Unleash Your Child's Creativity with ChatGPT: My Experience Helping My Son Write His First Book!

One weekend while hanging out on the couch with my 9 year old son, ingesting Youtube videos about using AI for business, the video illustrated the process of writing and publishing a self-help/DIY book. My son, who was writing a short story in school as part of a creative writing activity, looked up from his handheld console and exclaimed, "I wonder if I can write a whole book with it?!" and the gears began to turn... The following weekend, we sat down with a Book title ("Down the Drain") and a concept ("An alien bug pulls a human down into the sewers through a toilet bowl...") and began our writing process:

Step 1: Setting the Stage

We had a title and a funny incident, but this a book does not make. I asked my Son if the book was going to be a mystery, a science fiction, an other-world adventure, a tragedy, a comedy? He decided on a comedic science-fiction children's novel. I introduced my Son to the concept of a "conflict/climax", and he thought about how the Alien Bug "didn't like how the sewers looked, and wanted to redecorate but didn't know how, so needed some human help". Perfect! We now had a great title, two characters, a theme, a dilemma, and a setting. It was so much fun to see my child's creativity shine as they created this magical world with their own characters and twists!

Step 2: Generating Chapter Titles

Next, we spun up good ole' ChatGPT (v4 at the time of this writing) and prompted it as a children's book author, modifying something pulled from prompts.chat:

I want you to act as a children's novelist. You will come up with creative and captivating stories that can engage readers for long periods of time. The genre will be fantasy and the aim is to write something that has an outstanding plotline, engaging characters and unexpected climaxes.
My first request is “I need to write a science-fiction novel set in the present day on Earth, where an alien bug lives underground sewer systems and doesn't like the look of it. The bug wants to redecorate but does not know how, so the bug brings a human into his world through a bathroom toilet.”

We then prompted our title, characters, and conflict, then asked to create 10 chapter titles based on the given information. We got 10 interesting titles, but it also proceeded to write the story for us. The short story had about one paragraph per "chapter", and the characters didn't have any names! We had some more prompting to do...

Step 3: Writing the Chapters

Once we had our favorite chapter titles together, we had to tell ChatGPT our intended format. We told the AI that our chapters should be between 400-500 words, and written in the "voice"/lexical style of a 1st grader. We also asked to name our characters, and to give the human a gender (I know, we're in 2023 and gender is a spectrum; but that's what my 9-year-old Son wanted.) With ChatGPT's guidance, we generated each chapter according to it's title, and pasted the content into a text document.

Step 4: First Revision: Editing & Revising

Now that we had the rough-draft of a manuscript, it was time to read it and see if we liked the story! I shifted gears to some other work while my Son popped some popcorn and started reading the story. I heard him chuckle, sigh, exclaim, and experience a host of other reactions as he read... I knew we had a winner. I then asked him to go through and make sure everything made sense; that each chapter flowed well from one to the next, had consistent characters and plot, and was free from errors. He discovered some places where it did not make sense from one to the next, so he added and removed some paragraphs to make it work.

Step 5: Making It His Own

After the first revision, it was time to ensure that this was mostly a book with original wording, so that my Son could copyright the material (Material generated with AI and unchanged, is not copyrightable as of this writing.) My Son was informed of this and went back to re-read and revise the story, changing any words he didn't use in his vocabulary and elaborating on concepts he didn't understand. A third pass to ensure that he strategically changed more than 50% of the wording in the book. This process helped my child learn the importance of editing and revising their work, and also a bit about copyright law. My Son enjoyed seeing their story improve with each round of edits!

Step 6: Having Fun and Not Worrying

Throughout the entire process, We reminded ourselves to have fun and not worry about making mistakes. ChatGPT was there to support and inspire us, and we embraced the creative journey with excitement and joy. My child learned that writing is a form of self-expression, and ChatGPT was a tool that encouraged their imagination to soar! The creative process is allowed to be messy, unstructured and supposed to be fun, we experienced it all.

Step 7: Formatting and Designing the Book

Once the story was complete, we copied and pasted it into Google Docs and formatted it according to Amazon KDP standards -- changed the page size and margins, added page numbers & table of contents, and added page breaks before each chapter and front/back matter (We used ChatGPT to generate content like summaries, descriptions, taglines, etc.) The author didn't want to use illustration, in order to let the reader's imagination run wild, but he drew the cover art in Google Docs and then used Amazon's included designer tool to create the book's front/back cover. He even wrote his own mini bio to go on the back cover next to his picture. It was a proud moment when we saw the final product come together!

Step 8: Reflection and Next Steps

We made sure to talk about what we learned during the process: about writing, publishing, generative AI, and also about ourselves. I want to ensure that my Son feels proud about his achievements, that he and his community celebrate his successes so that he is confident to build in the future.

Lessons Learned:

1. Don't ask for too much at once as a response. - In our experience, it was easier to ask ChatGPT to write in chunks (e.g. in 500 word chapters) instead of asking it to write the entire book in one step. When it tried to write more than a few chapters at a time, it would stop generating in the middle of a sentence, seemingly "timing out"; we would have to prompt it to continue... and sometimes it would continue but not be relevant to the preceding answers...
2. Rework, don't Regenerate - If we didn't like an answer, instead of regenerating (which was hit or miss in creating better answers) we would copy/paste some earlier response, and ask it to rewrite or rework the response using new/detailed/more specific information. This yielded results that were better aligned with our goals.
3. Try to do it all in one "session" - I'm not sure if ChatGPT "remembers" what it writes in previous "sessions", i.e we would switch tabs to paste into a text document, or take breaks for snacks/lunch and come back to writing later. In our example by the time we got to chapter 9, ChatGPT started writing a story that did not connect at all to chapters 1-8. I ended up copy/pasting the entirety of chapters 7-8, and prompted to continue with the next two chapters, concluding the story.
4. Be prepared for the publishing process - IF you decide to publish the book, be prepared for whatever process is involved; formatting, reviews (by the publisher), pricing, creating summaries, tag lines, categories, marketing and promotion, etc.
5. ChatGPT is just a tool. You need to research - Just like any tool, you need to know a bit about what your doing to use the tool correctly; If you don't know how to build a house, you'll use a hammer to build something else. We had to learn a bit about what makes a story, what makes publishing successful, and also how to guide ChatGPT in the write directions (prompt engineering).

Conclusion:

Writing with ChatGPT was an incredible experience for my child and me. It unlocked my child's creativity and brought our stories to life in ways we never imagined. With ChatGPT as our storytelling companion, we had fun, learned, and created unforgettable moments together. I encourage you to try it with your child(ren) and embark on your own creative writing journey!

Oh and if you'd like, join Emily, Zog, and Sigma on their incredible journey and discover the power of friendship, courage, and determination in the face of the unknown. Brayden Byrne presents: "Down The Drain"