How to Use AI To Write Compelling Horror Fiction

Full video transcript

Hey, what’s going on everybody. Happy Tuesday two years out there — I forgot which day of the week it was, but hey, Darby Rollins tuning in here with author Kade Scott. We’re going to be having kind of a deep-dive conversation on developing fiction stories using Jarvis, using AI, weaving that into character development, storytelling, and just making your reader’s experience going through your work as a writer that much more enjoyable. Kade has published over 100 short chat fiction stories on an app called Hook, which I’m really excited to learn more about, and recently one of his short horror films had eclipsed 100,000 views on YouTube — that was released back in April. Can you give me a little background on yourself, in your own words, and how you came across Jarvis?

I actually stumbled across it because I part-time for a digital marketing agency right now, and they started using Jarvis and allowed me to use Jarvis since I was the writer of the group. So I started using the templates — I started using it for web copy, for social media copy, Google ads copy, just general marketing materials like that. So in the marketing realm it was great — my projects were sped up, I was writing so much, getting things accomplished in record time, and I started to think: could I do this with fiction? Could I do this with my fiction stories, because I was running into writer’s block there as well, of course. So I just started tinkering around with different fiction ideas, different character development ideas, and started asking Jarvis questions about my story, about my characters, and I was enthralled by what I found Jarvis could do.

Storytelling, screenwriting — just fiction in general, right? You’re coming up with these stories that are designed to capture our feelings and hold this suspense in the term of horror. How are you using Jarvis for these short stories? Like where does Jarvis fit in, in your process specifically?

What happened was I suffered from idea fatigue, and so each day it was, “Oh man, I feel like I’ve already done everything, what’s another idea?” Now I kind of use Jarvis, and I’ve created a recipe that maybe I can share with people afterwards that helps come up with ideas. All you do is type in the genre — say, horror — and then say, “Write five premises based on the genre above,” and it’ll give you a two- or three-sentence outline of a story in that genre. It gave me the experience of writing hundreds of stories and figuring out what works — figuring out what’s a good pacing for a horror story, what needs to happen at the midpoint in order to keep your audience engaged and keep them reading from line to line, how do I tie in the beginning elements with the end so it all makes sense and comes together in an impactful way.

How are some ways that you’re using Jarvis in your writing and your authorship, in your screenplay, to actually make money — just curious how you’re making income as a result of this?

People approach me for short screenplays or short stories, and I use Jarvis as a tool to help me with that.

If you’re looking at a short 5,000-word story, what are the parameters — how does a story like that flow? You mentioned earlier the cadence, and like when does this need to happen in a horror story? Do you have a formula? How would you approach writing a 5,000-word short fictional story, horror being the topic?

I always try to use the same, quote-unquote, formula or framework, and that’s Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. That’s what I’ve found a lot of the Hook stories fell into, but you have to condense it a little bit for that short of a story — there’s only one movement that can happen. Whereas if you look at a film, each scene has its own movement, and when I say movement I mean something’s changed, something has altered the character’s perception or world to where it’s not the same anymore — they can’t go back. In a movie or a novel you’ll have many instances of that; in a 5,000-word story, or a Hook story that’s a thousand words, you can only do that once. So it’s usually one scene, one place — you have your hook at the beginning that immediately grabs your audience, and then that can work as your inciting incident to propel your character forward into the unknown world, to the point where they adapt to that unknown world and either survive it or don’t survive it — regardless, they come out the other end having changed for better or worse. For a 5,000-word or thousand-word short story, you have to make sure the plot is always being pushed forward — that each line you deliver is delivering new information, pushing the story forward. We’re not going back or standing still, it has to go forward.

Would you be down to try and write a 5,000-word short story right now, and like make it up on the fly and actually go through the process? I’m curious how we collaborate in making something like that with Jarvis.

Here’s my recipe that I’ve kind of put together for fiction right now, but for this exercise we’ll use the fiction story idea and outline. I’ll go ahead and run it — so you see here, we could start with an idea, a certain genre, get into a short premise, come up with a title, and then we’ll use that as the title here, and then the premise we’ll use as the content brief, and then we’ll just try to plot it out point by point. I have seven plot points here, at least we can come up with an outline. Let’s stick with four and see what we get. Let’s see — type in the genre: write a list of storylines, psychological horror.

All right, so it gives us three story lines of premises here: a group of teenagers going into the woods for Halloween weekend and getting lost looking for their cabin; you’re driving down a country road and see an abandoned, broken-down house on the side of the road; your plane crashes in front of a small village, and throughout your time there strange happenings keep taking place. This might be a high concept.

There’s a question too from one of the comments — they find that Jarvis works well in a similar way to exquisite corpse writing. I’m not familiar with that term, I just did a quick Google search — is that something you’re familiar with? I’m not familiar with that. So exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver, is a method in which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled — each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule, or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed. Oh, interesting, so it’s kind of like a popcorn story — okay, so it’s when two writers add content together, and one writes something, the next writer — oh, cool.

Let’s just do the plane-crash one and see where it takes us. Okay, yeah, so here’s our premise. All right, I’ll go down here, we can give Jarvis some context as we continue to write, see what we got. Any of these good as a working title? I think “The Strangers in Twilight Village” is the one that makes the most sense — so this will be our working title, “The Terror in Twilight Village.”

Okay, cool. We’ll take out the “your plane crash throughout” and then this is where the interrogation might come into play — what is the terror at Twilight Village — village of witches and warlocks. Oh, it’s coming up with a game — you have to stay in the light, and if you don’t, you’ll get caught by shadows; if you do, you’ll take three turns for them to catch up with you. However, let’s keep it going, see what happens. Nighttime is mandatory, if you miss your sleep, keep reloading until — okay. It’s like, what’s a terrible spell cast by witches and warlocks on this village — what if you’re stuck in a simulation, like inside a video game? Oh yeah, that could be the major reveal at the end — it’s a play test. You wake up, your plane crash-landed in a small village in the middle of the night, but you don’t remember getting on the plane. It’s coming up with a game — hey, let’s do this. Let’s find out who the main character of the story is.

Who’s our hero — a girl named Mitchy, she was just trying to survive what life throws at her. So that’s interesting. I have here, optional: complete the fictional character backstory recipe — but let’s ask her some questions about Mitchy. She wants the safest life possible, doesn’t want to disturb others — force her into this scenario, so let’s just ask why. Shy — okay, super-charged comes up if we just hit Command-J, let’s see what happens, trying to see if it throws out something better. What is the world — mix of modern day, old-fashioned. She fears that her sister might kill her, so we might put her sister on the island.

The reason I’m asking these questions is because I’m trying to get to the core of this character. So I just started with asking who the main character is — Mitchy — and then from there I’m just trying to get to what drives her, what does she want, what does she fear, what does she actually need. And then usually I’ll use that as a jumping-off point to start the plot and tie in the terror to the character itself, because ultimately I want my monster, or my terror or my horror, to connect to some core element of the character himself — to me that’s more impactful. That’s what my idols are doing right now — if you look at Midsommar, right, the main character, what she wants is family, is to belong, is to feel included, and in a weird twisted way, at the end, the cult that she joins and that terrorizes the rest of her friend group includes her, makes her feel like she belongs, to the point where she assimilates with that cult. So the terror kind of feeds into what that character wants.

So right now I’m trying to get at that character’s core, so I can start to connect the monster, the horror, to my character. Darby, you’ve talked about kind of feeling out the content brief — so we’ll add these pieces we found out about our main character, about the world itself, into the content brief, to give Jarvis a little more context, so that when we start plotting out those points, or going through the Story Circle, Jarvis will understand what we’re trying to do.

I don’t want to get at — I’m going to ask it one question: what causes the plane to crash? That might give us something — actually asking ourselves all throughout the story, just trying to find out why this happened and what had caused it. So it looks like it’s reading from over here — at one point she felt like this was her fault and killed everyone on the plane. So here we’re starting to get into some deeper character issues, and trying to figure out how Mitchy’s story may connect to the shadows and the village and the plane crash — maybe she’s haunted by the shadows of her parents, by the shadows of her sister, and they could be a personification of that. There’s a great character moment here.

So now that we have that template, that’s where these three bullets come into play — this is Dan Harmon’s Story Circle right here: a day in the life, an unfamiliar situation, an inciting incident, the character adapts to it, gets what they wanted but pays a heavy price for it, and returns to the old world transformed, having changed. These are prompts to help flesh out those different plot points, and from there I would go in and start writing. But let’s see — this might not be completely relevant to the story, but “work at the bakery, ready for what happens at night” — so I’m just giving context. You can ask if it relates to the character itself, but maybe you should ask this: what’s some background, why does Mitchy get on the plane? Sorry, I came for a church — interesting.

So again, like what we experienced with the character backstory, it’s already prompting the next things. I’m just hitting compose and seeing how far Jarvis will go with this thread. So it’s saying she’s part of the village, which is kind of getting away from what we first had — what are they? They’re not human beings but rather something else — ghosts, ghosts, it’s a good ghost story. Right now it’s getting into a flood narrative, so we have a big chunk of plot points and stuff — again, I think if I were to spend more time with this I would go back through and pick out, like you saw me doing, get really messy with Jarvis and pick out the sentences and pieces that I thought were engaging, that I really enjoyed, that I thought the story was going down and continue to flesh out those pieces. So even though it’s fast brainstorming, it’s kind of going in a different direction, but again, you don’t have to stare at a blank page and wonder where should I go, where can I go — you can go one way, and if you don’t like where Jarvis is going, you can put it and ask another question to go a different way, or you can tinker with the information in the content brief.

Let’s say it seems to think Mitchy’s in the village — if you want to stick with the storyline that she’s on the plane that crashes, take place — so you can clean this up. I wanted to clarify to Jarvis that this is the direction we want to go. She’s trying to survive — let’s take this out actually and just keep the big plot points: caught by shadows, like to be afraid of something, she finds out that — stay away from the shadows before she comes, fears at night. So there’s a nice small character arc.

Okay, after tinkering with it, then I can go back and start the process again and see if Jarvis gives me better direction, and so those could be my beats — those could be the big arcs. Yeah, she quickly finds out that strange things start to happen — shadows are everywhere — energy, so you can again look through this, edit it, and that’s what I do — it still takes a lot of guidance, but you edit it and keep going until you feel like you have a complete story, then you just start filling in the gaps.

So yeah, if you guys are interested in getting the recipes from Kade or myself, or want to jump on these lives with us, comment below, let us know, and really thank Kade for his time coming in with us today. And I will see you guys all at the next live.