Story Refinement with AI
Once you’ve written a paragraph, a scene, or an entire story, there are useful AI prompts you can use to help refine it.
Summarizing
One of the best uses of AI Large Language Models is in summarizing large amounts of text.
Suppose you’ve written a novel with fifty scenes. When it comes time to do revisions, it may be difficult to remember in which scene a certain event took place. It can be very useful to create a ‘reverse outline’ to easily understand the structure of your story.
Prompt Example
Depending on the size of your story, you may need to repeat the following prompt several times. I haven’t always had success giving it an entire story and having it separate the scenes automatically.
Summarize the following scene in one sentence.
[PASTE SCENE]
Audio Review
As a writer, it’s wonderful to be able to hear readers’ reactions to what you’ve written.
Imagine listening to a podcast with people discussing your story! Google Gemini offers this feature for uploaded documents. To upload a document, press the + button as shown below and then select a file from your computer or from your Google Drive.
Then write the following prompt. The audio generation will take a few minutes.
Create an audio overview of the attached file.
A more elaborate audio “podcast” is available in a free tool by Google called, Notebook LM.
Proofreading
AI can review your story and make suggestions to correct spelling and grammar. However, you can ask it to go deeper, asking it to identify confusing phrases or overused words. Just like with different humans, different LLMs will find different things. It helps to proofread the same text through multiple LLMs.
Prompt Example
The prompt here includes some common issues, feel free to add additional criteria to the list.
Act as an expert proofreader. Read the following text carefully and identify all typos, grammatical errors, weak verbs, overused words, incorrect punctuation, and confusing phrases. Highlight all of these problems in bold text and explain the problem in bold text within square brackets.
[PASTE TEXT]
Show, don't Tell
Using the following prompt will help you identify places where the text is telling excessively (instead of showing). Note that the intent of this prompt is to identify, and not fix the text.
Prompt Example
Act as a developmental fiction editor specializing in narrative technique. Analyze the following scene. Identify every instance of telling (instead of showing
[PASTE SCENE]
Scene Motivation Analysis
As the author, you know what motivates your characters. Use AI to see if those goals and motivations are coming across to the reader.
Prompt Example
Act as a fiction editor. Carefully read the following scene. Describe the subtext that is occurring in each paragraph. What motivates each character?
Act as a developmental fiction editor. Analyze the following scene and provide a detailed breakdown of its dramatic purpose. Specifically, identify the central scene conflict, describe the underlying subtext between the characters, and clarify the motivation and stakes for each person involved.
[PASTE SCENE]
Change within a Scene
Every scene within a story should describe some kind of change (either with the plot or with a character). AI can help you assess whether that change is plausible and effective.
Prompt Example
Act as a developmental fiction editor. Analyze the protagonist’s emotional arc in this scene: describe its trajectory, critique its plausibility, and provide specific revisions to increase its dramatic effectiveness.
[PASTE SCENE]
Consistency Checker
As a story gets longer, it’s easy to have some details slip through the cracks. Getting AI to check for plot holes and other problems is quick and easy with the following prompt.
Prompt Example
Act as a developmental fiction editor. Critique the following story for structural integrity, identifying all plot holes, continuity errors, and logical inconsistencies.
[PASTE STORY]
Finding Overused Phrases
Writers often have certain “crutch phrases,” that often appear in their writing. Finding them is a very tedious task for humans, but easy for AI.
Prompt Example
Act as a copy editor. Analyze the following text for overused language and crutch phrases. Present a list of the phrases, a critique for each, and a revision for the surrounding text to eliminate the repetition.
[PASTE STORY]
Character Arc
In most stories, the main character changes in some way over the course of the story (character arc). Your AI tool can analyze that character arc and offer suggestions to make it more effective.
Prompt Example
Act as a developmental editor. Analyze the following text and chart the protagonist’s character arc. Critique the transformation’s effectiveness and provide specific revisions to enhance its dramatic impact.
[PASTE SCENE OR STORY]
Scene Assessment (General)
Sometimes you want to get general feedback on your writing. The first level is simply to ensure that your story is understandable by the reader. The following prompt will give you an initial commentary.
Prompt Example
Act as a developmental editor. Provide a diagnostic critique of the following scene: summarize the main beats, list the characters, and assess its overall effectiveness. Do not suggest revisions.
[PASTE SCENE]
Scene Assessment (Specific)
Get an assessment of the effectiveness of your scene according to various criteria. The example prompt lists several aspects of writing to assess. Tailor the list to suit your story and the aspects where you want to improve.
Note: Different chatbots will give you different scores.
Prompt Example
Act as a developmental editor. Critique the following scene by creating a table that scores (out of 10) and justifies the effectiveness of: Dialogue, Setting, Character Arc, Conflict, and Show/Tell.
[PASTE SCENE]
You can rerun this prompt to get updated scores after you’ve made changes to your scene.
Scene Suggestions
The following prompt will give you general guidelines as to how you can go about improving your scene. Running this prompt in different chatbots will offer additional areas for improvement.
Prompt Example
Act as a workplace [GENRE] developmental editor. Prioritize a critique of the following text’s structural and thematic quality. For each major suggestion, provide three distinct, detailed examples of how to execute the improvement.
[PASTE SCENE]
Rubric Based Assessment
Seeking more objective feedback, I decided to create a rubric, against which an AI chatbot could evaluate a story or scene. The rubric itself was created based on input from Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude, and in general it gives me consistent results across all three. The rubric I use is tailored for the office satire genre, since that’s what I write these days, however you can tailor the different categories yourself.
The rubric document is here and I upload it to the chatbot conversation along with the following prompt.
This type of prompt makes for a useful Google Gem or a custom GPT.
Act as an expert developmental editor. Using the supplied rubric, perform a constructive, detailed critique of the text. Present a report that includes: quantitative scoring (out of 10 per category), qualitative justification, and three specific, actionable suggestions per category, with estimated score increases. Calculate and output an overall score out of 100.
Visual depiction of the story
Of all the chatbots, I’m most impressed with Claude’s ability to “understand” a story. This prompt creates a visual diagram of the story. You can tweak the prompt to focus on different aspects of the story.