No Stupid Questions

Bro, just tell the damn story you want to tell. Robots will drift toward the most common attractors (aka, tropes and cliches and repetitive phrases) in the language space for whatever genre, tone, style, etc. you prompt for. It will all sound the same and it will suck. You can't tell a good story with that kind of mine field waiting for you to monkey's paw your story. Now, that isn't to say you can use a chatbot as a sounding board for ideas and ways to development them, kind of using it as an anti-oracle. But you have to realize these models are trained on every book they can possibly find. How many of those books are actually any good? And imagine averaging all of those shitty books you would never read together into one distilled, sad mediocrity. That is what the chatbot is going to give you when you ask it to write stories for you.

Weird to frame this in a way where using LLMs is the default way to write. Is this what we've come to as a species?

You shouldn’t write with ChatGPT. That’s easy

Read the book storyworthy by Matthew dicks. Set up a framework for a 3 act structure or heroes journey. Fill in the framework to find your story everything else is gravy. I do this professionally. The steps are simple. But the inward searching of your soul, that's the hard part.

Is the problem motivation, or creativity? For motivation, there's a reason writers in a coffeeshop is a cliche. It helps to get away from your regular situation and just have a notebook and a nice drink. Set a timer and that is your writing time. It doesn't need to be good. You learn to write by doing it, a lot. You can go over it and edit later.

For creativity, read. Especially outside your normal interests. If you don't read nonfiction or fiction, read some ones in the other space. Maybe a text about the history of sailing will inspire ideas for a mystery novel. You also learn what kind of writing you admire, and aspire to. What feels good in a sentence structure, and what doesn't work for you.

Mostly, don't hold too tightly to things if you're just starting. Write a bunch of little stories, scenes, dialog. Maybe one of them you'll love and want to polish up, but each time you write anything, you're learning. Even if/especially if it sucks.

Sometime, find an art blog for someone you admire who's been posting for years, and go back to the beginning and compare. Unless they're an established professional since they started posting, you'll notice a clear difference in quality. The same thing happens with writing.

That's a broad question, man. People dedicate years of their lives learning to write. I don't know if anybody on lemmy is going to be able to answer 'what should I do to write?' Stephen King said in his book 'On Writing': "If you don't have time to read, then you don't have time to write." I would start with reading books, some of which could be about writing, and maybe taking some classes at your local community college. Khan Academy also has some free courses for writing, I think.

I would get into fanfiction, both reading and writing. Places like Ao3 are so batshit insane, that they sort of force you to recalibrate creativity for yourself.

Just write for fun, don't carry any baggage about turning it into something serious or long term. You'll randomly get feedback to improve (some good and some bad) and soon you'll recognize what you value in feedback and what you don't.

You'll also start recognizing stories that you like and that you don't like. Use those moments as opportunities to really sit and figure out why you like and don't like those stories. Imagine how you would improve them or write them differently.

Eventually, you'll find that you have your own ideas, your own voice, and opinions on what makes a piece good or bad.

Just start writing whatever you want.

This is the second unhelpfully vague question you've posed today about writing.

So it would seem the first thing you need to do is to look up resources on effective communication and on accurately identifying problems/goals. Because I'm unclear as to whether the problem is that you don't know what you're looking for when asking these questions, or that you do know and for some reason assume that we can read your mind and know it too even without your properly describing it.

I am not a writer myself, so take this with a grain of salt, but it might be better to just start writing things down in a short framework, even if elements of the story are missing or incomplete. Like you may think about a specific scene/situation so you can jot that down, then you might write something like "there would be a problem that caused X character to be here" just to have a placeholder so later you can come back and replace it with something.

Also consider that studies have shown physical activity can help stimulate your mind. So maybe go for a walk to think about your story or what you want from it

Now writing with LLMs is a bad idea. However, if you set it up right, you can use an LLM locally downloaded as a tool to point out errors, mistakes, and other quirks, to help with your writing style.