Episode 218 - Story Bibles and How AI Can Help with Kaylin Tristano
December 26, 2023
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Kaylin Tristano discusses STORY BIBLES AND HOW AI CAN HELP. If you’re tired of discussions about AI, you’ll find plenty to interest you in the first half of our conversation, and if you’re not tired of AI, you’ll find some great tips for uses of AI for authors that go way beyond the creation of story bibles. We start out our conversation discussing story bibles in a more traditional context, including what information is important to capture, and how much is too much; capturing story bible details during a proofread (or proof listen); and expanding our idea of story bibles beyond text to include things like maps and audio. In the AI-focused part of our conversation, we discuss tips for prompting; the need to babysit AI; using AI for brainstorming; concerns about AI and piracy; and how the different AI platforms use your data.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
"That's kind of the challenge with AI in general, is it's an amazingly powerful tool that can help you save a bunch of time, but you also have to babysit it, at least at this point in the game, because, yeah, it gets bored and it starts hallucinating, or it starts doing a bad job, and you have to keep it on task." —Kaylin Tristano
Kaylin Tristano is an indie author who has been writing contemporary romance and romantic suspense as Cara Malone for the past 7 years. She is also a freelance editor with Happy Ever Author, specialized in helping other indie authors produce great books. She has a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's in library science.
Links
Kaylin's Links:
http://caramalone.com
http://happyeverauthor.com
Mentioned in the Interview:
https://coggle.it/
https://claude.ai/chats
Hard Fork Podcast on Spotify
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
http://caramalone.com
http://happyeverauthor.com
Mentioned in the Interview:
https://coggle.it/
https://claude.ai/chats
Hard Fork Podcast on Spotify
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kaylin! Do you use a story bible? If yes, what is a best practice we didn't mention? Have you used AI as an assistant in some of the ways Kaylin describes? If yes, what was your experience?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
AI-generated Summary
Are you an indie author seeking to reshape your scriptwriting process? Have you considered using Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Whether you are a seasoned author or a newbie, Kaylin Tristano brings innovation to the table in her recent chat with Matty, the host of The Indy Author Podcast.
Kaylin is an accomplished indie author known for her contemporary romance and romantic suspense novels written under the pen name Cara Malone. With a background in writing and library science, she also works as a freelance editor at Happy Ever Author, helping other indie authors produce exceptional books. Kaylin shares her journey into using AI to develop story bibles—a cornerstone tool for authors to streamline their projects.
The Classic Art of a Story Bible
In the traditional sense, a story bible is a guide that helps authors maintain consistency within their narrative. It is especially useful for series, allowing authors to maintain accurate details throughout the chronology of the story. A story bible typically houses information about each character's physical descriptions, personality traits, habits, and history. This information can also extend to the setting and timeline of the story.
Kaylin pointed out that although templates are available on platforms like Scrivener, authors should not limit themselves. One could integrate spreadsheets, mind maps, images of characters, and even maps of story locations. This not only results in a more elaborate story bible but also makes it interactive and fun.
The Role of AI in Script Writing
Where does AI come into the picture, you might ask? Specifically, it comes in handy in automating and improving the process of creating a story bible. When an AI platform like Claude or ChatGPT hosts an entire novel, it can generate a character list, summarize important events, or provide detailed descriptions, all at the author's request.
AI offers an efficient method of asking precise, unambiguous questions to obtain required information. For instance, Cailin uses the prompts "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned" and "Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book" for story bible creation.
The inclusion of a large context window (currently 100k tokens in Claude and 90k words in Playground by OpenAI) allows authors to paste extensive chunks of their novel for AI processing. However, the generated output should be carefully reviewed and babysat, as AI has been observed to make up its own answers, a phenomenon known as "hallucination," particularly when left for extended periods.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Piracy
The fear of piracy is a major concern for authors venturing into AI platforms. However, as Kaylin reassured, platforms like Claude and OpenAI clarify how user content is handled in their terms of service.
Basically, on both Claude and OpenAI, you retain all rights to your content. Neither one uses the content added to their platforms without explicit permission. So, authors can feel secure while using these platforms to augment their story bible process.
In Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has promised to significantly transform the writing process. While the technology is still evolving, it offers an innovative means of streamlining the creation of story bibles without draining an author's energy. As Kaylin puts it, it's about leveraging a powerful tool to save time and make the author's job easier.
What are your thoughts on the use of AI in your writing process? Now might be a great time to explore the plethora of opportunities AI opens up for indie authors!
Kaylin is an accomplished indie author known for her contemporary romance and romantic suspense novels written under the pen name Cara Malone. With a background in writing and library science, she also works as a freelance editor at Happy Ever Author, helping other indie authors produce exceptional books. Kaylin shares her journey into using AI to develop story bibles—a cornerstone tool for authors to streamline their projects.
The Classic Art of a Story Bible
In the traditional sense, a story bible is a guide that helps authors maintain consistency within their narrative. It is especially useful for series, allowing authors to maintain accurate details throughout the chronology of the story. A story bible typically houses information about each character's physical descriptions, personality traits, habits, and history. This information can also extend to the setting and timeline of the story.
Kaylin pointed out that although templates are available on platforms like Scrivener, authors should not limit themselves. One could integrate spreadsheets, mind maps, images of characters, and even maps of story locations. This not only results in a more elaborate story bible but also makes it interactive and fun.
The Role of AI in Script Writing
Where does AI come into the picture, you might ask? Specifically, it comes in handy in automating and improving the process of creating a story bible. When an AI platform like Claude or ChatGPT hosts an entire novel, it can generate a character list, summarize important events, or provide detailed descriptions, all at the author's request.
AI offers an efficient method of asking precise, unambiguous questions to obtain required information. For instance, Cailin uses the prompts "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned" and "Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book" for story bible creation.
The inclusion of a large context window (currently 100k tokens in Claude and 90k words in Playground by OpenAI) allows authors to paste extensive chunks of their novel for AI processing. However, the generated output should be carefully reviewed and babysat, as AI has been observed to make up its own answers, a phenomenon known as "hallucination," particularly when left for extended periods.
Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Piracy
The fear of piracy is a major concern for authors venturing into AI platforms. However, as Kaylin reassured, platforms like Claude and OpenAI clarify how user content is handled in their terms of service.
Basically, on both Claude and OpenAI, you retain all rights to your content. Neither one uses the content added to their platforms without explicit permission. So, authors can feel secure while using these platforms to augment their story bible process.
In Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has promised to significantly transform the writing process. While the technology is still evolving, it offers an innovative means of streamlining the creation of story bibles without draining an author's energy. As Kaylin puts it, it's about leveraging a powerful tool to save time and make the author's job easier.
What are your thoughts on the use of AI in your writing process? Now might be a great time to explore the plethora of opportunities AI opens up for indie authors!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Kaylin Tristano. Hey, Kaylin, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Kaylin: Hey, I'm good. How are you?
Meet Kaylin Tristano
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Kaylin Tristano is an indie author who's been writing contemporary romance and romantic suspense as Cara Malone for the past seven years. She's also a freelance editor with Happy Ever Author, specializing in helping other indie authors produce great books. She has a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's in library science.
I invited Kaylin to the podcast to talk about story bibles, and we're going to discuss traditional story bibles as well as how to use AI to help create story bibles.
What made Kaylin decide to use the pen name Cara Malone
[00:00:37] Matty: But I had to start out because I met Kaylin as Cara Malone, and now I've spent, I don't know how long, maybe a year or something like that.
[00:00:44] Kaylin: At least a year.
[00:00:45] Matty: Yeah, so inevitably I'm going to call you Cara at some point. But I had to ask, Kaylin Tristano is such a great name. What made you decide that you were going to use a pen name?
[00:00:55] Kaylin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So really, the only reason was because I have my master's in library science, and in my experience looking for jobs, librarians aren't particularly forgiving if you appear to be interested in anything other than library science. I've been doing this for almost 10 years now, so maybe it's changed, but back when I worked as a librarian, I thought that it was important to keep my resume as Kaylin Tristano, strictly library science.
[00:01:24] Matty: That makes sense. And you'll forgive me if I call you Cara periodically throughout our conversation.
[00:01:28] Kaylin: I mean, like you said, I've been doing this for seven years, so I feel like Cara just as much as I feel like Kaylin.
What is a story bible?
[00:01:34] Matty: Okay, good, good. That'll make it easier for me. So we had been spending much of that year having almost daily writing sprints. And in one of those writing sprints, we got talking about story bibles, and you had some background in that. So I just wanted to invite you to chat a bit first about traditional story bibles. Well, let's start out saying what a story bible is, and then what made you decide that this was something you needed for your own work?
[00:02:00] Kaylin: So I imagine that story bibles are a lot of different things depending on the author you're talking to and what their particular needs are. Essentially, it's just a guide that you can reference that tells you the important details of your book. Most of the time, it's used in series. For example, if I was going to write book five and needed to refer back to book one and be like, "Oh, what type of car does XYZ character drive?" That's the type of detail that I personally would put in a story bible.
I'm a contemporary romance author, so a lot of my stuff is that kind of background and also chronology—when does a certain thing happen in the story, what happens in my characters' backgrounds. Things along those lines. But if you're a sci-fi fantasy author where you're creating worlds, then your worldbuilding would also go into your story bible, things like that.
And the reason I personally felt I needed a story bible was because instead of writing book one in the series, then book two, and then book three, where everything was constantly top of mind, my writing schedule involves different series. I write book one in series A, then maybe book three in series B, and then back to series one—I kind of rotate. So I needed a refresher on all those small details. That's why I started using story bibles.
[00:03:36] Matty: Did you have a standard list of fields that you collected, like eye color, hair color, height?
[00:03:43] Kaylin: Yeah, a lot of the stuff you would find in a character questionnaire or something like that. I like to use models for my visual cues, so I'll model a character after a particular actor. That way, I can look at a picture of them and remember what the visual cues are supposed to be. But yeah, age, race, sexual identity, jobs, education history, pets, hobbies, all those kinds of things.
[00:04:16] Matty: And then do you update that? For example, let's say someone has a pet in book one, and then something happens to the pet, and they get a different pet in book three. Do you have a way of accommodating those kinds of changes that happen over the course of the arc?
[00:04:32] Kaylin: I do. I try to incorporate that into my process, so I'll either do it right when I'm done with writing that book. Sometimes I capture those details as I'm going along, but you get into the zone, and you're writing, and you don't remember to jot down every single little detail. If I'm being a really good author, I do it right after I finish writing the book. But more often than not, I get lazy and I do it right before I write the next book. So I'll just reread the previous book in the series and jot down all of my series bible information.
Tools to create story bibles
[00:05:03] Kaylin: That might be a good time to mention there are different ways to keep a story bible. There's software you can download specifically for that, and I believe there are a number of them. I use Notion a little bit for that. I also put it directly into Scrivener, and that's where I do most of my writing. I break it down by character level, information, setting, chronology, things like that. Each one of those will have a separate document in Scrivener, or you could do like an Excel sheet or something like that. So there are many ways to capture the information.
[00:05:40] Matty: Yeah, I have a lot of mine in Excel because I find a lot of what I need to accommodate from book to book is chronologically related information. So I have basically a calendar that says, book four takes place in March, and book five takes place about a month later—you know, calculate that out. It helps me keep track of if I'm referencing back to a previous book, did that take place? Would snow have been on the ground? Would flowers have been blooming? Things like that. But I do like the idea of Scrivener. It kind of provides a template for occupation and physical characteristics and things like that, but I find that the things the templates ask for are not often the information I find I need a bible for.
[00:06:28] Kaylin: Yeah, I haven't played too much with their preset stuff. I just start with a blank document. But I do like Plottr. I've never used it consistently, but it has a lot of good features. You can create pages for each individual character, and you can create your fields. If you don't like the ones that they preset, then you just delete those and put your own in.
You can do that for characters and settings. And then if you don't want to use their timeline for your actual plotting, or I mean, I guess you could use it for both, but you could set up a book in Plottr that's specifically just the timeline for your book and do like across the top the actual chronology, and then down the side would be either each individual character or each plot line.
[00:07:22] Matty: Yeah, it gets tricky because there are so many things that could be considered story bible material, as you had mentioned to begin with. I know a lot of people who use Scrivener make a document for each character in Scrivener and then when they're starting a new book in the series, they just copy those files over into the new ones, and then they can build upon them so that you have this gradually expanding dossier of a certain character.
What I think is tricky with a story bible is that there are the obvious things that people want to capture mainly for story consistency purposes; you know, what's the pet's name or what's the character's eye color or something like that. But then there are things that you don't realize until later that you need, like, where did they go to college? You know, when you wrote that, you never expected to have to refer to it again, and that isn't too bad because you can always just go back and search for college or university or whatever it might be. But, do you have tips for recognizing the things that should be captured in a story bible?
[00:08:21] Kaylin: Only really from experience, like you said, stuff that you don't realize you're going to need to know, and then later you think back, and you need it, so then you start capturing that going forward. Once we get into the AI, that's actually one of my favorite reasons for using AI to do your story bibles because it makes it way easier to find that kind of stuff, so I can elaborate on that in a little while. But yeah, I don't know, just kind of anything that might stand out as a unique thing to that character, I would say. So yeah, like the type of car they drive, the way they take their coffee, stuff like that. Little nuggets.
How much info is too much in a story bible?
[00:09:03] Matty: Are there any things that you started to capture in a story bible, and then retrospectively you realized that that was just effort that wasn't worth investing? How much is too much for a story bible?
[00:09:14] Kaylin: Yeah, there's a fair amount. I try to keep in mind when I'm writing a series, and it all takes place in one city, the favorite diner that all of the characters go to obviously needs to be detailed. But if I think that this one character happens to be interested in yoga, so they go to a yoga studio, but no one else in the series is going to be interested, then I don't actually need details about that. Like, I might write down the name of the studio and what book it's in so that I can reference it later. But things like that I do sometimes get into the weeds about.
[00:09:46] Matty: Yeah, I think that just plain old search is your friend there because I have a folder where I have word exports of all my books, and if I'm having an inkling that somebody did something about yoga later, I can just search that folder for yoga, and nine times out of ten, maybe eight times out of ten, I can find what I need without having to diligently go through every single detail, which I think is not necessarily a useful use of time.
[00:10:09] Kaylin: I was just going to say sometimes I get it in my head that I gave something a name. I mentioned diners, and I'm seven books into my current romantic suspense series. And these characters have been going to this diner for three of those books. I was so sure I had given it a name by now, and writing book eight, I'm searching and I'm searching and I'm searching, and there is no name.
So, if you know the name, you can search for it. But if you don't know the name, then you're looking for a diner, and it's possible that there are other diners in the book, and maybe you called it a cafe instead or something like that. It can get difficult. Asking AI, "What is the diner that they like to go to?" and not needing those details is really cool.
[00:10:51] Matty: Yeah, I had a similar experience where I was writing a book, and one of the secondary characters, sort of a primary secondary character, I couldn't remember if I had described it as having a beard and mustache. So I searched for beard, I searched for mustache, I searched for facial hair, I searched for every way I could think of that I would have described somebody having a beard and mustache, and I couldn't find it, just as you're saying. But I do think that people shouldn't get so hung up in the story bible, partially because of some of the things you're about to discuss.
Story bibles beyond Text
[00:11:20] Matty: The other thing I wanted to mention is when I think of a story bible, I think of a written-out text document, but I've seen some really cool story bible kind of information, like a map of the town where the activity takes place, which I think is super fun. I love maps. Plus, it would be a very fun giveaway for fans, like subscribing to your email newsletter to give them a map of the town where it takes place.
[00:11:42] Kaylin: Yeah, I love stuff like that. It's fun, a fun extra. It's fun for you. I've done, because I write romance, and a lot of my stories are interconnected, I have a mind map on a website called Coggle, it's C O G G L E, and I believe it's dot I T. Where it's like the Cara Malone universe is the center of it, and then each branch off is all of the different towns that my books are set in. And then I have arrows going from like, alright, so this town has these three books in it, and here is the list of all the characters that are in that book, and this character is a side character in this book, but then it points over to this book where they become a main character, so I never really thought about that as a story bible, but I guess it kind of is.
Capturing Overlap Between Two Series
[00:12:32] Matty: Yeah, and that's bringing up a good topic that if you have very explicitly interconnected books, then it's probably clearer. But I have a couple of circumstances where, well, actually, this is a good example because I have two police detectives who primarily show up in the Lizzie Ballard books, but I gave them a little cameo, a couple of line cameo in one of the Ann Kinnear Novels, and I forgot to remind my audiobook narrator that they were the same characters. So, these two characters have totally different voices in the audio of the Ann Kinnear version than they did in the Lizzie version.
And those kinds of things, even expanding the story bible further, another thing on top of all those descriptive things like eye color and etcetera is if you can find a snippet of someone's voice, someone who sounds like you imagine the character to sound. Because I think I would have avoided some back and forth with my audio narrator if I had said, "I imagine this character sounds like Kathy Bates," and it would have avoided some of the sort of poking around to try to come up with a voice that is distinctive for that character and kind of makes sense with their personality and things like that.
[00:13:47] Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great idea. I never actually thought about telling my narrator a famous person's voice to reference.
[00:13:54] Matty: Yeah, it was a person who was very large. You know, people who are very large just have kind of a different timbre to their voice than people who are. Then I think because there's just like more lung area or something like that, you know, there's some physical reason for that. And when I was listening to it, it sounded like it didn't sound like that. So I found, I think it was, I don't know, like Dick Butkus. It was a very old Saturday Night Live. He had been the Saturday Night Live host, and I found the monologue, and it was perfect because I was saying, like a football player voice. Professional football player voice. So that was the kind of voice. So yeah, you could do multimedia story bibles, I guess is the underlying message.
[00:14:36] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do include images of my characters because I said I like to use famous people to reference.
[00:14:44] Matty: Yeah, that can, I think, even be helpful for audiobook narrators too because I've done that before. Kathy Bates is the example I'm thinking of because I got a sample chapter, and the person sounded much younger than I pictured. And so I said, no, it's really Kathy Bates, but not in Misery.
Created a Story bible with AI
[00:15:02] Matty: so we've mentioned a couple of times this idea of using AI. I'm very curious to hear more detail about how you are using AI to help you create story bibles.
[00:15:11] Kaylin: So, it all started with Claude because Claude is the original one that has a large context window, meaning you can paste in a really large chunk of text and have the AI reference that whole chunk of text when it's giving you answers. And actually, since you asked me to come on to this podcast, which has been less than a month now, ChatGPT now has a large context window option in GPT-4, specifically in their Playground model. So the stuff moves really fast, and it's entirely possible that anybody listening to this a month from now is going to need updated information too because it just goes so fast. But essentially, yeah, when Claude came out with their version that you could paste in, it was 60k, and that's in tokens, so that would be roughly 50,000 words. It blew my mind, and I was like, there are just so many different options for this.
I've used it for a whole bunch of different purposes. One of them is the story bibles because I write roughly 50,000-word novels, and at this point, they're up to 100,000 tokens, which is roughly 75,000 words. I know that was kind of a limiting factor for a lot of people. You would have to paste in half of your novel at a time in order to get your story bible. But if you write shorter or under 75,000 words, then it's relevant now. You can just do your whole novel. Yeah, you can paste it in and then ask it any kind of questions that, let's say you were going to outsource it and hire someone to create your story bible, you can ask it the same kind of questions.
So you're like, read this and give me a list of all the characters with their physical descriptions. Or give me a chronology of the events in the novel, things along those lines. So, for someone who's been writing in series for almost all of the seven years that I've been writing and also been putting off the job of doing a really good story bible on most of those series, this was a godsend because I could just sit down and knock it all out at once.
[00:17:33] Matty: So, I'm wrestling with this question about the amount of input you can provide. We had talked about this a little bit earlier, that maybe a little more than a month ago now, I've tried putting the AI-generated transcript of the podcast that I get from Descript, which is my audio and video editing software, and it does like a pretty good job, but not a publishable job, and I put it into ChatGPT, and I just gave it the prompt, "Correct the typos and grammatical errors in this transcript," and it does a great job. But I can only put in 4,000 characters at a time, and I've tried to experiment a little bit with other platforms, but I haven't found a platform where I can put in much more than that. Where would you direct people to go to enable them to put in these very long, like a novel-length chunk of information?
[00:18:23] Kaylin: Alright, so let me get the, I have them up on my screen so I can give you the exact URLs. Claude is run by Anthropic, and it's at claude.ai. You have to create an account there, and then once you have your account, it would be claude.ai/chat. You can either paste in, and it will convert it into an attachment, or if you have your document already in either Word or it also takes PDF, there's a spot to just upload the file.
Claude is free. They also have a paid option. The free option is, don't quote me on this because I don't know for sure the number, but it's roughly like 25 messages in a 24-hour period. So if you're trying to do your whole catalog, then you're probably going to have to stretch it out over multiple days if you don't want to pay for it. But they do have a paid plan where you get more messages.
The regular ChatGPT, where you either have the app on your phone or you're on the computer at chat.openai.com, that's the one with the 4,000-word limit. The other version, it's still GPT, but it gives you a longer context window, is called Playground. I believe it was originally developed for software engineers, like people who are writing code, but it works with just words too. And that one is platform.openai.com, and even if you have an account with ChatGPT, which is the regular ChatGPT. You would have to create a separate account for Playground. This one does charge you for messages.
ChatGPT is free and they have a paid option. This one, there's no free option. There's a free trial. And then after that, you're paying. By the generation. So, like if you put in a 4,000-character message in Playground, you're going to be paying a lot less than if you paste in your entire novel and start asking questions. But it's still pretty negligible. Like, I would say that you can easily do your whole manuscript for probably, like, definitely under 5, possibly under 1. It's very cheap right now.
[00:20:43] Matty: Okay. And once you've loaded it, is it there for you to query later. Is there a library you can add it to so that it's there for later use?
[00:20:54] Kaylin: It should be, yeah. So, for sure, in Playground, you can access your history, and on Claude, I believe they have a limit, they'll only go back so far. Let's see, so I have stuff that goes back three months, so I know that for sure it goes back three months, but I wouldn't expect it to save stuff just forever because you never know if something's going to go goofy on their end, and you're going to lose data.
[00:21:21] Matty: And when you're querying the information that you've put in there or the material you've put in there, do you have any tips for how to frame up the questions you ask? Does it work to just put in, "Give me a description of such and such character," or is it more complicated than that?
[00:21:38] Kaylin: No, you can use natural language. There are better ways to phrase questions. I would say, start with just ask it a question like you're talking to a person, and if it gives you a really weird answer, then you know you didn't phrase it quite right. You want to be as specific and unambiguous as possible is the basic trick to talking to AI, and I can give you some quick story bible prompts that I use.
So the four that I have been running my books through most recently, are I paste in the novel and I ask, "Please provide a detailed chronology of this book, including the amount of time from start to end, and any seasonal information provided." You would obviously, if you have different concerns, you would tweak that to include whatever information you want, but I struggle with, like specific months being mentioned, so that's why I put in the seasonal information.
I would recommend if you're in, Playground in particular, let it run the answer, copy that into whatever you're planning on storing your story bible in, so if you're going to put it in Scrivener or a Word document or whatever, put it in there. And then actually delete the answer that it gave you and just paste in a new question. So you're starting with a blank document where it's just your book and then the question that you have and then the new answer.
Because the question or the problem that you're going to run into is when you were talking about, well, two problems, really. Number one, you're talking about the context window on ChatGPT being short. If you pasted in an entire novel, and your novel is close to that limit, where, you're at, let's see, Playground is actually 90,000 words, and then Claude is 75,000 words, and those are estimates. If you're giving it a whole bunch of different questions, and it's giving you all the answers, that's going to eat into your context window, and it won't tell you that it's run out of context, it'll just start deleting stuff from the beginning. So, you could be missing out on some details because you've run out of context, so I always just copy-paste it into whatever I want. And then start a new question.
And then the second problem, I've noticed this with Claude more often, but, sometimes the AI can hallucinate, which means it starts making up its own answers. One time I pasted in a novel that was much larger than the 50,000 that I had access to at the time, so I had to cut it in half. I gave it the first half of the novel and I started asking it my chronology questions, and it summarized the first half of the book that I gave it, but then it just assumed that I wanted it to summarize the entire book, even though it didn't have the second half.
And it started writing, and I was reading it, and it actually took me a minute to figure out that it wasn't summarizing the information I gave it, it was hallucinating new information because it was doing a pretty good job of following what I had written, which was impressive, but, yeah, so you have to be careful if you give it if you leave the old answer in there, it could potentially reference that answer and then start making up its own stuff because it's considering that part of the context window as a whole.
So I basically just give it one thing at a time, delete the old stuff, put in the new question, to avoid that. So, a couple more questions that I give it are, "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including the names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned." I put story bible in there, even though we've been talking about story bibles as a whole, including the chronology, and the worldbuilding, and all these things, because through trial and error, it seems like when you say the phrase story bible to do that. Chat GPT or Claude, it thinks about the names and physical descriptions because that's what it'll spit out automatically. If you just say, "story bible" and nothing else, it'll give you names, physical descriptions, locations, things like that. So that's why I included that term there.
“Can you please let me know any major life changes or updates that occur by the end of this book for the following characters?” I use that for my series if I have a core group of characters that are going to need updates throughout the series, so I want to know, like, so and so just got engaged at the end of book two, and then by the end of book three, they're going to be married, and things like that. So, I'll just include a list of the specific characters that I want information on.
Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book. That one I have not fully tweaked to my satisfaction because it doesn't give you a super thorough list that I would like. It starts off thorough and then it kind of tapers off and gives you a more general list about the midpoint of the book, at least in my experience.
[00:26:58] Matty: It gets fatigued.
The need to babysit AI
[00:26:59] Kaylin: Yeah, it gets tired, and so I need to work on making my AI assistant do that task better. And that's kind of the challenge with AI in general. It's an amazingly powerful tool that can help you save a bunch of time, but you also have to babysit it, at least at this point in the game because, yeah, it gets bored and it starts hallucinating, or it starts doing a bad job, and you have to keep it on task.
[00:27:24] Matty: Well, I do think it's kind of a nice example of how we're not at a point yet where it's going to be taking over our jobs. I would never say never, but the fact that it needs to be babysat is what we humans are here for. I found that even with the transcript correction that the first time I put the podcast transcript into ChatGPT. I just said, "Fix this transcript," and it created like an article for me. I was like, "Well, that's nice, but it's not what I need." So I had to futz a little bit with the prompt, which ended up being more or less fixed typos and grammatical errors.
Then I also added, "And insert paragraph breaks as appropriate" because otherwise, it would just do one really long paragraph. If my guest or I were talking for a long chunk of time, it would just be one giant paragraph. It did a better job. It actually did break it up a little bit more if I put that extra prompt in. So I think it's very interesting to play around with this stuff because you do have to bring a different mindset to it than any previous interactions with computers that I've had before AI started hitting.
[00:28:25] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I think it's not even really consistent within itself yet because, last month, I was running a book through AI that I had written in the third person, and I decided that it actually needed to be in the first person. The old way would be to sit there for a week, tediously changing all of your pronouns. It's amazing that you can spend just a couple of days, paste in a chapter, tell it to change it to first person, paste in another chapter, hit go again. I would still have to sit there and scan through it and make sure it was doing it right because nothing else would change. The prompt would be the exact same. It's only been, like, three minutes since I ran it the last time. I paste in a new chapter, and it starts coming up with some kind of crazy stuff, and it's not even writing my book anymore. It's like, "Well, let's try that again. All you're doing is changing the tense, so stick to that, please."
[00:32:57] Matty: Yeah, these are all great examples of brainstorming possibilities as well as story bible creation. You could be working on a book and think, "Huh, I wonder if this would be better in the first person." You could stick a couple of chapters in there, run it through ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, see what comes out, and go, "Ah, no," or, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of better, I think I'm going to switch,” and do that much more effectively and efficiently than you would have been able to do in the past.
Kaylin: Oh yeah, for sure. This is one of the reasons I'm most excited about AI—tasks like brainstorming and outlining. It would help to have another person in the room. You can run it past AI. Many authors focus on the ethical use of AI to generate novels, big-picture questions. I think there are tons of small tasks that AI can help us do without necessarily touching on the big elephant in the room question.
Matty: Yeah, and even the idea of loading all your books into one of these. When you're starting work on the next book in the series, you could say, "Give me 10 ideas for what might happen next in the story or give me 10 ideas for what might happen next with this character." That could be a super cool brainstorming thing.
I've been using that a lot for nonfiction articles. I'll have a topic that I need to write about, I'll plug it in, and the text is so generic it would never make an interesting article. But oftentimes, the ideas or the way the information is organized are very useful to me to then write the article by myself.
Kaylin: Yeah, I've gotten all kinds of good details. The one that I have to chuckle about—hopefully, my reader who I talked to about this doesn't listen to this and learn my dirty secret. I had a character, this was just a total throwaway scene where the character was interacting with her sister, and her sister was teasing her as sisters do. The character said she got a new hobby, and the sister is like, "Oh, what are you doing now? Competitive air guitar?" My reader actually took the time to specifically message me about how hysterical she found that, and I was like, ChatGPT gave me that idea.
Matty: Oh, interesting! And what prompt—like, based on what prompt did it give you that idea?
Kaylin: Huh, I believe I asked it something along the lines of, "Give me ten ideas for ridiculous hobbies."
Matty: Oh, perfect! Yeah, I found it's good, if I'm looking for another word, of course, you can go to bazillion online thesauri. But, I often find I get more interesting suggestions. Like, I know this is almost the right word, but not quite. You can get more interesting input from AI than just the standard thesaurus.
Kaylin: Yeah, for sure.
Concerns about AI and piracy
Matty: One of the things that we wanted to talk about regarding AI was the idea of piracy. I mean, that's a concern for everybody. What are your thoughts about AI, either specific to story bible kind of information or more generally?
Kaylin: so, personally, I don't really worry about it because I think that authors who publish their work online are so used to being pirated by the billions of piracy websites that are out there. We know we're never going to get them all, even if you start sending takedown notices. They take them down, and then new ones pop up, and sometimes it seems like they even pop up maliciously. They're like, "Oh, you sent a takedown notice on this, so I'm going to upload it on five more." I have never personally been upset about the idea of piracy, either by AI or by actual humans. I don't worry about it, but I do know that a lot of my author friends I've talked to about AI are pretty concerned about that possibility.
How AI uses your data
Kaylin: I did take the time before our meeting to look up the terms of service for Claude and OpenAI, just to reference. You can look these up. I don't know if they change or if they're pretty set in stone, but if you're personally concerned with the AI protecting your copyright, then definitely look it up for yourself.
The essential overview is on Claude: anything you put into Claude, you own, you have the rights to it, and they're not going to use it. However, they authorize you to use the outputs, so you don't actually own them, but they're kind of informally licensed to you. That's my not-a-lawyer explanation of it. They also say that they do not train on the things you put into Claude.
OpenAI, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite. You still retain all of your ownership of anything you put into OpenAI, and you own the output as well. They don't authorize it to you; they just give it to you. But the way they majorly differ is they do train on anything you input, not output. If you put your novel into OpenAI, then you're giving them permission to use that as part of their large language model, unless you go in specifically and opt out. So you do have that option; you have to go through their helpdesk, and you can opt out of them using anything you put into their system.
Matty: Cool. Thank you very much for having done that research for us.
Kaylin: Yeah, I figured I should probably know these things too since I do use them.
Matty: As you're saying, it's tricky because it is a moving target. A huge fan of the “Hard Fork” podcast. If anyone is interested in AI and is looking for a great and fun source for information on AI, the Hard Fork podcast, which is put out through the New York Times is a great and very entertaining presentation of AI information.
Creating a story bible during the proofread
Matty: And then just to take the conversation away from AI for a little bit and back more to core story bible. I know we had early on referenced a couple of ways that we ourselves assemble the story bible. One thing that I've been trying with mixed results, because you do get in a flow, like you were saying earlier when you're writing, you sometimes just get in the zone and forget that you're supposed to be taking little notes about this stuff.
One way that I've worked to get around that is that I always, another computer-assisted thing. The very last thing I do with my book is I have my computer read it to me, and oftentimes I can pick up things that my proofreaders missed, or my editors missed. You know, there are always a couple of things that I get that way, and I try to use that time for consciously thinking, "Now I'm looking for story bible information." So if people don't quite want to make the jump to AI yet, I think that's a great time to accomplish two things. You can get your story bible written, and you can also do that final check on your manuscript. And, Kaylin, do you have any other, the old-fashioned way, any other tips, the old-fashioned way for story bible?
Kaylin: I guess maybe if you use a character questionnaire or something like that, then it can be helpful to just have a blank one. And that way, you know if there's anything that you missed in there because you have a blank spot.
Matty: Yeah, that's why I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are my go-to. I don't know what I'd do if Excel ever went away in terms of managing it, but it is nice because you can see very clearly where a hole is. Sometimes it doesn't matter; like, I'm never going to care where that character went to school or whatever, but I think that also sometimes looking at that and seeing where the holes are can give you story ideas because you think, "Oh, you know, not only do I still have to establish where they went to school, but hey, maybe I'm going to use that as a backstory or flashback or something like that."
Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great way to develop people. And then you're like, "Oh! Wow, I forgot completely to give these people parents."
Matty: Yes, exactly. That could be a whole series unto itself.
Well, thank you so much for sharing information on story bibles, old and new. So please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and everything you do online.
Kaylin: All right, so if you're interested in me as an editor, my website is happyeverauthor.com, and if you're interested in my books, which are sapphic romance, it's caramalone.com.
Matty: Great, thank you so much.
[00:00:06] Kaylin: Hey, I'm good. How are you?
Meet Kaylin Tristano
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Kaylin Tristano is an indie author who's been writing contemporary romance and romantic suspense as Cara Malone for the past seven years. She's also a freelance editor with Happy Ever Author, specializing in helping other indie authors produce great books. She has a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's in library science.
I invited Kaylin to the podcast to talk about story bibles, and we're going to discuss traditional story bibles as well as how to use AI to help create story bibles.
What made Kaylin decide to use the pen name Cara Malone
[00:00:37] Matty: But I had to start out because I met Kaylin as Cara Malone, and now I've spent, I don't know how long, maybe a year or something like that.
[00:00:44] Kaylin: At least a year.
[00:00:45] Matty: Yeah, so inevitably I'm going to call you Cara at some point. But I had to ask, Kaylin Tristano is such a great name. What made you decide that you were going to use a pen name?
[00:00:55] Kaylin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So really, the only reason was because I have my master's in library science, and in my experience looking for jobs, librarians aren't particularly forgiving if you appear to be interested in anything other than library science. I've been doing this for almost 10 years now, so maybe it's changed, but back when I worked as a librarian, I thought that it was important to keep my resume as Kaylin Tristano, strictly library science.
[00:01:24] Matty: That makes sense. And you'll forgive me if I call you Cara periodically throughout our conversation.
[00:01:28] Kaylin: I mean, like you said, I've been doing this for seven years, so I feel like Cara just as much as I feel like Kaylin.
What is a story bible?
[00:01:34] Matty: Okay, good, good. That'll make it easier for me. So we had been spending much of that year having almost daily writing sprints. And in one of those writing sprints, we got talking about story bibles, and you had some background in that. So I just wanted to invite you to chat a bit first about traditional story bibles. Well, let's start out saying what a story bible is, and then what made you decide that this was something you needed for your own work?
[00:02:00] Kaylin: So I imagine that story bibles are a lot of different things depending on the author you're talking to and what their particular needs are. Essentially, it's just a guide that you can reference that tells you the important details of your book. Most of the time, it's used in series. For example, if I was going to write book five and needed to refer back to book one and be like, "Oh, what type of car does XYZ character drive?" That's the type of detail that I personally would put in a story bible.
I'm a contemporary romance author, so a lot of my stuff is that kind of background and also chronology—when does a certain thing happen in the story, what happens in my characters' backgrounds. Things along those lines. But if you're a sci-fi fantasy author where you're creating worlds, then your worldbuilding would also go into your story bible, things like that.
And the reason I personally felt I needed a story bible was because instead of writing book one in the series, then book two, and then book three, where everything was constantly top of mind, my writing schedule involves different series. I write book one in series A, then maybe book three in series B, and then back to series one—I kind of rotate. So I needed a refresher on all those small details. That's why I started using story bibles.
[00:03:36] Matty: Did you have a standard list of fields that you collected, like eye color, hair color, height?
[00:03:43] Kaylin: Yeah, a lot of the stuff you would find in a character questionnaire or something like that. I like to use models for my visual cues, so I'll model a character after a particular actor. That way, I can look at a picture of them and remember what the visual cues are supposed to be. But yeah, age, race, sexual identity, jobs, education history, pets, hobbies, all those kinds of things.
[00:04:16] Matty: And then do you update that? For example, let's say someone has a pet in book one, and then something happens to the pet, and they get a different pet in book three. Do you have a way of accommodating those kinds of changes that happen over the course of the arc?
[00:04:32] Kaylin: I do. I try to incorporate that into my process, so I'll either do it right when I'm done with writing that book. Sometimes I capture those details as I'm going along, but you get into the zone, and you're writing, and you don't remember to jot down every single little detail. If I'm being a really good author, I do it right after I finish writing the book. But more often than not, I get lazy and I do it right before I write the next book. So I'll just reread the previous book in the series and jot down all of my series bible information.
Tools to create story bibles
[00:05:03] Kaylin: That might be a good time to mention there are different ways to keep a story bible. There's software you can download specifically for that, and I believe there are a number of them. I use Notion a little bit for that. I also put it directly into Scrivener, and that's where I do most of my writing. I break it down by character level, information, setting, chronology, things like that. Each one of those will have a separate document in Scrivener, or you could do like an Excel sheet or something like that. So there are many ways to capture the information.
[00:05:40] Matty: Yeah, I have a lot of mine in Excel because I find a lot of what I need to accommodate from book to book is chronologically related information. So I have basically a calendar that says, book four takes place in March, and book five takes place about a month later—you know, calculate that out. It helps me keep track of if I'm referencing back to a previous book, did that take place? Would snow have been on the ground? Would flowers have been blooming? Things like that. But I do like the idea of Scrivener. It kind of provides a template for occupation and physical characteristics and things like that, but I find that the things the templates ask for are not often the information I find I need a bible for.
[00:06:28] Kaylin: Yeah, I haven't played too much with their preset stuff. I just start with a blank document. But I do like Plottr. I've never used it consistently, but it has a lot of good features. You can create pages for each individual character, and you can create your fields. If you don't like the ones that they preset, then you just delete those and put your own in.
You can do that for characters and settings. And then if you don't want to use their timeline for your actual plotting, or I mean, I guess you could use it for both, but you could set up a book in Plottr that's specifically just the timeline for your book and do like across the top the actual chronology, and then down the side would be either each individual character or each plot line.
[00:07:22] Matty: Yeah, it gets tricky because there are so many things that could be considered story bible material, as you had mentioned to begin with. I know a lot of people who use Scrivener make a document for each character in Scrivener and then when they're starting a new book in the series, they just copy those files over into the new ones, and then they can build upon them so that you have this gradually expanding dossier of a certain character.
What I think is tricky with a story bible is that there are the obvious things that people want to capture mainly for story consistency purposes; you know, what's the pet's name or what's the character's eye color or something like that. But then there are things that you don't realize until later that you need, like, where did they go to college? You know, when you wrote that, you never expected to have to refer to it again, and that isn't too bad because you can always just go back and search for college or university or whatever it might be. But, do you have tips for recognizing the things that should be captured in a story bible?
[00:08:21] Kaylin: Only really from experience, like you said, stuff that you don't realize you're going to need to know, and then later you think back, and you need it, so then you start capturing that going forward. Once we get into the AI, that's actually one of my favorite reasons for using AI to do your story bibles because it makes it way easier to find that kind of stuff, so I can elaborate on that in a little while. But yeah, I don't know, just kind of anything that might stand out as a unique thing to that character, I would say. So yeah, like the type of car they drive, the way they take their coffee, stuff like that. Little nuggets.
How much info is too much in a story bible?
[00:09:03] Matty: Are there any things that you started to capture in a story bible, and then retrospectively you realized that that was just effort that wasn't worth investing? How much is too much for a story bible?
[00:09:14] Kaylin: Yeah, there's a fair amount. I try to keep in mind when I'm writing a series, and it all takes place in one city, the favorite diner that all of the characters go to obviously needs to be detailed. But if I think that this one character happens to be interested in yoga, so they go to a yoga studio, but no one else in the series is going to be interested, then I don't actually need details about that. Like, I might write down the name of the studio and what book it's in so that I can reference it later. But things like that I do sometimes get into the weeds about.
[00:09:46] Matty: Yeah, I think that just plain old search is your friend there because I have a folder where I have word exports of all my books, and if I'm having an inkling that somebody did something about yoga later, I can just search that folder for yoga, and nine times out of ten, maybe eight times out of ten, I can find what I need without having to diligently go through every single detail, which I think is not necessarily a useful use of time.
[00:10:09] Kaylin: I was just going to say sometimes I get it in my head that I gave something a name. I mentioned diners, and I'm seven books into my current romantic suspense series. And these characters have been going to this diner for three of those books. I was so sure I had given it a name by now, and writing book eight, I'm searching and I'm searching and I'm searching, and there is no name.
So, if you know the name, you can search for it. But if you don't know the name, then you're looking for a diner, and it's possible that there are other diners in the book, and maybe you called it a cafe instead or something like that. It can get difficult. Asking AI, "What is the diner that they like to go to?" and not needing those details is really cool.
[00:10:51] Matty: Yeah, I had a similar experience where I was writing a book, and one of the secondary characters, sort of a primary secondary character, I couldn't remember if I had described it as having a beard and mustache. So I searched for beard, I searched for mustache, I searched for facial hair, I searched for every way I could think of that I would have described somebody having a beard and mustache, and I couldn't find it, just as you're saying. But I do think that people shouldn't get so hung up in the story bible, partially because of some of the things you're about to discuss.
Story bibles beyond Text
[00:11:20] Matty: The other thing I wanted to mention is when I think of a story bible, I think of a written-out text document, but I've seen some really cool story bible kind of information, like a map of the town where the activity takes place, which I think is super fun. I love maps. Plus, it would be a very fun giveaway for fans, like subscribing to your email newsletter to give them a map of the town where it takes place.
[00:11:42] Kaylin: Yeah, I love stuff like that. It's fun, a fun extra. It's fun for you. I've done, because I write romance, and a lot of my stories are interconnected, I have a mind map on a website called Coggle, it's C O G G L E, and I believe it's dot I T. Where it's like the Cara Malone universe is the center of it, and then each branch off is all of the different towns that my books are set in. And then I have arrows going from like, alright, so this town has these three books in it, and here is the list of all the characters that are in that book, and this character is a side character in this book, but then it points over to this book where they become a main character, so I never really thought about that as a story bible, but I guess it kind of is.
Capturing Overlap Between Two Series
[00:12:32] Matty: Yeah, and that's bringing up a good topic that if you have very explicitly interconnected books, then it's probably clearer. But I have a couple of circumstances where, well, actually, this is a good example because I have two police detectives who primarily show up in the Lizzie Ballard books, but I gave them a little cameo, a couple of line cameo in one of the Ann Kinnear Novels, and I forgot to remind my audiobook narrator that they were the same characters. So, these two characters have totally different voices in the audio of the Ann Kinnear version than they did in the Lizzie version.
And those kinds of things, even expanding the story bible further, another thing on top of all those descriptive things like eye color and etcetera is if you can find a snippet of someone's voice, someone who sounds like you imagine the character to sound. Because I think I would have avoided some back and forth with my audio narrator if I had said, "I imagine this character sounds like Kathy Bates," and it would have avoided some of the sort of poking around to try to come up with a voice that is distinctive for that character and kind of makes sense with their personality and things like that.
[00:13:47] Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great idea. I never actually thought about telling my narrator a famous person's voice to reference.
[00:13:54] Matty: Yeah, it was a person who was very large. You know, people who are very large just have kind of a different timbre to their voice than people who are. Then I think because there's just like more lung area or something like that, you know, there's some physical reason for that. And when I was listening to it, it sounded like it didn't sound like that. So I found, I think it was, I don't know, like Dick Butkus. It was a very old Saturday Night Live. He had been the Saturday Night Live host, and I found the monologue, and it was perfect because I was saying, like a football player voice. Professional football player voice. So that was the kind of voice. So yeah, you could do multimedia story bibles, I guess is the underlying message.
[00:14:36] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do include images of my characters because I said I like to use famous people to reference.
[00:14:44] Matty: Yeah, that can, I think, even be helpful for audiobook narrators too because I've done that before. Kathy Bates is the example I'm thinking of because I got a sample chapter, and the person sounded much younger than I pictured. And so I said, no, it's really Kathy Bates, but not in Misery.
Created a Story bible with AI
[00:15:02] Matty: so we've mentioned a couple of times this idea of using AI. I'm very curious to hear more detail about how you are using AI to help you create story bibles.
[00:15:11] Kaylin: So, it all started with Claude because Claude is the original one that has a large context window, meaning you can paste in a really large chunk of text and have the AI reference that whole chunk of text when it's giving you answers. And actually, since you asked me to come on to this podcast, which has been less than a month now, ChatGPT now has a large context window option in GPT-4, specifically in their Playground model. So the stuff moves really fast, and it's entirely possible that anybody listening to this a month from now is going to need updated information too because it just goes so fast. But essentially, yeah, when Claude came out with their version that you could paste in, it was 60k, and that's in tokens, so that would be roughly 50,000 words. It blew my mind, and I was like, there are just so many different options for this.
I've used it for a whole bunch of different purposes. One of them is the story bibles because I write roughly 50,000-word novels, and at this point, they're up to 100,000 tokens, which is roughly 75,000 words. I know that was kind of a limiting factor for a lot of people. You would have to paste in half of your novel at a time in order to get your story bible. But if you write shorter or under 75,000 words, then it's relevant now. You can just do your whole novel. Yeah, you can paste it in and then ask it any kind of questions that, let's say you were going to outsource it and hire someone to create your story bible, you can ask it the same kind of questions.
So you're like, read this and give me a list of all the characters with their physical descriptions. Or give me a chronology of the events in the novel, things along those lines. So, for someone who's been writing in series for almost all of the seven years that I've been writing and also been putting off the job of doing a really good story bible on most of those series, this was a godsend because I could just sit down and knock it all out at once.
[00:17:33] Matty: So, I'm wrestling with this question about the amount of input you can provide. We had talked about this a little bit earlier, that maybe a little more than a month ago now, I've tried putting the AI-generated transcript of the podcast that I get from Descript, which is my audio and video editing software, and it does like a pretty good job, but not a publishable job, and I put it into ChatGPT, and I just gave it the prompt, "Correct the typos and grammatical errors in this transcript," and it does a great job. But I can only put in 4,000 characters at a time, and I've tried to experiment a little bit with other platforms, but I haven't found a platform where I can put in much more than that. Where would you direct people to go to enable them to put in these very long, like a novel-length chunk of information?
[00:18:23] Kaylin: Alright, so let me get the, I have them up on my screen so I can give you the exact URLs. Claude is run by Anthropic, and it's at claude.ai. You have to create an account there, and then once you have your account, it would be claude.ai/chat. You can either paste in, and it will convert it into an attachment, or if you have your document already in either Word or it also takes PDF, there's a spot to just upload the file.
Claude is free. They also have a paid option. The free option is, don't quote me on this because I don't know for sure the number, but it's roughly like 25 messages in a 24-hour period. So if you're trying to do your whole catalog, then you're probably going to have to stretch it out over multiple days if you don't want to pay for it. But they do have a paid plan where you get more messages.
The regular ChatGPT, where you either have the app on your phone or you're on the computer at chat.openai.com, that's the one with the 4,000-word limit. The other version, it's still GPT, but it gives you a longer context window, is called Playground. I believe it was originally developed for software engineers, like people who are writing code, but it works with just words too. And that one is platform.openai.com, and even if you have an account with ChatGPT, which is the regular ChatGPT. You would have to create a separate account for Playground. This one does charge you for messages.
ChatGPT is free and they have a paid option. This one, there's no free option. There's a free trial. And then after that, you're paying. By the generation. So, like if you put in a 4,000-character message in Playground, you're going to be paying a lot less than if you paste in your entire novel and start asking questions. But it's still pretty negligible. Like, I would say that you can easily do your whole manuscript for probably, like, definitely under 5, possibly under 1. It's very cheap right now.
[00:20:43] Matty: Okay. And once you've loaded it, is it there for you to query later. Is there a library you can add it to so that it's there for later use?
[00:20:54] Kaylin: It should be, yeah. So, for sure, in Playground, you can access your history, and on Claude, I believe they have a limit, they'll only go back so far. Let's see, so I have stuff that goes back three months, so I know that for sure it goes back three months, but I wouldn't expect it to save stuff just forever because you never know if something's going to go goofy on their end, and you're going to lose data.
[00:21:21] Matty: And when you're querying the information that you've put in there or the material you've put in there, do you have any tips for how to frame up the questions you ask? Does it work to just put in, "Give me a description of such and such character," or is it more complicated than that?
[00:21:38] Kaylin: No, you can use natural language. There are better ways to phrase questions. I would say, start with just ask it a question like you're talking to a person, and if it gives you a really weird answer, then you know you didn't phrase it quite right. You want to be as specific and unambiguous as possible is the basic trick to talking to AI, and I can give you some quick story bible prompts that I use.
So the four that I have been running my books through most recently, are I paste in the novel and I ask, "Please provide a detailed chronology of this book, including the amount of time from start to end, and any seasonal information provided." You would obviously, if you have different concerns, you would tweak that to include whatever information you want, but I struggle with, like specific months being mentioned, so that's why I put in the seasonal information.
I would recommend if you're in, Playground in particular, let it run the answer, copy that into whatever you're planning on storing your story bible in, so if you're going to put it in Scrivener or a Word document or whatever, put it in there. And then actually delete the answer that it gave you and just paste in a new question. So you're starting with a blank document where it's just your book and then the question that you have and then the new answer.
Because the question or the problem that you're going to run into is when you were talking about, well, two problems, really. Number one, you're talking about the context window on ChatGPT being short. If you pasted in an entire novel, and your novel is close to that limit, where, you're at, let's see, Playground is actually 90,000 words, and then Claude is 75,000 words, and those are estimates. If you're giving it a whole bunch of different questions, and it's giving you all the answers, that's going to eat into your context window, and it won't tell you that it's run out of context, it'll just start deleting stuff from the beginning. So, you could be missing out on some details because you've run out of context, so I always just copy-paste it into whatever I want. And then start a new question.
And then the second problem, I've noticed this with Claude more often, but, sometimes the AI can hallucinate, which means it starts making up its own answers. One time I pasted in a novel that was much larger than the 50,000 that I had access to at the time, so I had to cut it in half. I gave it the first half of the novel and I started asking it my chronology questions, and it summarized the first half of the book that I gave it, but then it just assumed that I wanted it to summarize the entire book, even though it didn't have the second half.
And it started writing, and I was reading it, and it actually took me a minute to figure out that it wasn't summarizing the information I gave it, it was hallucinating new information because it was doing a pretty good job of following what I had written, which was impressive, but, yeah, so you have to be careful if you give it if you leave the old answer in there, it could potentially reference that answer and then start making up its own stuff because it's considering that part of the context window as a whole.
So I basically just give it one thing at a time, delete the old stuff, put in the new question, to avoid that. So, a couple more questions that I give it are, "Please compile a thorough story bible for this book, including the names and physical descriptions of all major characters, as well as locations mentioned." I put story bible in there, even though we've been talking about story bibles as a whole, including the chronology, and the worldbuilding, and all these things, because through trial and error, it seems like when you say the phrase story bible to do that. Chat GPT or Claude, it thinks about the names and physical descriptions because that's what it'll spit out automatically. If you just say, "story bible" and nothing else, it'll give you names, physical descriptions, locations, things like that. So that's why I included that term there.
“Can you please let me know any major life changes or updates that occur by the end of this book for the following characters?” I use that for my series if I have a core group of characters that are going to need updates throughout the series, so I want to know, like, so and so just got engaged at the end of book two, and then by the end of book three, they're going to be married, and things like that. So, I'll just include a list of the specific characters that I want information on.
Please provide a detailed list of the events in this book. That one I have not fully tweaked to my satisfaction because it doesn't give you a super thorough list that I would like. It starts off thorough and then it kind of tapers off and gives you a more general list about the midpoint of the book, at least in my experience.
[00:26:58] Matty: It gets fatigued.
The need to babysit AI
[00:26:59] Kaylin: Yeah, it gets tired, and so I need to work on making my AI assistant do that task better. And that's kind of the challenge with AI in general. It's an amazingly powerful tool that can help you save a bunch of time, but you also have to babysit it, at least at this point in the game because, yeah, it gets bored and it starts hallucinating, or it starts doing a bad job, and you have to keep it on task.
[00:27:24] Matty: Well, I do think it's kind of a nice example of how we're not at a point yet where it's going to be taking over our jobs. I would never say never, but the fact that it needs to be babysat is what we humans are here for. I found that even with the transcript correction that the first time I put the podcast transcript into ChatGPT. I just said, "Fix this transcript," and it created like an article for me. I was like, "Well, that's nice, but it's not what I need." So I had to futz a little bit with the prompt, which ended up being more or less fixed typos and grammatical errors.
Then I also added, "And insert paragraph breaks as appropriate" because otherwise, it would just do one really long paragraph. If my guest or I were talking for a long chunk of time, it would just be one giant paragraph. It did a better job. It actually did break it up a little bit more if I put that extra prompt in. So I think it's very interesting to play around with this stuff because you do have to bring a different mindset to it than any previous interactions with computers that I've had before AI started hitting.
[00:28:25] Kaylin: Yeah, for sure. I think it's not even really consistent within itself yet because, last month, I was running a book through AI that I had written in the third person, and I decided that it actually needed to be in the first person. The old way would be to sit there for a week, tediously changing all of your pronouns. It's amazing that you can spend just a couple of days, paste in a chapter, tell it to change it to first person, paste in another chapter, hit go again. I would still have to sit there and scan through it and make sure it was doing it right because nothing else would change. The prompt would be the exact same. It's only been, like, three minutes since I ran it the last time. I paste in a new chapter, and it starts coming up with some kind of crazy stuff, and it's not even writing my book anymore. It's like, "Well, let's try that again. All you're doing is changing the tense, so stick to that, please."
[00:32:57] Matty: Yeah, these are all great examples of brainstorming possibilities as well as story bible creation. You could be working on a book and think, "Huh, I wonder if this would be better in the first person." You could stick a couple of chapters in there, run it through ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, see what comes out, and go, "Ah, no," or, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of better, I think I'm going to switch,” and do that much more effectively and efficiently than you would have been able to do in the past.
Kaylin: Oh yeah, for sure. This is one of the reasons I'm most excited about AI—tasks like brainstorming and outlining. It would help to have another person in the room. You can run it past AI. Many authors focus on the ethical use of AI to generate novels, big-picture questions. I think there are tons of small tasks that AI can help us do without necessarily touching on the big elephant in the room question.
Matty: Yeah, and even the idea of loading all your books into one of these. When you're starting work on the next book in the series, you could say, "Give me 10 ideas for what might happen next in the story or give me 10 ideas for what might happen next with this character." That could be a super cool brainstorming thing.
I've been using that a lot for nonfiction articles. I'll have a topic that I need to write about, I'll plug it in, and the text is so generic it would never make an interesting article. But oftentimes, the ideas or the way the information is organized are very useful to me to then write the article by myself.
Kaylin: Yeah, I've gotten all kinds of good details. The one that I have to chuckle about—hopefully, my reader who I talked to about this doesn't listen to this and learn my dirty secret. I had a character, this was just a total throwaway scene where the character was interacting with her sister, and her sister was teasing her as sisters do. The character said she got a new hobby, and the sister is like, "Oh, what are you doing now? Competitive air guitar?" My reader actually took the time to specifically message me about how hysterical she found that, and I was like, ChatGPT gave me that idea.
Matty: Oh, interesting! And what prompt—like, based on what prompt did it give you that idea?
Kaylin: Huh, I believe I asked it something along the lines of, "Give me ten ideas for ridiculous hobbies."
Matty: Oh, perfect! Yeah, I found it's good, if I'm looking for another word, of course, you can go to bazillion online thesauri. But, I often find I get more interesting suggestions. Like, I know this is almost the right word, but not quite. You can get more interesting input from AI than just the standard thesaurus.
Kaylin: Yeah, for sure.
Concerns about AI and piracy
Matty: One of the things that we wanted to talk about regarding AI was the idea of piracy. I mean, that's a concern for everybody. What are your thoughts about AI, either specific to story bible kind of information or more generally?
Kaylin: so, personally, I don't really worry about it because I think that authors who publish their work online are so used to being pirated by the billions of piracy websites that are out there. We know we're never going to get them all, even if you start sending takedown notices. They take them down, and then new ones pop up, and sometimes it seems like they even pop up maliciously. They're like, "Oh, you sent a takedown notice on this, so I'm going to upload it on five more." I have never personally been upset about the idea of piracy, either by AI or by actual humans. I don't worry about it, but I do know that a lot of my author friends I've talked to about AI are pretty concerned about that possibility.
How AI uses your data
Kaylin: I did take the time before our meeting to look up the terms of service for Claude and OpenAI, just to reference. You can look these up. I don't know if they change or if they're pretty set in stone, but if you're personally concerned with the AI protecting your copyright, then definitely look it up for yourself.
The essential overview is on Claude: anything you put into Claude, you own, you have the rights to it, and they're not going to use it. However, they authorize you to use the outputs, so you don't actually own them, but they're kind of informally licensed to you. That's my not-a-lawyer explanation of it. They also say that they do not train on the things you put into Claude.
OpenAI, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite. You still retain all of your ownership of anything you put into OpenAI, and you own the output as well. They don't authorize it to you; they just give it to you. But the way they majorly differ is they do train on anything you input, not output. If you put your novel into OpenAI, then you're giving them permission to use that as part of their large language model, unless you go in specifically and opt out. So you do have that option; you have to go through their helpdesk, and you can opt out of them using anything you put into their system.
Matty: Cool. Thank you very much for having done that research for us.
Kaylin: Yeah, I figured I should probably know these things too since I do use them.
Matty: As you're saying, it's tricky because it is a moving target. A huge fan of the “Hard Fork” podcast. If anyone is interested in AI and is looking for a great and fun source for information on AI, the Hard Fork podcast, which is put out through the New York Times is a great and very entertaining presentation of AI information.
Creating a story bible during the proofread
Matty: And then just to take the conversation away from AI for a little bit and back more to core story bible. I know we had early on referenced a couple of ways that we ourselves assemble the story bible. One thing that I've been trying with mixed results, because you do get in a flow, like you were saying earlier when you're writing, you sometimes just get in the zone and forget that you're supposed to be taking little notes about this stuff.
One way that I've worked to get around that is that I always, another computer-assisted thing. The very last thing I do with my book is I have my computer read it to me, and oftentimes I can pick up things that my proofreaders missed, or my editors missed. You know, there are always a couple of things that I get that way, and I try to use that time for consciously thinking, "Now I'm looking for story bible information." So if people don't quite want to make the jump to AI yet, I think that's a great time to accomplish two things. You can get your story bible written, and you can also do that final check on your manuscript. And, Kaylin, do you have any other, the old-fashioned way, any other tips, the old-fashioned way for story bible?
Kaylin: I guess maybe if you use a character questionnaire or something like that, then it can be helpful to just have a blank one. And that way, you know if there's anything that you missed in there because you have a blank spot.
Matty: Yeah, that's why I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are my go-to. I don't know what I'd do if Excel ever went away in terms of managing it, but it is nice because you can see very clearly where a hole is. Sometimes it doesn't matter; like, I'm never going to care where that character went to school or whatever, but I think that also sometimes looking at that and seeing where the holes are can give you story ideas because you think, "Oh, you know, not only do I still have to establish where they went to school, but hey, maybe I'm going to use that as a backstory or flashback or something like that."
Kaylin: Yeah, that's a great way to develop people. And then you're like, "Oh! Wow, I forgot completely to give these people parents."
Matty: Yes, exactly. That could be a whole series unto itself.
Well, thank you so much for sharing information on story bibles, old and new. So please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work and everything you do online.
Kaylin: All right, so if you're interested in me as an editor, my website is happyeverauthor.com, and if you're interested in my books, which are sapphic romance, it's caramalone.com.
Matty: Great, thank you so much.
