I find the biggest issue with ChatGPT is that it tries to finish the story too quickly. I’ve tried similar prompts as this, but it very quickly skips to the last chapter. I’ve tried ”wrote the first page out of 10” and stuff like that, even asked it to state which page it is on, but it almost always skips to the next chapter too early.

One trick I’ve found to make the stories less bland and more detailed is to not give it the outline. Just state what kind of story you want (like genre, setting etc) and then ask it to write 2 or 3 paragraphs. Adding instructions like ”vividly describe in detail” and ”include a lot of dialouge” and such helps. Another one that helps is to tell it to not use any phrases previously used, but you have to remind it constantly, so prompting it with something like ”Continue with the next 2 chapters. Don’t use any phrases previously used” helps a lot. You can also steer the story a lot during the continue prompts, but the steering wheel is very sensitive. Small hints can derail/change the story a lot, but stating explicit things works much better, like ”Continue, [main characters name] is walking to the office” will probably not derail the story.

Writing a story like this is a lot of fun, like steering a boat but you’re not sure exactly where you’re going :)