Getting more out of ChatGPT:

I have a confession to make, in preparation for this post, I have been working with ChatGPT on my own time. Shocker, I know! After my experience trying to learn about flash fiction the other day, I wanted more. Honestly, I needed more.  I resisted the urge to take to the web and start reading stories and exploring online articles on how to create flash fiction. Instead, I stuck to my guns and dove back into using AI to learn.

Now that I have more specific resources and examples I feel I’m ready to give writing flash fiction a shot. Don’t worry, as always, the full ChatGPT logs from my sessions are available at the end of the post so you can see how I went from getting general advice and knowledge to dialing in on more specific examples.

My AI-Assisted First Draft:

Below is my attempt at a first draft of flash fiction based on the items I’ve learned from ChatGPT. I’ve mentioned this before but we’re going to be sticking to flash fiction for this example. It’s easier for me to write and work on short examples and it’s easier for ChatGPT to analyze shorter amounts of text. I’ve also decided to leave this text below as an unedited piece. What is here is a first draft, we’ll go through and edit this story into something more substantial in my next post.

Without further ado here is my first  AI-assisted writing sample:

“A Cocktail a day”

The harsh fluorescent light shone through the empty bag hanging above his bed. He reached up and tapped it with a bony finger and sighed,
“A cocktail a day keeps the cancer away.”
He turned away, closed his eyes, and felt his heartbeat to the drum of the monitor.

It’s short, not so sweet, and gets the point across. It took me longer than I would like to admit to write that one paragraph but that’s part of the experiment! It needs some work, but I know that’s a good base to build off of.  In the next post, I’ll be using ChatGPT to help edit, and flesh out the base of the story.

For those curious about how I was able to get more specific writing resources, attached is the ChatGPT log!

Link to the ChatGPT Discussion:

ChatGPT: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnHinTJ3CWhKmyo3meUcipN2hwBI?e=r7aaln