Hats, Boots, & Chocolate

     I tried/have been trying an experiment lately where I used ChatGPT during my brainstorming process for a completely new project, just to see how well it would do. It's terrible for coming up with a coherent plot--it forgets a lot of the things it just wrote out and starts to contradict itself--but for the story seed I used, it was perfect, because I've been doing research on that idea to figure out how it might work in a story for years, and never found anything that gave me a decent starting point for it. (It's a music-based magic system, but every previous attempt at designing it I'd tried, it became far too complex for me to write into a story, at least with my abilities as a novelist. ChatGPT gave me the best idea of what something like that could look like without being too complex for me to write, which was a perfect jumping-off point for me to then have the AI take me through a couple possible plot-threads, which I then unraveled and wove into my own plot-st...

    About a month ago, I adopted a goldfish from the preschool where I've been student teaching. His water was pretty scummy and he wasn't really eating, and the regular teachers at the site didn't have the time to take care of him as well as they wanted, and my head teacher mentioned that she'd been thinking about flushing him.     I, however, am a wee bit of an animal-lover, and while I'd never had a fish before, I couldn't bear the thought of flushing the poor little guy--he'd done nothing to earn that treatment. So I offered to take him home--a process that involved dumping him into the preschool sink by accident, then hurriedly scooping him into a plastic bag full of water and putting him in a little paper cup to give his water some structure so he'd have a bit of space to swim in. Then he got to hang out in the car and slosh around for thirty minutes while I drove home, and after that he had to survive living in a quart jar for a week while I order...

    I mostly wrote this to help myself figure out what the best principle for writing is for myself, but I decided that there was some value in this spiel that others might appreciate. Enjoy!      The most important part of a story, in my opinion, is the characters—the characters, their arcs, their relationships, their interactions within those relationships, their traumas, their challenges, their dilemmas, their choices, the consequences of their actions, their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, their conflicts, their hopes and dreams, their fears, their doubts, their worries, the lies they tell themselves, the truths they have to teach their writers and their readers. Everything else in a story—the plot, the setting, the action, the prose—all of it is supplemental, and exists solely to support the characters' growth, arcs, and journeys.     Some characters, like Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings, have to go on fourteen-month journeys to find ou...