Hello, and welcome to the Nonfiction Authors Podcast. I'm Carla King, your host, and today we're talking with Derek Murphy about how to use AI prompts to help you craft each stage of your story. But first, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by the nonfictionauthorsassociation.com, and that's where you can find this and all our other podcasts, including full transcripts, links, and show notes. So head over and subscribe to our email list to get notified about upcoming guests and past guests. You can also take advantage of our free resources and explore membership options. We're here to help make your writing and publishing journey an enjoyable and successful one and connect you to a community of nonfiction authors like you. Now I'm thrilled to introduce our guest, Derek Murphy, who has been featured on CNN for his nomadic lifestyle renting castles, but mostly leads a quiet life, helping authors publish better books and succeed faster. Derek has a PhD in literature. He's a ghost writer, a developmental editor, a book designer, founder of creative indie.com, and he's really into AI. And in during this talk, we're going to reference his one page plot outline chapter by chapter. We're not going to go through every single step at www.creativeindie.com/plot-outline if you want to follow along. Hey, Derek So I don't know, where do you want to start?
Derek:Well, we were talking just before we started about plot outlines in general because most memoir writers just want to tell their story, so they have a bunch of episodes, maybe they've had a cool life and they have a lot of stories, but a bunch of stories altogether isn't really a memoir. Most memoirs are written like novels, so it's a narrative nonfiction where there's a story and that needs to follow some kind of a template, which means stories that are successful, they build momentum. So you kind of start to sympathize the main character, the protagonist, there's a lot of scene description, but then more and more conflict happens until a final turning point that forces the protagonist to change or have some kind of moment of awareness. Which is something you can do either at the beginning with planning and plotting, or you can do it after you've kind of organized all your episodes on a timeline, But you've gotta identify those critical pieces that you're building towards. That's just about taking your story and turning it into a successful product because books are products and they fail or succeed depending on whether people finish them, whether they got something out of them. So that's what I do as like a editor. But I've also put out templates because I wanted to get better at writing my own books. I had to figure out how do I make this work. It took me a long time, so I put out, 24 chapters for fiction. And I think I have two different 10 chapter, outlines for memoirs that I think work pretty well. It's something so that you have some structure that you can begin with to start filling in the blanks. I think it's really useful. But I have gotten into AI more, not from the, like, how to write a book withAI, which is whatever I'm talking about right now but just from a standpoint of I have too many projects. I'm a one person shop. I don't have the funds to outsource everything. So for the first time ever, aI is allowing me to finish some products or projects that, that I never could before, just because it's like having a co-writer or a researcher or an editor, that can help me to do things that I don't have time to do myself. So that's kind of why I am excited about it, even though I know, it's obviously controversial and it's going to change a lot of things up in every industry. I do think it's a very useful tool for writers.
Carla:So you mentioned you have your novel plot outline that I'm looking at is 24 pieces or chapters, and you mentioned the memoir outline is 10.
Derek:I think most memoirs are shorter, but it kind of depends. If you're writing narrative, nonfiction is like a story. I do think 24 chapters I write about two or 3000 words per chapter, so it turns it into 60 or 70,000 words but another type of nonfiction that's more like the self-help, how-to type stuff that maybe isn't just narrative nonfiction memoir, but it's a little more I have knowledgeable advice that I want to share. So it's more of that kind of a book, I think.
Carla:Mm-hmm. Right. And you know, even in prescriptive, nonfiction, self-help, et cetera, the authors who write them tell stories to illustrate their points all along.
Derek:And it's important because, nobody remembers information. So if you just give people a bunch of information or advice, they won't care about it. They won't remember it because you can't visualize that. So the idea with stories is that, you need to put pictures in people's heads and make them feel things, which you can only do with stories so it's a really good idea to like start a chapter with a story like an unfinished story. Like you, you start and build up to the point of crisis or conflict, but you don't resolve it. And then you give all the advice and information and then at the end of the chapter, you. end that story, and then start a new story leading into the next chapter because that if it's just information, people just can't get into it. So by bridging it with, pictures, people visualize the scene and they feel the, the, the setting a little bit, and then they're more able to remember or identify with the the information.
Carla:Yeah, I, it brings to mind, the one that I can remember is this psychologist, Esther Pearl, which I think she's such a bestseller and a great voice for psychology and marriage and family. She always uses story and I remember her advice because I remember the stories and the evolution of the couples that she's talking about, and she even does that on television now. She has a television program. So I think that's a good example. But, so let's get to how we can get AI to help us with these. And maybe we could just start with the broader structure, which is act one, two, and three.
Derek:So with the, the easy thing I like to do when I'm outlining that I've been doing recently with Chad G P t, is I'll just put in my 24 chapter outline, uh, and say like, I have a story idea. This is the story I want to tell. Like I'll one paragraph summary, and then I'll give it my 24 chapter outline and say, can you convert my story into this like, suggestion. So that doesn't quite work if you're writing a memoir because you know, you probably already have your own stories. So Chad g PT will just make things up, which aren't going to be applicable to you, but you could have like, here's a hundred messy episodes, which of these would fit better on this 24 chapter outline? And can you organize it for me? Uh, that's one way to do it. Um, or you could say like here's my mind dump. Here's five pages of my mind, dump of my entire story, my life history. If you just make like a a bullet point list of your life history events, and then say, I need to write a bestselling narrative memoir, what's the best way to structure this? Could you turn this into an outline that, that would be a popular by selling nonfiction book and it can just do some of that work for you of, of organizing your content. So act one is, um, before you get to the really big stuff, you have to sympathize your character. And it's difficult with a memoir because typically the protagonist goes through a learning curve where they will become a better person. So a lot of people start off with a unlikeable character on purpose because they think, but he'll be redeemed and it'll make sense later. But if you start off with, two unlikable protagonists, people aren't going to enjoy any of the story because they have to like the person enough to go who's going through these changes to stick with it. They realize the person they were at the beginning is not who they want to be. And I don't think that all authors really build their memoirs that way to get to that point. And that could be very therapeutic, but it's not really very enjoyable, necessarily for the reader. So if you're going to write a memoir for yourself, just to process your feelings. It doesn't matter how you write it, but if you want to write a memoir that other people enjoy enough to talk about and share, it becomes a bestseller.
Carla:So how do you get ChatGPT to help you with that?
Derek:With the narrative nonfiction, there's always a balance of momentum. So you start off with small things and you build to the really big things. If your first couple chapters are all violence and chaos and shouting and screaming and stuff, then there's nowhere to go anywhere in the story because your emotion is at a 10 in chapter one. So then when you get to that final crisis point, there's nowhere for you to go. You've already shown your max emotions. You want to show interesting stuff without showing the internal emotional outbursts. So you want to hold it in and try to contain yourself as the situation gets more and more impossible until you reach a point where the emotions come a highlight of your culmination of your final dramatic instance, your lowest point. It's actually not, if you look at my 24 chapter outline, there's two final battles which can be metaphorical in memoir, and there's the final battle where they completely fail because they had the wrong idea about what they wanted. They had flawed information. So they fail. That's the dark night of the soul or the lowest point. Then they have the other final battle, which, they, in the heat, in the middle of the battle, they figure out their fatal flaw. They have their flash of inspiration or insider epiphany, mid battle. Maybe they don't figure it all yet out yet, but they see what they haven't seen before and they choose to resolve this situation differently than they've ever done before. And that's how, things get resolved in that final peak. But something that can work really well is you start off with, what's going to be right before the Dark Knight and Soul your most dramatic, crazy entertaining story. Like the biggest one, you've got the craziest thing you've ever done. You start there in the first chapter of the preface, but you don't finish it, you don't resolve it. You get to that moment of conflict or crisis, and then it's something like, but let's go back to the beginning, which they do all the time in movies. Like they, they start with that hook. That's the big thing. Then they go back to this is the way it started. Here's the whole story. Building up to that point of crisis, you give the resolution, that's the dark, night of the soul. You take a pause, you reflect, and then you have a few more chapters that get to that second big final conflict scene where this time you have the awareness to see differently and choose differently. I think that's a format that can work pretty well.
Carla:So a couple things come to mind for me here, and I just want to refer to Stephanie Chandler and Cristen Iris talked about outlining a memoir in nonfiction just a few weeks ago. And Jordan Rosenfeld talked to us about flashbacks and backstory and how to insert that. I was thinking also about Cheryl Strayed. She was definitely a flawed character at the beginning of her memoir, Wild she, her mother had died she ha she was having random sex, she was doing heroin and all of that. So you open with that. But somehow she was a sympathetic character I think, because she was so deeply flawed and she had a reason to be going down that dark hole. And so we connected with her because we wanted her to feel better, you know? Cause she was deeply hurt.
Derek:More entertaining, like the crazy stuff. It can be more entertaining, especially in the beginning. Somebody said that description is like pasting over the plot holes because if you keep them distracted with big description, big scenes, they're looking at the pictures, they're not really thinking does this story hold water? And the backstory. You want to start with the big scenes and keep things moving and then the backstory where you figure out why their behavior is justified, why they're so messed up, why they're acting out, that you get to the full reveal. That stuff usually happens much later in the book. It's not the stuff that you start out with. You start out with the exciting visual episodes where things are happening. You don't want to just be like in the protagonist flashback because the problem with flashbacks. In general is that it's concluded action. It's already happened, the result is known. So there's no suspense or intrigue. We don't know what's going to happen or like, how is this going to work out? Because it's all concluded. It's all happened already. There's no what could happen next, which is what keeps people reading. I would just try to take out all your flashbacks and just go into episodic time-based narrative until you reach that point where like in the middle of the most dramatic final conflict that they have to face, that they've been avoiding their whole lives. That's usually where the backstory happens. It's mid final battle scene. So in Netflix or in movies, even like Marvel movies, they have this thing where at the maximum point of crisis where the final battle is happening and you have to show the heroes winning. They stretch that moment out as long as possible. It's that moment usually like where the heroes and the antagonists are head-to-head pushing against each other. The metaphor is depicted visually. Like they're pushing with force or they're pulling with force. It's like a tug of war and then in that scene, before it gets resolved, there's long flashbacks where they dig into it's always the whichever character resists it the most. Whoever this challenge is the hardest for, that's whose story it is, and that's when you have to show, why is this challenge impossible for this character? A good story is always, an impossible challenge. So the character always has to be met with a personal challenge that mirrors their personal flaw or their backstory, uh, shard of glass, their whatever, they can't handle so often, like at the beginning, you'll show something they're afraid of, like a minor incident that hints at the thing they can't do, but it isn't all spelled out. And then at the end you see, like they have to do the thing that they absolutely cannot do because they've been afraid of it their, entire lives because of their childhood history. So when they're forced to do that one thing, that's the time to finally reveal the full, deep backstory narrative as brutal and painful as it is, because then they're finally facing it. But I do think you want to be careful about even if it's an interior monologue, inspirational awakening, you've gotta show it on a stage. Like what would this look like as the Netflix show if your memoir got turned into a movie? How do you picture this? Is it just someone in their room, even if it is they're probably are going to dramatize it with demons or ghosts or earthquakes or big events.
Carla:And going back to Cheryl Strayed very little of that memoir is her walking the Pacific Crest Trail. Most of it is in her head and it's very, very dramatic. So what I'd love to get to is we, the memoirists, we have our stories. I have a story, and I have the beginning and the middle and the end but I'm having trouble figuring out how much to tell and in what order? How do I, you mentioned before feeding a five page summary or something into ChatGPT, how do you prompt it again to, to give you an outline that follows the hero's journey, the act 1, 2, 3.
Derek:There's a lot of different writing tools and ChatGPT 4 is probably the best and the easiest. It's like having a chatting co-writer buddy. So, it remembers the thread and you can just prompt it with something and if it doesn't do it right, you can say, that sucks, try it again, do it different. mostly you just tell it the role you want it to be. So I'll usually say something like you are a developmental editor who works with New York Times bestselling memoirist. I have a story idea. I want you to be my writing coach, and it will adopt that personality. You can either give it specific styles, like even if I just say like in the style of a bestselling memoir or book. But I could feed it specific author names or passages. Or if like I really like my own writing, I can give it a few pages of my writing and say, learn this style. This is Derek's style. We're going to use this from now on.
Carla:Now you're talking about actually having it do the writing for you.
Derek:Even if I'm just fixing my writing. Like maybe I've got all the stories and I've written a rough draft, but it's just not as pretty as I'd like it. Yeah, it is good for both parts.
Carla:I think a lot where a lot of memoirists that I know of get stuck is how to structure it, and they're not following the hero's journey, which is the typical story structure, So you just really just put the, like a five page summary in there and see what happens or, what do you do?
Derek:I'll say make this better, make this tighter, make this more engaging, more entertaining. I would even, if I don't know what order, I'd probably do, like act one, act two, act three, here's my 20 episodes for each act, but I don't know how they should be arranged. And then I'd say you know, can you organize this content for the most dramatic entertaining way? Or I think it, my 24 chapter outline works pretty well. So if I just gave it like, here's my three acts in my episodes, and it's basically like 24 chapters in a one sentence prompt for the kind of thing. It's not a what happens in the story, it's just the kind of thing that could be happening at this point in the story.
Carla:And so you say are saying episodes, so would they be scenes or mini stories? What would they, those episodes be? Something that a director could make a movie scene out of or a TV show scene from?
Derek:So my chapters will probably have two scenes and then I'll separate in the middle. So you can do a scene break when there's a transition. It's gotta have a starting point, an ending point. and you want to start just before the action and cut off mid action, like before it's resolved. And then the next chapter probably you'll continue it or resolve it. Anyway, if you're doing cliffhangers, it depends if you want to do that. But if you resolve every story, then there's no point of pushing it forward. I'd say with a memoir, I'd be careful of, the meaning like, these are my feelings. I would stick a lot closer to what actually happens, what events happen. And then later, like towards the end, you can get into some deeper reflection theorizing self-awareness. In the beginning. I think most people just don't have time to self-reflect on the episode. Focus on telling it like a novel in terms of things should always be happening that move the story forward. Everything that you put should matter so that if you took it out, the next section wouldn't make sense because it's a necessary, like this piece was a necessary domino to get to the next. Scene, even if we don't see it all until later. it's the sequence of events that were all necessary to get to that moment of crises or change that actually happened. You only got that epiphany because you happened to go through that, all those other, episodes so that you were prepared to act differently this time because almost everybody, like normal people handle crises well, and most of us we wouldn't become someone else or destroy our consciousness or ourself, because we can handle crises. But then sometimes, like you might have crazy entertaining stories. You just want to tell, or maybe you have some like, name dropping. You want to tell, I know people who met. Famous Hollywood stars or whatever. You met those people, name dropping will probably help the book be more successful. But it may not be a relevant story to get you to where you need to go towards the end. Sometimes there can just be entertaining scenes or episodes.
Carla:I'm glad to hear you say that because my books and stories, they have travel at this travel memoir and so I've got all this travel stuff and you're a traveler too, so there's all this stuff happening that people want to know about and it's valuable, but it have. It doesn't create any epiphanies for me. Yeah. the things that happen that create that epiphany, but I want to keep them in there. Is that okay?
Derek:No, that's fine. Especially with travel writing, because I think travel writing's more about the entertaining stories. People don't expect that, this is all leading somewhere to a transformative event. I think that's, as a fiction writer, like to make a very satisfying, emotional novel. There should be this kind of a structure. You can apply that structure later if you just have all your episodes in order. And this is, the book is all your fun, cool episodes you can still apply some of that structure on top to just give it a little bit more depth and drama. I think the problem with entertaining episodes is that it's not building emotionally.
Carla:So what I'm hearing you say is that nonfiction authors whether you're psychologists or sports or travel or whatever, you should have, 24 scenes maybe, 10 to 20
Derek:...might be more than that.
Carla:30 scenes and you can feed those into an outline. And can you ask ChatGPT to structure it with the hero's journey, but it doesn't know the backstory around each of these stories.
Derek:Yeah. You'd to give it the scenes. You could like just do a massive, brain dump, basically here's a hundred cool episodes. I want to turn into a book. How can I structure this? It's pretty smart. And if it doesn't get it right, it's probably the prompt. I also think, like right now, it's limited by character, so you can't put in 50,000 words, a hundred thousand words. But it will at the end of the year. By the end of the year, there's going to be a bunch of tools that can do that, where you could put in a hundred thousand words and say, this is a mess. Can you just read this and then turn it into a bullet point outline for me. And it can do that. It'll be able to do that. So I think it's going to be pretty useful. Right now you'd have to say here's a hundred things that happened to me, funny, cool things that happened to me. And it'd be like a one sentence or one paragraph summary of the scene. Yeah, and that's probably what you'd have to do. And then you'd say, organize this. There's a lot of famous screenwriter structures too. So if you just say like, use this structure. I want to turn this into a movie, or I want to turn into a best selling memoir or whatever, it'll just use the public history of knowledge to turn your content into something more organized. It depends if you already done a lot of writing to, or if you're like, I just have an idea for a book, but I don't know how to write it, and then I'd really focus on organizing your episodes. People who don't have five grand to spend on developmental editor can now find a very cheap tool that can help process that information and organize it or critique it, which is something we've never really had before. So I think it's going to make it easier for people to tell their story. The other thing we were talking about earlier, which I've been using, is for people who can talk a lot but maybe aren't used to writing things down. I'm not very comfortable on video, but I got into YouTube because I want to build my nonfiction channel basically. And, uh, I'll I'll stall and, and mumble and, um, go around in circles. So my videos are not great content because I'm not a great public speaker, but I can pull those youTube videos into tools that. Turn all of my speech into words. I have an hour long video. It'll turn into like 20,000 words, which is crazy. So I could make my list of a hundred episodes and just tell the story, tell the anecdote, videotape it, or record it. And then put it into one of those tools first to get the the wall of text, which is going to be just messy with no punctuation. It's a nightmare to edit, but that kind of content ChatGPT does really well with editing. If you can say, okay, here's me telling this story. Now I want you to pretend you are a developmental editor for New York bestselling publisher I want you to organize this and clean it up and fix it and rewrite it to make it dramatic and engaging and entertaining, and it can do that for you. You could train it in your style first if you want, or you could test out a few different things to see which style is going to be the best. I know some writers who just want to write their own words and they want their style. And I know some writers who just want to tell their stories and they just want someone else to fix the style. You know, they hire a ghost writer, they hired an editor to just make it sound better. That's the kind of thing that was extremely high skill and very expensive last year even, which right now is being threatened because I think even if these tools aren't there yet, by this year, they really will be. I think people have more options and they'll be able to produce better quality books than they could before.
Carla:What tools do you use to dictate your words and create text? I've got one that's called Anthiago. It's ANTHIAGO. It's a Spanish site, but for some reason I found it and it works really well. It's free. You just like, here's the link to my YouTube video. And then instantly it gives you the whole text and quality is pretty good. Even though I'm, I don't speak very clearly, so I, I'm, I know there's a lot of others and people use, um, certain apps for like just dictating or dictation, but I've been using that and then I just, I'll put that whole thing into ChatGPT and just say, clean this up. Uh, and then I need to write a lot of blog posts to build my traffic so I can sell books, but I don't really blog very much. I don't have anything to talk about. YouTube's easier for me because I can sit down and make a five or 10 minute video instantly and put it out there. But that could be a 2000 word blog post, like immediately where I just make a video, put it on YouTube, I'll turn it into a blog post and put my YouTube video on my blog post. That's really good for platform building and it's so much easier than sitting down to write. Yes, it is. And you know, don't sell Yourself short, Derek, you have a great following on YouTube and I actually love to listen to you and watch you on YouTube. I remember you did, I think a year of YouTube videos at one point as a personal challenge.
Derek:I did a hundred like brain dumps about all the topics publishing and writing. They'll come up sometimes in my feed and I'll see myself 10 years ago just looking like crap, talking about crap. They're embarrassing. I think there are, there are other passive ways where if you're not an extrovert, you can still sell a lot of books. But it was something that I wanted to do for my platform. so I still like, they could be so much better if I had an editor, if I did fancy stuff. But there's value in doing it the easy way, even if the quality is less good, because I basically focus on content. I put out a lot of content. The value is really good because it's good information, even though the production quality is really low because I don't invest you know, in, in making good looking videos. I would do a lot better if I did, but that's not like I don't make a lot of money from YouTube, which is something I use to drive traffic.
Carla:I think that the authenticity that you put forward in those videos was a real, refreshing to your viewers. I wish we could talk more. So where can we find you and these videos and your main site and some of your books and are you blogging on AI tools?
Derek:I've been getting a lot of traffic for like Midjourney because my creativindie.com is like my blog where I talk about everything, but it's not really directly focused on one thing. So people try to find me in my books and course, and they can't even find it on my main blog. But I also talk a lot about book design and cover design. So I get a lot of traffic for book cover templates. Midjourney art stuff is getting a lot of traffic right now. Have a lot of free books about publishing and writing. The Plot Dot is a free book, about plotting, which is like we mentioned, the 24 chapter outline. The Plot Dot just like a simple nine step framework. So even if you're just starting with that, that's a pretty useful beginner's guide to like, how do I make my story build momentum? It's simple and I want to it into a real, like workbook or something. And then Book Marketing is Dead. It's free. That's a marketing book. I've done a lot of books about books and publishing. I've been working on a nonfiction book proposal about creativity andAI, which I'm kind of excited about. And I've been using ChatGPT to build the proposal. And this is like a project where I've got a brain dump file I've been working on for 10 years that's just a mess. I don't want to look at it. I would never have the energy to do, except with ChatGPT I can get help, just like cleaning it up, organizing it. So that's been useful for me because I have so many projects that I could dust off and turn into something pretty quickly. So that's what I've been doing.
Carla:Great. Thank you. I think that's very inspirational to a lot of experts who have a lot of experience and a lot of notes to organize that are just sitting there on hard drive somewhere. So thank you for being with us, Derek. And I look forward to your travels and more castles and travel adventures as well.
Derek:Sure It'll be fun.
Carla:And thank you to our listeners for joining us today. You can find the full transcript of this and every episode along with links to what we talked about today at nonfictionauthorsassociation.com. And please also subscribe to the Nonfiction Authors Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. And until next week, remember, keep writing. The world needs your experience and expertise. Thank you.