writing

Gulf City Blues Revision Stage One

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues a month ago. I set every first draft aside for a while after I complete it. For previous stories, I’ve only taken a couple of weeks before I start revising but I’ve always been too close to the story when I return to it. This time, I resolved to spend a month letting the whole thing go. It wasn’t easy. After the first week, I felt like I was wasting time. Especially since I’m unemployed right now, I felt like I should be taking action. But especially since I’m unemployed right now, I took other action—like looking for work while also trying to build my side gig up.

After two weeks, the feeling faded. By last week, I’d developed a healthy distance from the story. I have the right balance of fondness for it and its characters vs. the understanding that the narrative structure will certainly need to be adjusted. Waiting any longer means my interest will start to wane as other ideas emerge from the primordial soup of my mind.

My first step is to read the whole thing straight through, without marking anything up. I want to remember what I’ve written and evaluate it from a reader’s perspective. Then I can start working on the superstructure. Do I have the right scenes, in the right order, to tell the story I want to tell? That’s the question I want to answer in this draft. I expect that I’ll find there’s a lot to adjust. Once I complete the first read-through, I’ll go through it a second time. The second read-through is where I’ll determine what scenes I need to drop, add, or move. Those notes will guide the work of structural revision.

I have no idea how long it will take. I’m not going to push myself to complete it by a target date. That has never worked well for me. I’ll aim to write a target number of words per day, whether that’s in the form of exploratory writing in the notebook or manuscript words, or a combination. Steady pace with focus will create a healthier experience. Once I’m done, I will let it lay fallow again. I might need a second structural pass, or it might be ready for a revision that focuses on scene-level structure. I won’t know until I get there, and I won’t worry about it until I finish this draft.

I’ll keep you posted.

Ideal Day

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
View all responses

This prompt reminded me of an exercise a friend introduced me to: “the ideal average day.” Rather than describing the most perfect day you could ever have (which is how this prompt initially read to me), you think about the kind of day you’d like to have, on average, every day.

I like that focus better. The “most ideal” is a day you’re going to have once if you’re lucky. It may be unattainable and then you’re chasing something you can never have. And if you achieve it, it’s all downhill from there. Regression to the mean applies to more than statistics.

Rather than thinking about what the best day ever would look like, I prefer to consider the whole of my life. What’s my ideal daily experience?

What’s Important?

To answer that question, I have to first think about what’s important in my life. Sweetie. Creative expression. Learning. An income.

Yes, I would like an income. As a recently-laid-off guy, I miss the regular paycheck. (Or will once the severance runs out.) Do I want a job, in the form of a forty-hour a week gig? I am looking for one, and I will certainly take a suitable one when I find it. Unless I have another means of making money.

My ideal average day includes the things that are important to me, and it somehow includes an income. For this exercise, I want to envision an ideal average day where my income derives from my creative endeavors.

Morning

I wake up around six. Coffee is waiting for me because Sweetie gets up before I do. Don’t @ me; I’m not being sexist. She’s a morning person who gets up at least an hour before I do and she makes coffee. We have our coffee together if she hasn’t already had her two cups. Then we go for a walk together, pet the neighborhood dogs and cats, and come home for a light breakfast. After washing our hands, in case you missed the part about the neighborhood dogs and cats.

After breakfast, I take about an hour to write in my journal. That often segues into creative exploration that bridges into the rest of my morning’s creative expression. Most likely, that’s writing, although occasionally there’s a computer program I want to work on.

Afternoon

After I wrap up my creative morning, it’s time for lunch with Sweetie. We make it together. She tells me about her morning, spent in the garden. She’s seen new growth on her plantings, caterpillars going into chrysalis, and dozens of birds in the yard.

After lunch, I study or do research. Learning feeds my creative mind. Then I turn to business matters. Remember that income I mentioned? My creative work feeds it, and so I have to attend to it. The afternoon is when my analytical mind is at its strongest and the creative mind is quiescent. I leverage that pattern to play to my strengths.

Evening

Dinner with Sweetie. We cook together again, except on the nights when we visit our favorite restaurant. (Good Intentions. Try it. Your taste buds will thank you.) After washing up and doing whatever other daily housekeeping chores need doing, we go to the living room. The television is tuned to a soccer match. I’m not paying attention to it but I like the background sounds as I read fiction, or play a computer game, or write some more. Between 9:30 and 10:00, I brush my teeth and climb into bed. I sleep well.

Persona prompting

Sam Falco

In a recent post on using ChatGPT, I covered four prompt patterns I’d used for a specific task. Today, I want to elaborate on one of them. The persona prompt pattern is enormously useful, and I’ll take a deeper look into how to use it.

What is it?

The persona pattern is named for what it does: it instructs ChatGPT to respond as a specific person or type of person. ChatGPT’s training data is vast. As a result, it can be difficult to get it to focus on what you want. The persona prompt channels ChatGPT to select the kinds of details it should focus on as it generates its output. Focusing the output also helps when you aren’t sure what type of output you want, but you do know the kind of person you might ask for those details. For example, you might not be sure what to describe at a murder scene, but you know that a homicide detective could tell you what’s important and what’s not.

Pattern Structure

The structure is simple: “Act as a {persona name},” replacing the curly bracket text with whatever you need. “Act as a homicide detective…” in the example above. Then you follow it with the body of the prompt. Here’s an example:

Act as a medical historian and outline the important events in 17th century Europe.

You’ll get information about the Great Plague of London, the development of microscopy, and advancement in understanding human anatomy, among other topics. Omitting the persona produces output that describes events pertaining to wars, politics, and arts in addition to mentioning the effects of the Great Plague.

You can also append a prompt with this structure. For example:

The protagonist in my novel is a gambling addict. What are some things she might do to hide her problem from her family? Respond as a behavioral psychologist.

The last statement executes the persona pattern.

Variation: Outputs

A variation on the Persona pattern can help you narrow your scope, especially if you’re not sure what you want. The variation looks like this: “Provide outputs that {persona} would create.” Here’s an example:

My character wants to help a struggling student improve her grades. Provide outputs that a teacher would suggest.

I’m not a teacher, so I might use this prompt to know what kinds of assignments, exercises, or other tools a teacher might provide to the student. Then I could focus on the ones that support your story.

Uses

You can use the persona pattern to support your writing in many ways. Here are some things I’ve done with it:

  • Research assistant. While working out what a fictional Florida city might look like, I didn’t know how to start. I prompted ChatGPT to answer as an Urban Anthropologist and tell me factors I ought to consider.
  • Sounding board. “I’m having trouble coming up with a red herring for a mystery novel. Ask me questions about my plot from the perspective of a mystery reader until you can suggest some options for me.” That combines the persona with another kind prompt pattern, flipped interaction. ChatGPT probed what I already had in the way of plot twists before suggesting options that got my thinking started again.
  • Character development. I’ve provided the LLM with some details of the character’s background and psychology and then asked it to respond to questions as that character. That has helped me generate new ideas to deepen backgrounds, suggest motivations, and dilemmas the character might face.

You can combine multiple personas to examine a question from different perspectives. In the city-building example, I didn’t stop at Urban Anthropology. I also asked about the city from the perspective of the 19th century robber baron who founded it, a 1970s civil rights activist, and a teen who lives there today. Those outputs gave me fresh ideas to pursue.

These three ideas only scratch the surface of what you can do with the persona prompt pattern. Try it out, and please leave a comment telling me how it worked out for you.

Cheat GPT

Sam Falco

“But isn’t that cheating?” a writer friend asked when I mentioned that I’m learning to incorporate ChatGPT into my writing workflow. So we’re not friends anymore.

No, no, that’s not true. We had a fascinating discussion about it. I won’t try to reconstruct it, but I will dig into why I’ve come to embrace a tool that I, too, was skeptical about when it burst onto the scene not long ago.

And I was skeptical. Very. My initial experiments with ChatGPT produced poor results. Media portrayals of how it worked were shallow at best and often wrong. That, and what I saw people doing with it, led me to think of it as a plagiarism machine. After I explored its capabilities a little more I changed my mind. While it can be used unethically, that doesn’t change the value of the tool, and I don’t think it’s “cheating” to work with it.

CNC Routers and Woodworking

Bear with me on a digression. One of my hobbies is woodworking. That community has a lot of people who believe that using power tools isn’t “real” woodworking. It’s not butch enough if you flip a switch; you must do everything with hand tools. Of course, if you drill into that opinion (YSWIDT) you discover that they can’t back it up with much more than “because it makes it too easy.” Weird flex, my dude. (It is almost always a dude.) Do you fell your own timber, then mill it from the trunk, and so on? What does “too easy” mean?

But even people who accept power tools often balk at one in particular: the CNC router. A CNC (Computer Numerical Control) router uses computer code to cut complex shapes into and out of wood. Using a CNC router allows woodworkers to create amazing designs and shapes that would be difficult if not impossible to create by hand. An easy way to start an argument in the woodworking community is to talk smack about CNC machines, either pro or con. And the most common criticism is that using one is “cheating.”

That’s a load of crap. When you use a CNC machine, it’s only doing what you tell it to. It’s still executing on the decisions you make and the design you give it. It expands the range of what you can create. And by “you,” I mean “not me,” because I don’t have space for one in my shop. But I’d get one if I could.

ChatGPT is a Power Tool

Using ChatGPT is more complicated than using a CNC. You can’t put a slab of wood onto a CNC, turn it on, and expect something to emerge. Whereas with ChatGPT, you can certainly give it a shallow prompt and it will generate output that looks like something a human might have written. It looks like something that a particularly ignorant first-year high school student might have written, but it’s something. But ChatGPT is tool that can help you create something with greater detail and depth than you could without it, so in that way it’s similar.

Using ChatGPT looks like cheating because it seems like you’re getting something for nothing. And it’s fair to say that some people are using it that way. I don’t even have to cite any examples; you’ll probably see an article in the news *today* about how someone tried to pull a fast one with ChatGPT and it blew up in their face. Because ChatGPT is so much more robust at simulating human thought, it’s easy for people who are lazy, unethical, or both, to use it poorly.

It’s only “cheating” if you use it to cheat–such as trying to pass off its writing as your own. But that’s simple plagiarism, and it’s wrong whether you’re buying a term paper from a human writer and turning it in with your name on it or having a computer create the paper. Using ChatGPT as a sounding board, or a way to challenge your thinking, or to enhance what you would do on your own without it? None of those examples is “cheating,” unless you want to be like the weirdos who look down on people who use table saws.

Learning to use Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT will change the way you work. Word processors did, too. So did the invention of the disposable ink pen, and the fountain pen, and so on. The tool is an extension of the user. Learning to use ChatGPT doesn’t make you less of a writer; it only makes you a different kind of writer. It isn’t cheating. It’s adapting.

Are you using ChatGPT? What difficulties are you encountering with it? Leave questions in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them in future posts.

77,752: The End

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues moments ago. I need to take some time to reflect on the process and so on, and I will certainly do that. Right now, I’m basking in the satisfaction of completion.

I’m especially happy that I wrote a solid ending. That’s always a challenge. I tend to describe my endings as “crash landings.” Early drafts are the worst, but I have declared project “done” even though I wasn’t happy with an ending that feels abrupt and lacking something. To finish a first draft and think, “Yeah, that has legs” feels so good.

I always take time off between drafts. At least two weeks, but preferably a month. I like to empty my mind of the whole story before I come back to it. Attention residue is proportional to the size of the project, and two weeks usually isn’t enough to stop thinking and rethinking the plot.

I had planned to use the time between to revisit world building for the novel. But I’ve changed my mind. I might waste my time on things that aren’t necessary for this story, and keeping my head in Gulf City will make it hard for me to forget the story I told. It’s time to let everything about Gulf City lay fallow in my mind while I attend to other things.

How I’m using ChatGPT, and how you can use it, too

Sam Falco

Yesterday, I wrote about using ChatGPT as a sounding board to develop writing topics. I used this prompt:

Act as a conversation partner as I think through a topic. Your goal is to help me explore the topic and clarifying my thinking for something I might write about. Ask me one question at a time. After I respond, comment on what you think I mean and ask me if I want another question. Ask me for a topic.

Today, I’ll break down why I structured the prompt the way I did. If you’ve been wondering how to get started with ChatGPT, or tried it and gotten lackluster results, I hope seeing how I use it will help you find a good use for it.

General Principles

Before I dig into the individual components of the prompt, it’s important to understand a few general principles of working with ChatGPT.

First, be specific. The prompt above is focused on a single objective: to explore a topic that I provide. If I had been struggling to identify a topic, I’d have created a different prompt.

Second, give the tool a clear task. In my prompt, I tell the tool what its objective should be. One challenge people have when using ChatGPT is that they aren’t clear about the output they’re looking for and get results they can’t use.

Finally, remember that the tool is only as good as the data it has been trained on, and a lot of that data isn’t very good! ChatGPT doesn’t “know” things; it can only generate text that probably addresses the question it is being asked. It isn’t a search engine, and if you aren’t careful with what you ask it, it may generate bullshit answers. I once asked it what it knew about me as a writer of roleplaying game material. It constructed an elaborate bibliography of award-winning Dungeons & Dragons publications. Not only did I not write them, but none of them existed. So you have to be responsible for checking its output and making sure it’s good.

Prompt Patterns

User input to a Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT is called a prompt. Learning to create effective prompts is called prompt engineering. That subject is beyond the scope of this post, not to mention beyond my current ability to explain. What’s important is that part of prompt engineering is learning to use conversational shortcuts known as “prompt patterns.”

Prompt engineers have identified many prompt patterns and continue to identify new ones. I know of almost two dozen. But don’t worry! You only need a few to get started, and I’ll explain some of them in this post.

Prompt patterns can be used individually. They can also be combined to create more robust interactions. In the prompt I identified above, there are four: Persona, Flipped Interaction, Cognitive Verifier, and Tail Generation.

Persona

“Act as a conversation partner…”

In this phrase, I’m instructing ChatGPT to respond as if it is a particular kind of person. The Persona pattern restricts the output to what someone with the named background or skillset would know and how they would respond. Here, I want ChatGPT not to answer questions for me but to engage in back-and-forth with me as if it were a human and we were chatting over a cup of coffee.

Here are some other examples of using the Persona Pattern:

  • Responding as a dental technician, tell me what questions I should ask at my next cleaning about how I can improve my gum health.
  • I am going to have my kitchen remodeled. Acting as an architect, tell me factors to consider that I might not know about.
  • As a nutritionist, tell me what considerations I’ll need to make if I shift to a vegan diet.

In each prompt, I’m providing perspective to the tool to guide its output.

Flipped Interaction

“Your goal is to help me explore the topic and clarifying my thinking for something I might write about. Ask me one question at a time.”

This phrase shows a kind of prompt pattern called “flipped interaction.” The idea is to have ChatGPT ask you questions, rather than the other way around. It’s a great technique when you aren’t sure exactly what you want to ask and need to dial in your topic.

In this case, I’ve implied the flipped interaction rather than explicitly asked for it. ChatGPT understood my request probably due to the prompt being part of a larger conversation where I’d used the pattern already. You may find that you have to be more explicit in your instructions. For example, when I was needed to flesh out the fictional city for my current novel, Gulf City Blues, I use this prompt to start:

I am writing about a fictional city on the southern Gulf Coast of Florida. I don’t know what world-building factors to consider. Ask me questions about the kind of setting I want until you have enough information to make recommendations. Ask me one question at a time. Ask me the first question.

Those last two instructions aren’t always necessary, but I rarely omit them. Without the first of them, the tool usually spits out a long list of questions. That can be helpful if I want to see what its train of thought is but usually it’s a distraction. Without the final statement, sometimes the tool responds with enthusiasm that it would love to help me and then waits for me to nudge it again to start.

Try flipped interaction when you want ChatGPT to question you about a topic rather than questioning it.

Cognitive Verifier

“After I respond, comment on what you think I mean…”

This statement is a form of the Cognitive Verifier pattern. The intention is to help the LLM understand what you’re really looking for instead of answering the surface question with the easiest possible match. It’s sort of like talking to a trusted advisor who is willing to dig into your problem rather than give you a quick answer. In my case, if ChatGPT’s response had been off topic, it would allow me to rephrase my response.

Another way to phrase a prompt using Cognitive Verifier is:

Whenever I ask you a question, generate a number of additional questions that would help you generate a more accurate response.

Tail generation

“… and ask me if I want another question.”

Tail generation is a prompt pattern to remind ChatGPT of what you’re trying to do. That’s especially useful for long conversations, because ChatGPT starts to forget what you’re talking about after a while. By telling ChatGPT to ask me if I want another question, I’m making sure it will keep going until I’m satisfied with the output.

Other Prompt patterns

As I said above, there are dozens of prompt patterns, and data scientists continue to discover new ones. Some don’t have much use to me, but there are others that I use regularly. “Outline expander” helps you build and flesh out an outline. I’ve used it when I’m crafting new workshops. “Question refinement” instructs the LLM to suggest a better version of the question you’re asking, which often results in more useful output.

I encourage you to try the ones I’ve outlined here. Try them individually and in combinations. See what works for you and what doesn’t. Then explore other patterns. Generative AI isn’t a fad, although the hype surrounding it often makes it seem that way. It’s not going away. It’s a powerful tool waiting for you to learn to use it.

Sisyphus with a pen

Sam Falco

Yesterday, I realized that I hadn’t written a blog post since Monday. I should write something, I thought, and within minutes of putting pen to paper, I ran into a familiar challenge. Although I had a topic in mind, it was too broad. The more I wrote, the more subtopics popped up. It was like playing whack-a-mole, but the moles were hydra heads. Knock one down and two more take its place. Worse, I’ll realize that I need to go back and expand on an idea even more.

This phenomenon happens when I write just about anything. I’ll try to dissect a broad idea into manageable pieces. Each piece reveals more, often interconnected ideas. The enormity of the task overwhelms me, and I often give up.

I’ve experimented with various techniques for generating focus. Handwriting on paper forces me to slow down but slowing down only helps a little. Bullet-point outlines seem like the answer until I start writing from one and realize that I’ve missed something. Mind mapping ought to help but only produces its own chaotic web of thought. The only benefit seems to be that I get frustrated and give up faster, which saves time. “It’s a great way to visualize your topic,” I’ve been told. For me, it’s a great way to visualize my inability to focus. It’s discouraging, to say the least.

The best thing is to talk through the topic with someone, then write the ideas down as quickly as I can afterward. That’s great if someone happens to have the time and inclination to indulge me. That’s not always the case and it’s not reasonable for me to expect people to be a sounding board for me at all times. I’d need an entourage, but how could I afford to feed them all? 

I do have an OpenAI account and a subscription to ChatGPT, though.

I disdain the use of Large Language Model tools to replace human writing. Using it as an aid to writing is different, and ChatGPT excels at being a sounding board. When this very post threatened to get out of hand, I decided to give the chatbot a try. Here’s the prompt I started with:

Act as a conversation partner as I think through a topic. Your goal is to help me explore the topic and clarify my thinking for something I might write about. Ask me one question at a time. After I respond, comment on what you think I mean and ask me if I want another question. Ask me for a topic.

The result was a series of exchanges in which the tool helped me sort through all the things I might want to cover. After eight questions, I had a clearer grasp of what I wanted to say and started writing this post. I don’t know why I have so much trouble focusing. One possibility is… (BAD SAM, LEAVE IT!) … a topic I’ll have to explore another time. Meanwhile, I’m glad I’ve discovered a new tool to help me think and write with clarity.

Dropping out of warp

Sam Falco

Last weekend, I joined the members of my critique group for a writing retreat. Over four days, I logged thirty hours of writing and added 9,000 words to my manuscript. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re in a house with three other writers and no one wants to break anyone else’s focus. Coming home to a normal writing schedule of about two hours a day feels like dropping out of warp speed.

I’ve begun every session of this project by writing, “My primary objective is to write an enjoyable PI story.” Every prior attempt to write a novel has been haunted by the ghosts of my graduate studies in literature. No matter what I wrote, I felt I ought to be writing something with deep significance. I never could live up to the ideal, and I berated myself for it. Filled with despair and self-loathing, I’d shift the story toward a didactic theme. Characters turned into mannequins and plots turned into lectures. I’d hate every minute of it, veer back toward more adventure-style fare, and begin the cycle anew.

With this story, I wanted to remind myself every day to focus on writing a story people would enjoy. “Social significance” would have to emerge—if it emerged—on its own. The mantra did help in that regard. Police corruption is an integral part of the plot, but the story is not a lecture about how All Right-Thinking People Must Stand For Justice. I’ve built characters with interesting motives, flaws, and strengths and let them interact.

But this weekend, I realized a curious thing had happened over the course of writing the first draft. My objective shifted from “write an enjoyable PI story” to “write 80,000 words.” The shift translated at first to setting a punishing daily goal. Even after I moved the target date to the end of January, I still focused on the target total. I wrote a lot of material not to serve the story but to pile up word count. If my focus really had been on writing an enjoyable story, I’d have stopped, re-examined my plans and the state of the story, and adjusted what I was writing.

It’s funny because I chose one word in my objective deliberately so I wouldn’t worry about length: “story.” I didn’t say I wanted to write “an enjoyable PI novel.” I chose the word “story” because I wanted to leave it open to finding the right length. I wasn’t sure whether it should be a short story, a novella, a novel, or a series. But once I recognized it was going to be a novel, I focused on the target length and sacrificed good storytelling.

Today, there’s not much story left. Mark knows who the killer is and needs only one crucial piece of evidence to prove it. There’s one subplot to wrap up—will he reconcile with his ex-girlfriend? (I don’t know yet.) Two to four scenes will take care of plot and subplot. Regardless of the final length of the draft, I will type “The End” once I write them. If the book is too short, well, there’s another draft after this one, and I can worry about it then.

2024: The Year I Don’t Write a Novel

Sam Falco1 Comment

Every year, I tell myself that this will be the year I write a great novel. It never quite works out that way. The truth is that I don’t so much “finish” a novel as “get bored with and abandon” novels. I am always looking forward to the next one. The one that’s going to be so great, not like the puddle of puke I’m working on now. The next novel will flow from my pen like liquid chocolate, rich and delightful. It will not take much revision because I’ll do it right this time.

Of course, that never happens because first drafts are never like that.

And then my mind is looking forward to the next thing, instead of working to refine and improve what’s right in front of me. It’s as if, having arrived at an oasis in the desert, I go chasing the mirage of a bigger, better oasis that might not exist.

This year, I am not resolving to write a new novel. I’d like to finish Gulf City Blues without rushing it. I’d like to set it aside for a month and not start the next thing, so that I can return to Mark Marshal and his problems without having another story gnawing at me. I don’t know what I’ll do with the down time. I might take that time for related research, or to develop elements of the setting that I know need attention. But I won’t start a different project.

When I come back to the story for revision, I won’t rush that, either. A few pages a day is plenty. If it takes months, then it takes months. Maybe it will take the rest of the year. Maybe it will take longer. I don’t care. I can’t rush through stories anymore only to abandon them before they get good.

60,000+ words

Sam Falco2 Comments

I ended yesterday’s writing session thirteen words shy of 60,000 total. Today, I blasted out over a thousand. I am 76.25% of the way toward my target or 80,000.

Three-quarters of the way through a story is roughly where heroes are at their lowest. They have failed, utterly. They are farther from solving the riddle, answering the question, or discovering the mystery than they were at the start. They’ve lost everything–which is why this beat is called “All is Lost” in the Save the Cat storytelling framework.

I honored that “rule” of fiction by destroying my protagonist’s world. His apartment and his car are in flames. He escaped the blaze wearing only a pair of shorts–no shirt or shoes–and carrying the gun he managed to grab on his way out. Having pushed away all of the people in his life, he has no one to turn to. Oh, and he’s wanted by police, so having a gun isn’t going to do him any favors in a few minutes.

The next 20,000 words are going to be a hoot.