This semester my students are experimenting with an AI word processor for fiction writers called Soduwrite that has been around since GPT-2. The community around Soduwrite is amazing. Believe it or not, writers have been writing many novels with the help of LLMs far longer than ChatGPT has been around.  

Last week, we had a power user from Soduwrite, Federico Escobar, visit and share their experience of using AI to write fiction. I was especially fascinated by the sophisticated tips and tricks the Soduwrite community has been developing, and it struck me how their approach could help my students develop a better sense of how stories work.

My course is what we call University Studies, which are the foundational courses that students have to complete before moving on to a major. My digital storytelling class fulfills a Literary Interpretation & Aesthetics category. This means they need to learn something about literature or art.

Developing AI prompts can be another way to help students understand story elements like character better. Instead of just writing about characters, they can generate them. Because students will need to understand what makes a good character to make good prompts, this can be another way to reinforce literary ideas.

One of the super-prompts Federico shared was a character sheet used to generate character profiles quickly. Creating interesting characters is a challenging task for many writers, and it can take several iterations to get it right. That can slow down the writing process or even frustrate someone enough to give up. 

I mean ... look how long we are waiting for George R.R. Martin's final Game of Thrones novel.

Think of this as a kind of reverse-engineering. Writers and literature professors know what makes a good character ... we even theorize about them. So turn that theory into a framework, and you've got yourself a super prompt.

Now Federico shared an intricate prompt that included every character-making tool you can think of. Then you can take any generated character and create another character, for example, a love interest or enemy.

➡️ Take a look at the super-prompt here.

I tried to keep mine simple and focused on a just one literary principle ... the character arc. Writers use this concept to generate characters through the lens of transformation. For example, a character can have:

I took the questions used to create these arcs and turned them into a prompt:

By experimenting with these prompts, students learned different ways these character arcs work to better identify them in things they read and help them write better characters. 

You could even take your favorite character and have AI reverse-engineer its own prompt.

I can now take this breakdown, turn it into a framework ... and then use it as a prompt to create similar characters.

Confession ... I don't teach creative writing or literature, though I enjoy a bit of creative writing on the side. The purpose of this class was to have a safe venue for exploring AI in the writing process. I teach mostly professional writing (which is everything but creative writing and literature).

So my question has been ... how do I help students transfer what they are learning to the professional world? Storytelling isn't just for novels or movies.

Exploring these character sheets opened a door for me. AI-generated characters can be used in tech writing classes and workplaces to create user personas ... or characters based on users and stakeholders of a specific product. By using AI, it is possible to create detailed user personas quickly to help designers and developers better understand their target audience.

Instead of using literary theory to break down the character sheet, simply use categories in UX design.

➡️ Here is one example I am testing out.

Really, this can be used for any field or kind of writing when you want to understand your audience better. You can even feed AI notes from interviews or surveys.

My class's experience with AI-generated character frameworks has shown that literature instructors can use AI to teach literary theory in engaging and interactive ways, but they can also help us think about stakeholders in more complex ways.
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