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Create AI Writing Prompts using ChatGPT and Jasper | Recipe Rockstar Mastermind
Published March 16, 2023 · 808 views on YouTube
Key takeaways
- Start with an existing template or framework (here, Dan Harmon's story circle) rather than building a writing structure from scratch, since the structure itself is often the hardest part to work out on paper.
- Copy the framework's context and section descriptions out of the source tool (Living Writer) and into a Jasper document, then mirror that same context into a ChatGPT conversation.
- In ChatGPT, prompt with the context above and ask it to create a template or storytelling framework that includes prompts inside each section the AI can use as reference points to write the content.
- ChatGPT will bullet out a prompt for each section of the framework based on the context you gave it, effectively turning a static template into a reusable, promptable recipe.
- Once built, this recipe only has to be created once and can then be copied and reused, saving time on every future story written in that format.
How do you turn an existing story template into a reusable AI prompt framework?
Copy the context and section descriptions from an existing template, such as Dan Harmon’s story circle inside Living Writer, into ChatGPT, then prompt ChatGPT to reference that context and generate a version of the template with a prompt embedded in each section. ChatGPT returns a bullet-pointed prompt for every stage of the framework, which becomes a reusable recipe.
Why start from an existing template instead of building one from scratch?
Building a writing workflow or framework from nothing takes real mental effort to get onto paper, sometimes a lot, sometimes less depending on how simple the process is. Starting from a template someone else has already worked out, like the story circle, skips that groundwork. The story circle is an approach to plotting that Dan Harmon, creator of Rick and Morty, adapted from the hero’s journey. It lays out a cyclical narrative arc: a character ventures out to get something, gets it, then pays a heavy price for it.
What are the setup steps for building the recipe?
- Open the source template. In this example, the story circle template lives inside Living Writer, which pre-populates an outline with sections like “zone of comfort” and “they want something,” each already carrying some description and context.
- Export or copy the template content. Living Writer lets you export a story with chapter titles, chapter notes, and a table of contents, though the exported version doesn’t include the chapter context, so copying each section’s description directly may be needed instead.
- Paste the context into Jasper. Open a Jasper document inside your organized project folder and paste in the story circle context as a starting reference point.
- Mirror the same context into ChatGPT. Copy the same context block into a ChatGPT conversation so it has the same information Jasper has.
- Prompt ChatGPT to build the framework. Use a prompt along the lines of “referencing the content above, create a template or story circle storytelling framework that includes prompts inside each section that AI can use as reference points to prompt itself to write the content.”
- Review the output. ChatGPT returns each section of the story circle with a bullet-pointed prompt underneath it, for example telling you to introduce the protagonist and describe their everyday life inside the “zone of comfort” section.
What does the finished recipe actually save you?
Once the recipe is built, it only has to be created one time. After that, it can be copied and pasted into Jasper or a Google Doc for every future story written in that format, saving the time that would otherwise go into re-deriving the framework and its prompts from scratch each time.
Does this approach work for frameworks other than the story circle?
The video demonstrates the workflow specifically with the story circle, but notes that the same approach of feeding ChatGPT context and asking it to generate prompts inside a template should apply to building frameworks for pretty much anything.
Full video transcript
What I wanted to explore on this call today was how do we take a template that somebody else has already done a lot of the work for. If you don’t have a template built out, often that’s the workflow you need to get on paper, and it just takes brain power to do it. Sometimes it takes a lot more, sometimes it doesn’t take as much because it’s a more simple process.
What I have been finding with ChatGPT is that you can use it to generate frameworks based off of context that it knows, and then you can also use it to prompt itself to create prompts that would then be used inside of the framework or template, if you will. So I’m showing how I’m doing it with one of these. This story circle is an approach to plotting that Dan Harmon, the creator of the TV show Rick and Morty, adapted from the hero’s journey. It lays out the narrative arc — it’s commonly used by stories and myths from all over the world. The premise is that almost all forms of storytelling have a cyclical nature: the character ventures for us to get there, they need it, the character gets it, and pays the heavy price for it. So basically a modified version of the hero’s journey.
Now, here is context that we can give the AI in terms of a little bit more detail on what this is all about. So I’m going to first and foremost go ahead and copy this context and open up a Jasper document, so that I could start the process of how I’m going to approach building this out as a recipe. I’m going to have a ChatGPT doc open, fingers crossed that it’s not at capacity and I’m able to get in.
I’m going to open up my Recipe Rockstar Mastermind project because I do recommend you keep your projects organized by different sorts of things you’re working on — different books, different clients, that sort of thing. You open up this document and just start by pasting that in here — this is going to be a story circle recipe. I’ll go ahead and copy — that’s too much right here, so I’m just going to leave that up top, tab back to Living Writer, and now I’m going to click create. Whenever you create something inside Living Writer, it essentially pre-populates the entire outline.
There we go — zone of comfort on the left-hand side, they want something. Check this out: the people at Living Writer have already done a lot of the description and the general idea about what this stuff is. So you’ve got zone of comfort, chapter one, and you would add your chapter here with the news, so as we start to fill out the content we can put it there. I’ll be adding the prompts and stuff into here, so that we’ll be building out the series of prompts that we’re making this with.
Then we’ve got “they want something” — something is off balance in your protagonist’s universe or life, the protagonist wants something. This could be obsessing over someone they love, a magical artifact — for example, in Harry Potter, an external force like Hagrid draws Harry in. Each one of these sections is already coming with these levels of context, and that’s what I’m looking for here, rather than copying and pasting all of this stuff over. I actually haven’t tried doing this with everything just yet, but if you go over here to “story, download” — like I said, if you’re writing a biography or a thesis or something, and that makes more sense for you, maybe you don’t play around with the Living Writer template here in making a recipe. We don’t get to that necessarily today, but when you export it, as you fill out your Living Writer with content, as you export it you can export the entire story with chapter titles, chapter notes, and an end-of-story table of contents. This is going to give me everything I need. You can see you export it and it’s going to have your table of contents, but it doesn’t have any of the chapter context there necessarily — not a problem.
All I’m going to do here is copy and paste this over — say for example, zone of comfort, and then I’m adding that over here. I’m just going to quickly do a new chapter, “they want something” right here, so right here beside this. I might as well just copy and paste it into Jasper — I’m actually just going to do that so I’m not overly repeating myself, because I think that’ll be a faster workflow. So I’ll start with zone of comfort — that’s just going to be phase one of the template. So, zone of comfort, and copy that right here. These are going to be the things I’m going to want to be creating a framework around, and ultimately prompts to use as something we can refer back to quite often.
Zone of comfort, they want something, they enter an unfamiliar situation — you can see this does have some parallel to the hero’s journey, but different formats for expanding on the story. So that’s the reason I want to do this now, and why I like recipes so much — because I only have to do it once, and then I can have it just copy-paste, instead of Jasper in my account or on a Google Doc. Relatively speaking, I’m saving a lot of time by doing this for myself, if I’m going to write a lot of stories in this format, which I might, if this recipe works the way I hope it does.
Let’s go here — pay the heavy price, just copying and pasting back and forth, no real rocket science going on just yet. Forever changed, all right, reflection — we’re almost there. Going all in in this last section, put them through the ringer, it’s your chance to make it up to the reader. Okay, cool. All right, so now we’re set inside of Jasper — it’s got our story circle up top. What are we creating?
So I’m going to start here and just say context, because whenever I’m writing I want Jasper or ChatGPT to reference this. All right, so let’s do this — what I want to do now, if I want to turn this into a recipe, obviously I would need ways to prompt the AI to help me with the different phases of this structure. So this is in Jasper right now, but I’m going to go ahead and copy this, open up ChatGPT — I’m pretty sure this same approach will apply to creating frameworks for pretty much everything, so I hope you find this as cool as I do.
Context, zone of comfort — so here I’m going to go ahead and do a little command symbol. By the way, Jasper — you can just have it type in all of these other things you’re doing, like inside of Google Docs, you can write with Jasper. I don’t know if you can do it instead of Living Writer. Maybe — look at that, how cool is that, you can use Jasper inside of Living Writer or inside of Google Docs, inside of your Gmail, probably inside of pretty much every app. You might need to have the Jasper Chrome extension for this to be activated, but if you haven’t seen that, pretty cool feature.
Coming back — it’s going to cause some issues if I’m pressing that button on accident. I’m going to say “referencing context, create a…” — so I use this prompt command, whatever you want to call it, to make basically a 10-part framework for an email follow-up series for real estate agents doing lifestyle email follow-ups for leads that are considering moving to their city. Like legit, made 10 fresh templates with this prompt based on pretty much nothing.
So I started that template that I just pasted in there, with hopefully what I’m going to find after this. I’m going to say: referencing the content above, create a template or story circle storytelling framework that includes prompts inside each section that AI can use as reference points to prompt itself to write the content. Okay, I’m going to start with this because I think ChatGPT will run it — perfect. So what ChatGPT is doing right now, it’s taking that context that we had above and now it’s coming back in and it’s bullet-pointing out what can be viewed as prompts for each section. If you have a zone of comfort, it’s saying, okay, inside of this zone, knowing what I just gave it above, you want to introduce the protagonist and describe the everyday life — like in the hero’s journey, Ordinary World, introduce your protagonist.
And so now I’m breaking down that template from Living Writer, the story circle from Dan Harmon’s structure for the show Rick and Morty, which I’m sure other people have modeled for creating other shows, and I’m breaking it down for the first time into these prompts inside each section based on what I need for that section. Now I might want to expand on this a little bit, but that was step one, where I started playing in ChatGPT, and I was like, that’s pretty cool. I don’t know if anyone else thinks that’s kind of cool, that ChatGPT is able to reframe and build these on top of it. Let me know if it’s giving you any ideas for other frameworks that you’re going to test this out with.