- Level:
- Beginner
- Lessons:
- 4 Lessons
Simple Beats
Even one or two simple sentences can lead to exciting prose generation.
- Reading Time
- approx. 2 min
The typical beat for discovery writers/“pantsers”, a simple beat consists of one or two sentences describing what happens next in the story.
It can be as simple as “continue the story”, or perhaps involve two characters and an action, or an instruction to describe a certain aspect of worldbuilding.
Use simple beats when you want to give the AI the most creativity when writing prose, and you do not have a firm image of the scene in your head. As such, expect prose that is aligned with your beat, but that veers off the further the text generation goes. The more words you ask for with this type of prompt, the more it will go from your expectations.
Try running this type of beat twice and see how much changes!
Setup
Given how bare bones these beats are, you will want to include details of your characters and other relevant codex entries in the beat - otherwise your characters may end up waaaaay off, or your diner might suddenly be run by the wrong person! Past context and specificity is key for getting the most out of these beats, so make sure you edit prior words for continuity errors first.
Bob has found out that Jane has a secret phone and wants to confront them about it. When Jane arrives home, there is a twist.
Common pitfalls/troubleshooting
“The prose has gone in a direction I don’t like.”
To remedy this, you could:
- try adding in additional instruction/details,
- delete the text from where it veers off, and starting your next beat from there (think of this as course correction).
“It didn’t write very much.”
Without guidance, the AI doesn’t know how much you want it to write, how long a conversation should be, or how indepth the descriptions you want are.
Sometimes we are too vague, and so the AI doesn’t know where to go - just like a human! We need to be a little more specific and hold its hand.
That doesn’t mean we should go into lots of detail and ruin the simplicity of these beats. It’s more that we can add little breadcrumbs when we see something that we like in any given prose generation.
This lesson was taught by:
Kate Robinson
Based in the UK, Kate has been writing since she was young, driven by a burning need to get the vivid tales in her head down on paper… or the computer screen.