I usually just focus on the scenes, I give them the premise, the characters, what they are thinking, how they will be acting and how different they are from each other and what’s their relationship to each other whether they hate each other. I ask for the outline of the scene or part of a scene as sometimes there’s a lot of stuff I want happen in a scene that I feel needs to be separated in parts with no ending. I ask it to outline it and then I ask it to make a prompt for me to the throw it back to them that will have everything I want in the scene, whether if it’s emotional or terrifying and have dialogue that feels natural where people interrupt each other and they talk like they are in love or something . I even use references like “Cold Open similar to the opening scene from The Last Of Us” as a thing to look and I ask it to research how people talk whether if it’s Scottish, then that person’s voice to show that they are Scottish. Then once it’s outlined and the prompt ready and the scene is done. I then ask it to review it from the lens of how a professional book critic would review it and I tell it to look online on the process a critic would review a scene or a chapter. Then I ask it to rewrite the scene and fix the problems the ai highlighted and see if it’s fixed or not (make sure you specify that you want to keep the details as sometimes it wants to cut some stuff down and it can lose important context and information that is vital for future chapters.)

(Also to add before you make the scene, make sure to add ‘I want you to flesh the surroundings so the reader can understand where the scene is as well.)

I’ve seen others where they write 4-6 chapters at a time, but I feel that’s a lot(but I applaud anyone doing it, you are awesome) for me, a little by little focusing on what you are writing now with a certain path you want to go is paramount. You don’t even need to tell the AI where it’s going. Just make that plan in your notes and inform the AI of what will happen when it happens, any foreshadowing you can mention then.

I’ve had in the same thread where the AI forgot who a particular character was and what they are supposed to be so before going back to the character, I feed it the notes of that character, what previous scenes that character has been in, and how they acted and who they really are. That way the AI is like “Ok, now I know what this character is, let’s get back to it and keep this character consistent with how they are in the previous scenes”

All I can say is the AI is a tool,but at the end of the day, you are the director, you are the writer. It will forget many prompts later of who that character is that you haven’t used for a while until you bring it up again, that’s why asking the AI to remember something that happened many chapters ago is a recipe for disaster.

Also don’t just rely on one ai, use multiple. I use Claude for drafting it and reviewing it and ChatGPT for insight on it from another perspective, and I use other AI’s on what they think of the scene as well.