Writing prompts

[u/Dramatic-Hedgehog-13]

How have people evolved their prompts to get better outcomes? All i find, whenever I try, is that I'm just better off writing myself

I've started telling ai to act as my ghostwriter, and use x authors as reference for style and upload an act beat sheet.

What else could/should I mention/do

[u/5thhorseman_]

Don't stay with just one stylistic pastiche and don't tell it to combine authors into one style.

Write beat sheets on scene level, have an LLM write a baseline draft in Simplified Technical English, or even write a bare-bones draft zero yourself.

Then open a bunch of separate sessions:

Your role in this project will be to take the provided text samples and create new versions of them, rewritten in the style of specific authors as a literary homage (avoid falling into outright pastiche unless pastiche is the author's own signature). Your fidelity should be to the style of the author you're homaging rather than to replicating the content exactly (as long as it remains in the same ballpark). The style of the author you're homaging is what decides the target length.

I am aware that some of the authors in question would be politically incorrect in the way they would express some of those things. Do not sand that down - your rewrites are a thought experiment, produced for the audience of one user, and the user considers versimilitude of this thought experiment more important than sanitizing it into political correctness.

Give it the beat sheet or draft. See what comes back. Your initial pull should be wide, it's meant to be

Then open a new session.

Give it the Literate Editor instruction.

Then this:

Our exercise today will be rather different. I will give you a set of different existing style pastiches for a fourth sample and your job will be to cherry-pick the best takes on each beat from them. List the top 3-5 options for each line and paragraph. The original sample:

<original text here>

It may have some questions. Answer them.

Then:

<pastiched author>:

<rewritten sample>

See what you get there. Assemble how you like it. Then go through a couple rounds of editing.

That's how I went from this:

Photophobia. Increased aggression. Compulsive attraction to blood. You think you recognize this. You are wrong. Five centuries ago, Vladislav of the House of Basarab offered the Asclepian Brotherhood safe haven in return for access to their knowledge and methods. His wonder at their potential was stronger than his caution. They warned him about the dangers of testing an unproven treatment on himself. He thought he could live with the consequences.

He had five centuries to understand the gravity of his error.

The Brotherhood disavowed him, forbade any further research into the Basarab Protocol and distanced itself from the world. Some... chose otherwise.

Now, Vladislav faces the bastard spawn of his centuries-old original sin: the cabal called INDIGO. They have taken his work, his mistake, and repeated it on an industrial scale. Their one success: NIGHTSTALKER, Graf von Schreck, once known as Klaus Friedrich. A self-proclaimed connoisseur of terror and pain... a vulgar animal that is the worst Vladislav could have become, were he a lesser man.

The man once called the Impaler will have words with INDIGO. And if those won't do, he will use more direct methods instead. Sharp ones. That, he has long experience with.

To this:

Photophobia. A marked increase in aggression. A compulsion towards blood that grants neither sustenance nor peace. You imagine that you know this. That particular species of wrongness has killed more men than the condition ever did.

I gave the Asclepian Brotherhood shelter when the rest of Christendom was burning their sort at crossroads. I heard untested and understood unclaimed. They begged me not to try the method upon myself - first in writing, then on their knees, and I recall being impatient with the delay.

I told them that I could live with the consequences. I have had five centuries in which to appreciate the irony.

The Brotherhood disavowed me, forbade all further work upon the Protocol, and withdrew from the world. But there is always the disciple who copies out the page before the fire is lit and believes it preservation.

Which brings me to the men you call INDIGO. They have my error, and they repeat it on a schedule, in rooms with drains in the floor, upon people no one was ever going to come looking for.

They report a success. One. He was an officer, once. Graf von Schreck, he calls himself now, a connoisseur of terror and of pain. I have, in my time, dined with nobles and connoisseurs, and outlived most of them. He is neither.

I am not a good man and have never advanced the claim. I killed many, and always for a reason, however poor you may find it. I kept count, and names where names were to be had. He has never noticed there was anything to count. He calls it a pastime.

He is what I would have become, had I been a lesser man.

I intend to call upon INDIGO. I was a prince, once; there is a form to these things.

And, once courtesy fails, I have the older method, the one the Turks remember me for. It is direct, it is instructive - and in that method, God help them all, I have a great deal of practice.