This week, we’re doing a mini-series on how authors can use an AI tool like ChatGPT to support their author endeavors without crossing the line of plagiarism, copyright issues or just ethically questionable practices. In this series we’ll be covering how authors can use a large language model (LLM) to act as a personal assistant and a host of publishing pros in your pocket. Without ever replacing the job of a human, these prompts will help you with writing, editing and marketing your book.

In this first part, discover ethical ways to use ChatGPT to assist in your drafting endeavors. In part two, we’ll talk about how it can be used during editing without turning it into a virtual editor. And in part three, we will break down the many ways it can ease some of the struggles around marketing and promoting your book!

So if you’ve been curious, but cautious, about the emerging world of AI, kick off your exploration here!

Editing

No one is advocating for using AI to outright do the job of a human. Don’t upload your book chapter-by-chapter and tell ChatGPT to do all the editing. Not only is this removing the very real personal skilled and trained to do this job, but it’s also going to dilute your work from being your creation to a machine-generated product. It’s likely to be accurate, but also possible that it will read dry and lifeless in the way AI-produced content tends to be. Still, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to make use of the program in your editing process.

Organizing Notes

Raise your hand if you have notes… literally everywhere. Perhaps in an app on your phone, scribbled on a notebook, written in the comments of your document? It is in many writers nature to sort of scatter their thoughts and ideas all over the place. Wouldn’t it be nice if this was all organized and simplified into a digestible format that you can use as you edit your manuscript?

Give it a try. Copy and paste and transcribe all your thoughts and ideas on this project into ChatGPT. It can read something like this in the prompt:

Below are all the notes I’ve written down about a novel I am writing. Can you please organize these into digestible details and, where possible, provide some additional context for anything that might need it. This could include identifying themes you see within the notes. [Copy and Paste all your notes into the prompt.]

This one is too individualized to provide an accurate example, but give it a try! See if ChatGPT can serve as your virtual assistant and take scattered, perhaps sometimes incoherent, scribblings and turn them into a workable set of bullet points that helps you get your arms around all the inspiration that struck over the months you’ve been writing this book.

Analyzing Feedback

When you’re an author, you can get information coming from a lot of different directions. Perhaps you have critique letters from five different beta readers. Using ChatGPT you could upload each of these letters and ask it to look for overlaps in feedback to give you an accurate portrayal of what to focus on. This doesn’t take away from the valuable effort of combing through all the feedback yourself first, but if you’re looking for refined bullets and a specific place to start, this could be a helpful way to aggregate that information into tangible, step-by-step directions.

Fact-Checking

Authors are often shocked to find that even with a traditional publishing house, editors rarely (if ever) fact-check the details of your book when editing. Certainly, if something occurs to them and appears off they would say something, but if you’ve written a story outside their specific wheelhouse of knowledge, they may never pick up on inaccuracies as they do developmental and copy edits. This can result in some unfortunate missteps that don’t come to light until a well-informed reader points them out post-publication.

If you’re working on a novel that requires very specific information and you’re feeling uncertain about the accuracy of your portrayal, try running the information through ChatGPT. This might be of particular interest if you’re writing, let’s say, historical fiction. Ideally, you want to represent the time period your story is set in with as much authenticity as possible, but digging out ultra-specific details, could take a lot of combing through information to find out. And it may not be particularly searchable. Here’s an example:

Prompt: I’m writing a historical fiction book set in France in 1727. I want to write a scene about a woman who is dressing someone’s wounds, but need some accurate historical details to support the scene. I’m curious to know how people would access clean water (if it even occurred to them to do so), what they would use to close a wound, what they would use to bandage it, and what the likelihood of disease and death from a wound was like in those times. 

Here’s a partial sample of ChatGPT’s response:

Accessing Clean Water

Clean Water Access: In 1727, people often used water from wells, rivers, and streams. However, the concept of “clean” water wasn’t fully understood. They might not have been aware of waterborne diseases, and boiling water to purify it wasn’t a common practice.

Treating Wounds

Cleaning Wounds: Cleaning wounds was rudimentary. They might have used water to rinse the wound, but there was little understanding of germ theory. Sometimes, they used wine or vinegar as antiseptics because of their alcohol content.

Closing Wounds: Wounds could be closed using various methods. Stitching with needles and thread made from animal sinew or gut was common. They also used herbal salves and poultices, often made from plants believed to have healing properties.

Bandaging Wounds: Bandages were usually made from strips of cloth. Linen was commonly used, as it was absorbent and relatively soft. They might have also used wool or other available fabrics. […]

You can see how this information would be useful now in writing the scenes. You know they don’t have a conception of germs at this point in history, but perhaps they would have an understanding of herbal treatments for wounds. If you were to try to write this scene with a 21st century perspective, you might describe the scene where the character is boiling water to purify it, but they wouldn’t have been likely to understand that in the 1700s. The scene can be enriched by this knowledge and avoidant of inaccuracies with a little bit of context provided by AI.