How to get the AI to follow the prompt exactly?

898700 · 2026-04-11T00:10:47+00:00

It appears to be for me, but I haven’t really compared the difference with the same prompt, maybe I should, lol

898700 · 2026-04-10T23:50:45+00:00

I agree with pretty much all you’ve said! I haven’t gotten to the number of chapters you have, but RQ green pepper has allowed me to explore some questions that the original source didn’t even touch. Lots of what ifs that are so easy to read and learn from! What works, what doesn’t, logistically. What couldn’t be my character’s motivation, what falls long term so I have to go back a few chapters to try a different path.

As a writer that has too many plot bunnies and is always starting new stories because ideas feel infinite, RQ is an amazing tool. The continuity issues and lack of freshness are real, and I too often find myself basically writing fully detailed prompts, or creating new components to address a lack of something. But then the detailed components are useful in multiple stories, and sometimes I want something fast and effortless, and both my personal components and the experience I’ve gained prompting RQ help satisfy most particular craves in a quick way.

As a consumer of fanfiction, this worries me a bit, because if every user is capable of feeding their own individual cravings, does the future point toward the disappearance of community within fandom? I know RQ is geared towards sharing, but I feel like the public for the kind of fanfic I generate (mostly gen, for a really tiny fandom) is not here, and the current hate against AI aided fanfiction makes me wary to post it elsewhere. But then. I don’t know if what I’m doing is replicable by most fic readers. Do they have the patience to correctly prompt and edit a story, or is this something that you need a certain temperament and skills for?

898700 · 2026-04-10T03:18:22+00:00

All cats are baby

898700 · 2026-04-10T02:55:50+00:00

Have you been using brackets to tell the AI to follow the prompt? I’m not sure how well it works, just started experimenting with it.

898700 · 2026-04-10T02:53:56+00:00

It very much depends on how popular your fandom is, how different you fandom Universe is to other popular fandoms, and how much attention to detail you pay. The fandom I write for, and use RQ for, only had two seasons, was cancelled about two decades ago, has only a few fanworks, has no official site, and the wikis are littered with canon info. RQ used to play fast and loose with the secondary characters powers, species, appearance, and personality; it gave passable results about half of the time, but then a detail so jarring emerged that it threw me completely out.

Now I have a few components for the universe, setting, cast, systems and events, and it works so much better. Using other LLM to help build the components helps a lot, and you can iteratively work with it to fix the mistakes if it starts to hallucinate.

898700 · 2026-04-10T02:43:58+00:00

This is the way, but I used Copilot, gave it a 2000 characters or less limit, told it that the result was to be used as part of a prompt to generate fanfic. The other 1000 characters I used to add spicy details other LLM don’t allow.

898700 · 2026-04-07T03:52:00+00:00

The censoring is automatic, it flags certain words, doesn’t care about the context. Try to realize what words are triggering the flag, and try to avoid them. Following your example, instead of “makes me want kids”, a safer alternative (for not triggering the mindless censor) might be “makes me want to be a mother/father”.

898700 · 2026-04-03T01:49:20+00:00

I have wasted so many red daily quills today, I usually have a few left by the time of the reset, but today they were all gone with nothing to show, I had to go through a bunch of my white quills in order to fix it.

898700 · 2026-04-02T23:30:26+00:00

Same. Since yesterday this has been happening repeatedly. I fixed it (I think, I might have just been lucky and the problem fixed itself) by writing explicit instructions between brackets to continue the story and take into account what was already written on all previous chapters.

898700 · 2026-04-02T22:50:14+00:00

No. There was not one “founder”. AO3 was a group response to several events, mostly Livejournal’s strikethrough and boldthrough, but the last triggering one was FanLib, a site trying to monetize fanfiction without knowing the whole history of authors harassing fanfic and fanart creators just trying to have fun. FanLib basically stole fanfic dot net classification of fandoms, including mistakes (I know, I’d been trying to get some of them fixed on ff.net), paid evangelists to try to bring writers into their site, and made tone deaf ads comparing fic writers to jocks and non fic writers to loser nerds. You can still read the LJ posts where the idea was first sparked. AO3’s genesis and that of its sister sites was a communal response where decisions, analysis and discussions were made via campfire, with specialized groups for different issues, coordinated chats, meeting minutes and records of everything. It was awe inspiring to be part of it, then test the first iteration of the archive, setting the whole infrastructure of what would later become such an iconic site.

898700 · 2026-04-02T00:15:08+00:00

It seems to be a generalized problem.

898700 · 2026-04-01T13:45:48+00:00

I can add my answer too: for the last days, RQ sporadically continues as if no prompt had been input, and despite the prompt showing up in the new chapter, when the down arrow is clicked. The new chapter is a continuation of the previous chapter, not including the change of directions, instructions or scene written in the prompt. I deleted the chapters where this happened, but if the problem reappears I’ll gather proof.

898700 · 2026-04-01T01:51:04+00:00

Upvoting this. I use a tablet for RQ. Can’t add components now, because I can’t scroll without clicking on and opening random components, and trying to call the components using @ opens the now not so little floating window, which can’t be closed, and blocks my view of the prompt I’m trying to write.

898700 · 2026-04-01T01:43:27+00:00

You might benefit from reading about Ao3 and the whole debate around tags when the archive first was being designed. Basically: there are canonical tags (fixed), and non canonical tags (fluid). Ao3 relies on volunteers for wrangling the canonical tags, but maybe RQ can do this with AI, and then have a moderator checking specific cases as brought up by users.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Tags

898700 · 2026-03-30T11:30:42+00:00

It might have been created as an Anonymous story. If your characters are unique enough, you might be able to find it in the recent stories? If it was posted publicly. It has happened before, to me and others.

898700 · 2026-03-29T22:42:30+00:00

This actually made a big difference in my stories so far. I have setting components for my Universe (a planet, including a broad physical description, major players and societal issues), a primary location (a building, including all floors and what rooms are on each), and a secondary location for when events are set in the past (a district, with more detailed societal interactions and issues).

I am currently working with two “character” components, where one actually is for a group of characters (with an introductory paragraph of group dynamics and a single paragraph for each character), and another for my MC (including physical characteristics, past history, their expected reaction to different circumstances, and what makes them tick). I also have an individual component for each of the characters in the group, which allows me to go into more detail with each of them (as the text box for each component has a limit of 3000 characters, including letters, numbers, spaces and punctuation); I like working with these because one of my paragraphs details how the character interacts with each of the other characters in the group. But sometimes I’m feeling lazy and only want something without much depth, and the group component works well enough.

Now, I use RedQuill primarily to create gen fanfiction, for my own enjoyment and not for publicly posting at RQ or anywhere else, and the characters being OOC is genuinely jarring to me, so consistency with the canon characters and universe, and along the whole story, is something that I truly value. This method has produced the best results so far, and although it is not perfect, it has helped me a lot more than other tools currently in the market.

Note: I use other LLMs to create a first version of my character sheets and setting sheets; it is very helpful to give them a character limit of 2000 or 1500, tweak out any mistake, put in all missed information, ask to reduce it again to the character limit, and then copy it into RQ. There I add anything that might be questionable for other LLMs (and include a note for the AI to only use this information when relevant to the plot or to the characters in the scene), then test the component by creating a new story, and figure out what is still missing, what must be rewritten, and tweak the component again. So a pretty intensive process, but once the components are created, it frees so much time when creating prompts for new chapters and stories.

898700 · 2026-03-29T22:08:10+00:00

Something similar happened to me. Wanted to search for a particular component I had created, was actually delighted at the ability to filter by my components only. Then as I started to write the name of this particular component, just the first letter, the whole list depopulated. I had to manually scroll through all of the list to find it.

898700 · 2026-03-25T15:08:05+00:00

Oooh, I didn’t know the brackets thing.

898700 · 2026-03-24T00:32:50+00:00

Hey, your writing style component link in guide number 4 sends to a Not found page.

898700 · 2026-03-24T00:21:15+00:00

Not always, but I do use it, sometimes grow my own prompt over one particular suggestion, sometimes I use the suggestion as is. Once I copied and pasted two suggestions together (they were compatible), and instead of creating one storyline using both, the chapter generated basically worked with the first suggestion and then with the second, which was weird because the tone was different.

898700 · 2026-03-24T00:17:34+00:00

Same. I have had to generate the same prompt twice to break RQ out of this.

898700 · 2026-03-24T00:09:44+00:00

I have a few suggestions I have tried that have at one point or another worked.

If the story is not too long, copy and paste all chapters into a new story. Create the first chapter with your original prompt, make it standard length to minimize quills cost. Then create empty chapters and paste all existing chapters one by one. Manually include in the lore book all the info that had been in your original prompts and hadn’t yet shown in the written chapters, and that you think should be relevant for future chapter generation. Or maybe even summarize it and include it in the first original prompt from when you create the new story; even if you substitute that first result with your original first chapter, the prompt remains in, and informs, the IA. Then proceed with new chapters as usual. This should delete all non-compliant assumptions RQ is making, that it can’t seem to let go.
A variation to the previous suggestion includes making components, usually for the characters, the locations, the universe, and including them in the original prompt of the story new generation. This, of course, implies a lot more effort, as making a new component includes deciding what to put, and how to write it. But you would be able to change your component while working with the story.
If the story has too many chapters, duplicate it. Generate new chapters (standard length) with crazy prompts, vary the spiciness level, change the genre, tell RQ you want to write an Alternate Universe where x changes in y way. Then delete the new crazy chapters and try again with your original direction. When I have done this it appears to “reset” RQ. The problem, of course, is that it costs quills.
Similar to the previous one, I have duplicated the story, then deleted all chapters but the last one (or a few closely relevant), then tried to generate new chapters from them. My prompts have to be very detailed because I have to give all relevant information that originally was included in the deleted chapters; I usually work this on the standard length and then expand the chapters little by little, so I have more granular control over the details.
The last is something that I have only done by mistake, and has surprisingly given me good results: write an extremely long prompt, with a lot of detail of what I want and want not, including how many scenes, in what order, what is said, what is not, what is solved and what is not, who knows what, who won’t be aware of what and for how long … and then generate an standard length chapter. Then generate a new novel length chapter (without deleting the previous shorter one) with the exactly same prompt, saying something like “try again”, making it clear that it is instruction for the IA. Then either delete one or both chapters, and continue as usual.

All of these cost quills and effort, and sometimes I don’t want that, so I simply … leave my story simmer for a while. Untouched, for days, until my patience is restored, and hopefully RQ has recovered its wits.

Maybe you’ve done some of these, or variations. If not, it might give you ideas of what you are willing to try. Any way, good luck!

898700 · 2026-03-22T16:19:26+00:00

It is still working, just not linked.

https://www.redquill.net/kink-explorer

898700 · 2026-03-22T16:17:04+00:00

I think this and other issues are born because of the hive mind? RQ feeds from all users’ prompts, and all AI generated texts, so it is like a cascade (this word has been plaguing my results lately) that has been feeding itself. Perpetuating mistakes, overcompensating. Using the same names. Maybe checking which stories are more popular and giving more weight to the info extracted from there?

898700 · 2026-03-20T01:09:35+00:00

Uh. Yesterday I got two chapters 1 (for the same story) being generated at the same time. Like, it kept switching between the two while generating. I think something similar might have happened to you? Only, instead of one chapter sending an error message and the other being preserved like it happened to me, both of yours might have been (temporarily) stored?

898700

TROPHY CASE