My daughter has been into dragons for well over a year and even created characters and stories featuring dragons that she wanted to tell.
Last year, I wrote a story for her. This year, I wanted to help her bring her story to life. So, as the school year wound down, we worked together—with the help of ChatGPT—and out came Avalanche’s Ascent!
We started by generating images for her characters. Armed with names and descriptions, we turned to Dall-E to create images. During the final week of school, we sat for a couple of hours in a local coffee shop and tweaked visual representations of each dragon: the dragonet crew.
My daughter had already crafted a basic plot: a group of dragonets participating in a play, with one getting upset about not having the best part. The plot of the story actually mirrored the plot of the play. At my encouragement, we introduced a villain to tempt Avalanche, the dragonet my daughter wanted to focus on, into turning against her friends. Now we were ready to start writing.
As we tackled each chapter, we used ChatGPT to brainstorm potential subjects for the play, lines for particular characters, or twists at the end of each chapter.
Each day, we’d input basic plot points into ChatGPT, asking it to generate a 500-word chapter. We’d then listen to the output and revise as needed. It was hilarious to see how often the AI text would use the word “palpable.” (The final story only kept one instance of the word!)
To make sure the story was pitched at the right level of difficulty, my daughter read each completed chapter aloud to my wife. This test also helped us revise.
Our habit was to write two chapters at a time, and in a week, we had a story worth sharing.
We immediately sent it on to family members, including my aunts. They offered encouraging (and fast!) feedback.
I handled a lot of the prompt engineering, but I was continually impressed by how much my daughter knew intuitively about story construction. She had clear ideas about what worked and what didn’t. It was fun to sit down with her each day and help make something she’d had in her head take shape on the page.
I hope it’s not the last time we get to do it.
Learning Together 