Using AI to Write a Fiction Story

Full video transcript

Hey, what’s going on everyone, Darby Rollins here with Zachariah Stratford. Hello, hello. We’re having some technical issues with my camera for the streaming platform, so yes, face made for radio. There you go.

Now we’re hopping on today to showcase, or play around with, a new tool that Conversion AI just came out with called the Creative Story template. That template came out after sticking Jarvis in a room all weekend with some very famous fiction writers, to see if we could pull some more fiction-style storytelling tactics that we could build off of. This is literally my first time really running through the tool, so I want to just take it as we go and see how we might build a fiction story using Conversion AI.

Zachariah, give me a topic to start playing with, let’s see what we can come up with. Well, you know me, I’m a longtime Twilight fan, so why don’t we play around with vampires. Vampires, all right, doing what, what’s the plot here? Try vampires in the White House. Let’s see if we can get pretty vampires take over the White House, maybe funny. Yeah, like silly or funny would be great.

Let’s see what we’ve got. I mean, I love this for our authors, it’s just amazing, especially the fiction writers who are going to be on the Book Path, or anywhere else, or even in our seven day challenge. I think this is just a wonderful, really cool, fun tool.

Here’s what it gave us: “It was supposed to be a normal day at the White House with the president, his wife, and their two kids. Bad as it was out there in America, they woke up and found that instead of their own family running the White House, vampires had taken over and were ordering everyone around like servants.”

Okay, let’s hit the output a couple of times and see what we come up with, and see how we can build on this. Let’s say: “And I’m prepared for what happened next. The noise coming from outside is probably just the dog… his heart was beating in fear that somebody might break into the house. The man got up with caution, making sure to keep one hand rested on the gun. These days you can’t be too careful.”

Okay, so that one cuts off a little bit, but that’s amazing, that you can enter that and it gives you a sort of start. So how might we use this to combine some of these together? Maybe what we do is input… I don’t know if this will be too much, so that’s less than 400, let’s see where this goes, let’s see if it continues the plot.

“The president’s family and all of America will be in trouble, the president said as he woke up from his nightmare. Maybe they just want to take over for a day or two and show us how easy our lives are when we’re not fighting for them, she considered it for a minute before nodding her head in agreement. They both slipped out of bed and snuck into their children’s rooms before waking them up quietly, so they wouldn’t wake their grandparents who were staying with them while on vacation from Russia. It took some convincing to get them to go downstairs without…”

So interesting. I think if you’re going the fiction route here, without a real plot in mind other than vampires taking over the White House, could we try — I want to see if it’s better with just a single sentence. Can we try another topic? Let’s see, beavers in Texas, I don’t know, help me out here. Unicorns in the CIA, maybe.

“Unicorns in the CIA.” I wonder if we could also play around with going more the children’s route, like if we had fiction writers writing a children’s story. Darby, can you make that bigger, I’ll read it out. “She was born and raised in a town called Sabrina. The problem with that is everyone else in Sabrina had her same name. It got so bad that she refused to even say it in public for fear someone would think they were talking to the wrong person. A few years ago she moved to Washington, D.C. where she’s been able to live under the radar as far as names go, until now, when word leaked out about her new job at the CIA. There was no avoiding it, she’d been attending orientation, telling them her full first and middle names, Abigail… Abby.”

That has nothing to do with unicorns, right? Very little to do with the CIA. I wonder if it’s the story is more believable if that would help, if we phrase it inside of a sentence. Let’s do that.

All right, let’s see, “The story of Rich Rock.” “He had one dollar and a dream, which is a score of a deal on Shark Tank with Mark Cuban. Rich Rock packed up his suitcase full of money in different denominations and set off for LAX. It took him two days to get there by boat, because he stopped at every country along the way to make sure they knew about his business venture. He told them that if they invested in it, they would become rich rock stars like him. After arriving at LAX, Rich Rock got right in line outside the airport, when suddenly an officer came out and said, ‘Sir, are you aware that it’s illegal to transport currency across state lines?’ Rich Rock replied smugly…”

Okay, I think maybe that’s a little better if we give it more context, it’s like the intro to a whole story. Now how might we take — let’s see if we just take the last sentence. “Rich Rock replied smugly. Rich Rock, a small-time crook with big-time ambitions, liked to think of himself as a worldly man, but his travels had been limited. He sat in the backseat of his car. Today was different, today his smugness would be put to the test. You cannot believe how…”

It’s kind of diverting here, taking it in a different direction than I would expect, but it’s almost like you’re inserting a piece of the story and it’s giving you the beginning right there, the intro. It kind of reminds me of the intro paragraph, it would be fun to let Jarvis start a creative story and then you just fill in after the fact.

I think if you’re writing short stories, where you’re just looking for the adventures of this person or that person, or a different plot to travel down, I’ve never written a novel so I don’t know how many plot lines and characters need to develop inside of that, but again, this shows how great this tool is for helping people with ideas.

Let’s take the last line: “Rich Rock, a small-time crook, this is going to be an unforgettable trip. He decided it’s time to take a drive, he got in his car…” It’s taking kind of the same thing there. “He was going to be unfortunate because he took the day off work, but he could just enjoy himself.” It’s obviously not trying to pull facts, it’s definitely making a story up, it’s just going to be your job as the conductor of the tool to expand on things and direct the story as you get inspired and see fit.

That’s cool, I’m excited to get this out to our authors, I think they’ll really enjoy it, this tool is pretty cool. A lot of the things we’ve been coming up against, when it comes to getting a book out or a story in general, is that writer’s block, so if you’ve got an idea for anything, this is pretty neat, especially for opening up the front phase of things.

Let’s see, “unicorn… lego… after arriving in LA…” I wonder if this would work similar to the sentence expander. “Wait in line 45 minutes, and by the time he reached the front of the line it was well passed. ‘Sir, are you aware there’s little currency…’ ‘I’m just here on vacation,’ Rick Rock said. I don’t know, I’m just making this up. Rich Rock was on a vacation to Millionaire Ville.”

Okay, so I think the short of the plot is, let’s just let it go from there. “Rich Rock is on a vacation, a millionaire billionaire, went to his lavish hotel suite the next morning with three zeros added to his bank account balance overnight, thanks to an overnight deposit of three hundred million dollars from a Russian investor who just came into some money and wanted to share it around.”

Well, that’s nice. So happy, he gave everyone a tip, a thousand each for maids, bellboys, valets, and all those folks who made millionaires feel at home. I was glad that they all seemed happy with their tips.

That one is a little off, I think the shorter the plot input, the better. If it’s a little bit shorter it’s kind of like the sentence expander, the content improver, where it’s taking a little bit and expanding on it.

“Rick Rock, so happy, he gave everyone a tip… on a cruise, his wife is generous… everyone appreciative of… ‘Rich Rock, are you having fun,’ asked another guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt with sunglasses, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t sunny at all outside, who then walked away without getting anything from Rich Rock. People started coming up to Rich Rock more often because they saw how much money he had given out so far and wanted some for themselves too. Just before dinner time, though, someone stopped him in his tracks…”

So the plot of this next intro would be Rich Rock giving out millions before breakfast. “But Rich Rock was a pro. When you’re five, his day started with an hour of training on his one-man space station before breakfast, and he had already given away millions of dollars in charitable donations by the time they brought him his oatmeal. He also managed to read more books for fun while eating cereal with milk. After that he went to work, where he invented nine new products and made more money than anyone else in the world combined. When lunchtime rolled around, Rich Rock spared no expense in buying one million sandwiches for people who didn’t have much food or jobs, so everyone would have enough food for dinner too. It was now snack time and Rich Rock had been…”

I like that one the best, I think that’s my favorite: Rich Rock is just a little kid who’s balling out, inventing stuff and reading books and giving out millions of dollars before breakfast. Since you can add on to here as well, I’m wondering if we could just use this as the starting point, one output, and how you’d stack, add more, and keep Jarvis in the same storyline. You could have a separate doc and keep it rolling.

“Let’s say, ‘Free money,’ Rick Rock said, tossing hundreds like confetti. There’s not always dinner time… “ We copied this, came up here, and did that, so now it’s: “It’s hard to sound like a badass when you’re five, but Rich Rock was a pro at it. His day started off… when lunchtime rolled around, no expense spared, Rich Rock, a famous millionaire…” because he’s a five-year-old millionaire. “Arrives with a big grin on his face and sits down to eat. He pulls out his pockets, just waiting for a meal, and throws hundreds of thousands there like confetti. The people at the table, looking around, not sure what to do, suddenly yell ‘Free money!’ and begin sprinting towards him, knocking chairs over on the way. Within seconds everyone is running after him to grab the remaining piles of cash. What happened to everyone, where’d they go?”

So it doesn’t always make sense, which I wouldn’t expect it to since it’s not reading what came before, it would be nice to see if we could have an example story down here that it would follow along with. But either way, for just getting your creativity flowing, and coming up with a unique story around an idea you have, it’s a great way to just get started. I never would have thought of any of this.

I think this is great, and I’m really leaning toward children’s books with this Creative Story template, though I think you could do a lot with it for any fiction, really. I think the tone of voice we’re playing around with lends itself more toward children’s content. Let’s keep playing with this, and we’ll throw this in the group and see what everyone else comes up with, what cool fiction stories we can have come from this.

This is Jarvis’s mastermind, very cool, let’s see it, all right.