everywhere and it is improving at an incredibly rapid pace.
Just to give you an example, in my group coaching programs, we record the video for the calls, but we also record the transcripts so that folks can go back over the transcripts and read things if they prefer to learn in that manner. And so the tool I use for that is Otter. Just in the last six months, more and more Otter has been incorporating AI into this transcript development process.
For example, it would pull together a nice summary of the call or it would identify some action items, and Zoom started doing the same thing. From week to week and month to month, these summaries just get better and better. Then just last week I noticed a new feature. There’s an AI built right into Otter. I went in and I said to Otter, “Please review the last week’s worth of coaching calls that I’ve recorded and identify all the really good tips that I shared.” Ten seconds later, I had a list of maybe 20 bullets of advice that had come up in group coaching and one-on-one calls. That sort of thing is so valuable for me and for my clients.
Otter certainly isn’t alone. I’ve noticed in WordPress, if you’re a blogger, there’s AI built in there now.
If you have the latest version of Microsoft Word, there are all kinds of AI plugins you can plug in to support your writing there. Tools like Autocrit have incorporated it. Whereas it was this kind of strange, scary thing six months to a year ago, it’s now everywhere.
As scary as it might be, I think it’s impossible to put your head in the sand and not acknowledge that it’s here and it’s never going away, and it’s going to transform everything. I really encourage folks to familiarize themselves with it and try to get over the natural fears that come along with it.
Anytime we get new technology, it’s scary, and sometimes it goes wrong like we’ve seen with social media. A decade ago, we all thought social media was the greatest thing ever and was going to bring the world together. And of course, what we’ve discovered is social media has largely made the world a worst place and has influenced all sorts of crazy things that none of us ever anticipated.
Might this AI tech go wrong? Absolutely. It might. We’ve seen tech go wrong recently. That said, it’s difficult to ignore social media’s existence or pretend that it will go away. It’s similar with AI.
Put yourself into the mindset that it’s just another tool.
When the word processor came out, I’m sure there were a lot of writers who said, “Forget that! It’s too easy to revise it. It allows me to just write crap and fix it too easily. I’m sticking with my typewriter. My typewriter makes me think and make sure every word is clear.” Perhaps there’s still some people out there working on typewriters, which is super cool, but the reality is the technology was superseded by word processors.
Choosing to use a word processor isn’t cheating. It’s not having a computer write your book for you.
It’s just using the technology available. At the end of the day, writing on a computer is easier and more effective writing on a typewriter, and I think that’s the way it’s going to be with Ai.
Can you avoid it? I thought that was going to be an option six months ago when I was talking about this stuff. I thought, yeah, you can choose to use it or choose not to use it, but the more and more software build these AI capabilities into it, whether it’s Word, whether it’s Zoom, whether it’s whatever, I really think it has become unavoidable.
And so let’s embrace it.
In this episode of the podcast, I want to talk about a way that writers can use AI and Chat GPT to really build out the environmental descriptions of their book.
Back in episode 164 of the podcast, I identified what I considered to be the key literary elements, the eight items that we use to tell stories. You can go listen to that episode, but I’ll go over them really quickly. Again, they are: environmental description; physical actions and character blocking; dialogue; point of view character sense descriptions; thoughts and feelings; narrative exposition; big voice narration; and recipes, rules, instructions, lists, and rituals. Anytime you’re writing a scene, those are the eight types of elements that you can pull from to tell your story.
Most writers are comfortable with a handful of those elements and less comfortable with other ones. When it comes time to do revisions, it’s often important to look at your writing and say, “What am I good at? What am I leaning into, and what’s missing?”
For example, many people love writing dialogue and are often pretty good at writing physical descriptions. So you might look at a scene, and 80% of the scene you wrote might be dialogue and people moving around, which means you are neglecting those six other literary elements.
One of the literary elements that I think is most important that people almost never give as much attention as I would like is environmental description: sentences describing the environment in which a scene is taking place.
Perhaps one of the reasons why people often avoid this is maybe it’s a little more difficult than writing dialogue. Maybe it takes a little more thought or even some research, which brings me to a moment I had when I was writing my first novel.
I was writing a scene that needed to take place in a barn, and for whatever reason, I just could not get my head wrapped around the interior of a barn, and what sorts of things I should be describing. And so I got this idea. I said, “You know what? There’s this new thing called ‘Google Images.’ I’m going to go over to Google and I’m going to do a Google image search for “the inside of a barn.”
I typed inside a barn into Google, I hit enter, boom, and suddenly I’m looking at hundreds of images and photographs taken from the inside of barns. All I had to do was look at these different pictures, see what aspects of them inspired me, and then return to my scene and use that to build out the environmental description of the inside of the barn that this scene was taking place in.
Now, this approach is so standardized in the fine arts where you look at a nude model and you sketch them, or you look at a bowl of fruit and you paint it. There’s this long tradition of looking at reality and then trying to replicate it in fine arts. For some reason in literature, I think sometimes we come into it with this idea that everything has to be pulled from our imagination, and that using reference material or even research is somehow cheating.
I don’t consider doing research for your novel or looking at a picture of the inside of a barn cheating any more than looking at a model and then sketching that model is cheating. It’s not. It’s just part of the artistic process.
So this brings us back to Chat GPT and AI and how it can support your writing.
Step one here is really to recognize that when you’re writing, not everything needs to be spun out of thin air. You can use references to help inform your writing.
Cut to earlier this year, a couple of months ago, I’m writing a scene, and it’s set in a purely snow-covered environment. I’m looking for things to say, I’m looking for things to describe, but it’s basically just endless white everywhere my characters look.
I go over to Google Images and I search images of the North Pole. I’m kind of seeing some interesting blues and purples in the sky, maybe, but it’s a lot of white and a lot of ice.
So I get this idea. I go over to Chat GPT, and I type, “If I was walking in the North Pole, what might I see?:” Chat GPT gave me five or six paragraphs of things I might see in the North Pole, and most of it was stuff I could have guessed, but there was a couple of words that they used. I forget exactly what it was. I think it was something like “cracks and crevices in the ice.” Instantly I was like, “Oh, oh, that’s what I was looking for: cracks and crevices in the ice!” I went back to my scene and suddenly my scene was alive and was able to build out this environment based on the inspiration and the language that Chat GPT had given me. I was able to move on with my scene and create some great environmental description.
Now, here’s the really interesting thing. Not only can you do the same thing for anything you are writing. If you’re writing a scene set in the library, you could go to Chat GPT and say, “What are the types of things I might see inside a library?” You can also do this for things that aren’t real. So for example, preparing for this podcast, I went over to ChatGPT and I said, “What would the house of a witch and a dragon living together with a werewolf butler on the moon look like?” Here’s what chat GPT gave me. Here’s a small portion of it. It actually gave me a bunch, but here’s a little taste of it:
The bedrooms are cozy sanctuaries, each reflecting the unique tastes and personalities of their occupants. The witch’s chamber is adorned with colorful tapestries and overflowing bookshelves while the dragon’s layer is adorned with treasures plundered from distant galaxies. The werewolf butler’s quarters are simple, yet elegant with a comfortable bed and a small collection of lunar artifacts.
I’m pretty sure, obviously, no one’s ever written a book about a witch and a dragon living on the moon with a werewolf butler, and yet the AI was able to come up with some interesting phrases and some interesting ideas here. Maybe you take the words “colorful tapestries,” maybe you like the sound of that. Maybe “treasures plundered from distant galaxies,” that’s and interesting the way to fill out the dragon’s room.
Keep in mind that you can use chat GPT to stimulate words and to stimulate ideas for internal descriptions and for environmental descriptions for things that don’t even have to exist.
Now, let’s push this even further. Let’s talk about another way that we can continue to use the AI to build out our environmental descriptions.
You’ll remember that one of the literary elements that we discussed at the beginning here was point of view character sense descriptions. As you’ve seen so far, we’ve only been talking about one sense: sight. We said, what does the inside of a barn look like? What does the house of a witch and a dragon on the moon look like? Well, guess what? We can expand that out into other senses.
We could ask Chat GPT “What might I smell inside a barn?” We could ask, “If I am on the moon with a witch and a dragon, what might I hear?” If I were to eat a cake designed by Martians who have landed in West Virginia, what might that cake taste like? We can use the AI to help stimulate ideas and to give us words.
Now, let’s continue to push this even further.
We’ve used Chat GPT to give us some ideas for not only what we might see in an environment, what we might hear, what we might smell, and what we might touch. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of mood and how word choice and sentence structure inform the emotional resonance of a scene for readers. So again, when we’re going back to Chat GPT here, we don’t just need to say, “Describe what it’s like inside the principal’s office of a high school.” We could say, “Describe what I might hear, smell, taste, touch, or see inside a principal’s office in a high school . . . and make it scary. Or make it funny.
We can think about what is the mood of the scene? What is the vibe we’re trying to create? What is the emotion we’re trying to evoke in the reader? And Chat GPT can give us specific words, not just specific ideas in terms of what might be in any location, but also what words we can use to describe that location to continue to build out a mood and a feeling for our story.
Is this similar to taking a thesaurus off your shelf and flipping through it? Absolutely, it is. But guess what? It’s a heck of a lot quicker. If you want to say, “That’s cheating, I’m going to stick with my thesaurus,” go for it. But guess what? It’s going to be a little bit slower.
Not everything in life needs to be fast, but I can tell you writing a book is very challenging, and most of the writers I work with have a lot of stories they want to tell and a lot of projects they want to complete. If they can do something like use AI as a thesaurus rather than pulling a thesaurus off the wall, and it makes things a little bit quicker for them than I say, go for it.
All right, so Chat GPT is here. AI is here. More and more, it’s being integrated into all the tools that we use on our computers. We can’t avoid it, so we might as well use it. Hopefully in this episode of the podcast, I’ve shown you a really simple way that can use the AI to stimulate ideas and get some research material for environmental descriptions to help flesh out those sense descriptions, to really make an environment feel alive for our reader, and then give us some ideas for the synonyms and the word choices that we can make to give that environment a certain mood, a certain feeling in the reader.
All right. Let me know how you’ve been using AI. If you’re scared of it, if you’re familiar with it, if you’re rejecting it, or if you absolutely love it. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reach out to me at kevin (@) kevintjohns.com. Send me an email. I would love to hear from you.
This stuff is moving so quickly from week to week. I’m seeing the AI doing new things, offering new abilities. It’s mind-boggling, and I’ll go back to it. Yeah, yeah, it’s a little scary. It’s a little strange. Coming off of the high of social media, thinking, social media was so great only to see it crash and burn and really largely be a detriment to society—absolutely, that’s in the back of my mind every time I pull up Chat GPT. That said, it’s here, it’s available, and if it can make our writing lives a little bit easier, or if it can help stimulate creativity, if it can help us tell better stories and more easily communicate the narrative that we have inside of us and that we want to get out of our bodies and onto a page and into reader’s hands, then so be it.
We’re coming up on the beginning of the March 2024 edition of Story Plan Intensive. It’s my free four-week writer’s craft training program. You get daily writer’s craft training videos from me, weekly homework assignments, and by the end of the month you have a rock solid outline for your next book. I think you will love the program, so get registered for Story Plan Intensive today.
That is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
