Roger’s $0.02 - Writing Fan Fiction with ChatGPT

Writing fiction is an art. A browse through the NY Times Best Seller list gives you an idea of the width and breadth, and even the quality of fiction for sale. But reading fiction and writing it are two different things. Consuming and processing thoughts and ideas from another person is, from my experience, more effective than thinking, planning, and composing your thoughts on the screen. In my experience, much time is spent scratching out notes, ideas, and writing, and then deleting paragraphs, and the final output often seems small, incomplete, and stored as a text file on Google Drive and forgotten. So, in the interests of reporting back my full creative writing experience with an LLM Chatbot, I said, “Why not. It's not like I have any other ideas for a column.”  And so pressed on into the creative writing circle composed of myself and ChatGPT. Well, maybe less of a circle, more of a co-writer.

When it comes to subject matter, fiction has no limits. You can explore the relationship between humanity and religion by writing about space gods and astronauts, speculating on what a world without Pringles would look like, or even writing slash fiction about everyone’s favorite North American cryptid, Bigfoot. But like any other red-blooded middle-aged American male, I zero in on the one pop-culture topic that binds us and connects Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials. Star Wars. Star Wars is one of the great standard bearers for Fan Fiction writing, along with Star Trek, which is where we supposedly get the term “Mary Sue”, Lord of the Rings, and, of course, Harry Potter. Star Wars has a rich history of both canon and non-canon stories written for it across the Expanded Universe in novels, comic books, and video games. And because Star Wars is more about the universe it inhabits, it offers a colorful tapestry of story lines, characters, places, and enough allegories of the modern world to satisfy George Lucas.

One of the first things I did with ChatGPT was to have it play a role. Being Star Wars, I naturally choose a Jedi. I wrote a descriptive paragraph about the motivations and current situation of the character. I did not initially give the character a name or physical description. Initially, ChatGPT wrote possible scenarios for the Jedi that were not unlike what you would find in an AD&D game, where the Dungeon (Game) Master would lay out a scene and give you two possible paths to take. After a few run-throughs, I decided to change things up a little. LLMs do best with lots of context, so I started writing lengthier descriptions of a scene, including character motivations and bits of dialogue. What I watched unfolding was creatively interesting. Using the information I gave ChatGPT, it would start to build character interaction based on its existing training data. I assume a large amount of ChatGPT’s training data came from popular fiction and lots of fan fiction. Dialogue is something I still have great difficulty writing a great number of characters without most of them sounding or talking in a very similar fashion. Giving characters in an ensemble cast unique personalities without them degrading into simplistic stereotypes is a real challenge. It's why such great writers tend to take such copious notes and devote a great deal of time to researching people and personalities. You can do the most amazing world-building and believable scenarios, but if all your characters sound like they stepped out of an episode of Super Friends, it blows a hole in the verisimilitude of your entire story. And to its credit, ChatGPT did a bang-up job. Not great, mind you. I had to make tweaks along the way, and honestly, I would never publish anything directly produced from ChatGPT. As good as it is as a writing aid, it still has too many issues.

The biggest issue is something that all LLM Chatbots suffer from, and that’s they’re not aware of what they’re producing. In my case, ChatGPT would mistake characters for each other, assigning dialogue from one character to another, misrepresenting a situation, forgetting what a character said or did in a previous paragraph, or what happened in the two previous scenes. Another problematic area is that it recycles dialogue heavily, reusing the same phrases and constantly repeating the same words and actions. For example, ChatGPT has a lot of the characters in my Star Wars story tighten their jaws or cross their arms. In fact, it happens so many times I’ve made it a game to see if the next character introduced will tighten their jaw as a sign of character tensing up or crossing their arms as during a disagreement.

Now, in fairness, everything I’m critical about happens when you let ChatGPT write entire scenes for you. If you’re more heavy-handed and lay out exactly how you want a scene to play out, you’re more likely to get better results. Of course, this is how a writing aid should work. Not doing the work but helping with the mundane or assisting in the writing in areas you feel are not your strongest. Letting ChatGPT have a free hand can give you a mish-mash of different story influences that might be jarring or contextually inappropriate.

For those who find writing more of a chore than a joy, ChatGPT is a handy tool. But if you enjoy writing fictional stories based on existing properties or ideas that are your own, ChatGPT is still a great tool. As I stated earlier, I would never publish anything that ChatGPT or any LLM writes. It’s a great way, however, to outline a story or character arc because you can see how the LLM interprets what you write, which is a great stand-in for a reader. If LLM misinterprets its chances, so might the reader. It also lets you iterate on ideas quickly and efficiently. I could go through three or four different scenarios to see which one read better or made more sense. For train-of-thought writers, it's a great way to move through a story idea. I moved from my initial concept of a wayward Jedi after the Order 66 purge to the story of a lost Imperial pilot looking for redemption and a sense of purpose. All the characters are the same, but as I progressed from story arc to story arc, I found one that had enough legs to continue developing the idea.

My final recommendation is to give ChatGPT if you’re into creative writing. It works better, I found, for that purpose than say Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini. It’s a blast to see your ideas take shape at a much quicker pace than traditional writing approaches allow. If you want to see what I’ve conjured up in less than a week, check out the link. But word-for-word it's unedited. It’s all a stream of Star Wars consciousness. Roger’s Star Wars Fanfic Here.