alt Hacker NewsI have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven't really thought about publishing anything though. Too much work and bureaucracy.
The thing is ... ideas matter just as much as the writing. You cannot simply say: "Hey Claude, write me a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the bronze age."
I have found that a 1:4 to 1:8 ratio gives nice results. That is, for every 4-8 paras of expected output, you must provide 1 para worth of character detail, plot beats etc. So you would need 100-200 pages of your own writing to produce 800 pages worth.
But most people are lazy. So the output is too.
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As a writer and cognition-enjoyer, much of the reading I do has been done by people who were using that writing as an adjunct to their own thoughts.
Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. In fact, shortening works seems to be the main part of good writing. I don't generally want to watch a 4-hour film that could have been a tight 50 minutes. I don't want to read 800 pages that could have been a solid 200.
I'm not reading for distraction, and if I were Zane Gray and Robotech and Harliquin romance novels already have that filled- heck, I could just re-read Cujo (which probably wasn't edited very much at all, admittedly).
Generating a ton of crap, as you note, has never been a problem.
Getting rid of the 4-8 paras of thoughtlessness has always been the real work in my experience.
Just self-publish! That's the route I think many authors are moving towards.
But why would I want to read that?
Just give me the prompt at this point.
A bunch of ideas doesn't make a book. Actual writing takes place, the length of each sentence, the specific choice of words, the pace, the choices, the editing. It's literally an art. Nobody wants to read what ChatGPT wrote based on your prompts.
Of course you can use it to quickly try out stuff, for some editorial tasks and such. But unless you learn the craft of writing I don't think others will want to read any of this stuff.