Defending Your Writing From the AI Onslaught With John Truby

In this video, John Truby expounds on the significance of originality and craft in storytelling and how it differentiates successful writers from the rest. He highlights the importance of writers concentrating on building distinct characters and executing plot beats in a unique way, while also expressing powerful themes that touch the hearts of the readers. According to Truby, writers must learn to infuse their stories with their unique voice and style, which will distinguish them from the crowd. He warns against using AI writing, which can only produce generic writing that lacks the passion and vision of a human writer. Truby also cautions writers against copycatting popular genres, as this approach can create unoriginal stories that fail to captivate the audience. Instead, he encourages writers to create stories that use characters, plot, and theme to tell timeless stories. By doing so, writers can create stories that are not only original but also resonate with readers on a deep level.
#chatgpt #openai #aiwriting

[@stephenpowstinger733]

I ran across Truby’s Genre book while perusing books at B & N a month ago. I am not a writer but his book captures my interest in good writing and why it succeeds. I have an interest in philosophy and this represents a penetrating look at the craft. I have asked people “why do people watch horror stories”, for example, but this was the first time someone explained it to me. Same for the other genres. Life is a story and history is a story too. Movies like Platoon express a particular viewpoint of Action genre. Well, I play around with ChatGPT and it’s amazing for what it does.

[@r.castro9256]

Truby is my absolute favorite on topics about craft. Everyday I try to incorporate something from his teachings. I have a long way to go, but I’m hopeful.

[@AuthorNationLive]

His Story work was great but the latest genre material is ground breaking.

[@oracleofaltoona]

this is one of the best interviews I have ever seen about writing/genre. I’m very interested in genre because I’ve always suspected that understanding Genre is crucial to good writing. Good salable writing. But I’ve never wanted to learn all the different formulas. Frankly I have looked down on overtly “generic “work. Watching this discussion I can see how it is crucial information that I have missed along the way. I have immediately ordered Mr. Truby’s book. I look forward to finding out more about how knowing the mechanics of genre is going to help me tell my story. Kudos to Joe Solari for his insightful commentary and questions. Subscribed. 👍🏼😎✍🏼

[@bonniebeingbonnie001]

John Truby giving great advice again. I'm def a fan of his intellect and insight. A.I. doesn't have the emotions of a human to get to the in depth feelings of the character.

[@Reneekelley68]

Yep.

[@Reneekelley68]

But it does help if you need help writing copy

[@DashielClark]

Great video on so many topics, thanks for this.

[@syphon8408]

one of the push backs I usualy get from people who are not to knowlegable to the craft, is I get "oh you can't write enything original anymore and everything just has a different skin to it". Another thing is when you see remasters like of the Lion King, Snow white, Jungle book etc, that puts the idea of all stories are already told to people.

[@AuthorNationLive]

Even if the case is many stories are retold or tropes reused it seems people love them so much they want to read multiple versions. Sometimes great stories need a new skin to access a wider audience. Think of westerns reskinned as Science fiction.

[@syphon8408]

@@AuthorNationLive thats an intresting take and I do actually see where you are coming from.

[@Sams.Videos]

Mmm... As a professional filmmaker myself I've been experimenting with AI, and I can tell, OMG, the things Chat GPT4 comes up with are sometimes mediocre, but sometimes it just blows my mind how good and original it is.

[@AuthorNationLive]

You are still required to sort through those high and low points and decide what to curate.

[@Sams.Videos]

​@@AuthorNationLive Of Course. At the beginning when I started experimenting with ChatGPT 3.5, I had my logline or basic Synopsis idea. I then put the ideas in ChatGPT 3.5 and asked to develop them. I pretty fast started to realise that this was not the way to go. The ideas that the chatbot generated were mediocre at best. Only 1% of what it came up with was decent. And sometimes mindblowing. I then thought that maybe the better version, version 4, would do a better job at it. It was slightly better but still, I had now 5% of good stuff coming out of it, 5% of mindblowing things. I was still going to have to do the work of coming up with everything that is needed to write a story. I started to use ChatGPT more as an assistant, as a co-writer, than as a genie in a bottle who would grant all my story wishes. One thing about art is that it is extremely specific, nothing is left to chance. This is what is lacking with A.I. in general when used to generate images or videos: It is way tooooo random! You still have to go through the material and make the right choices. My conclusion is that the time you waste trying to find the best prompts to generate the best ideas, is time wasted that should rather be invested in developing your writing skills as a human being. If people continue to rely way too much on A.I. for everything that is art related (like I did at the beginning), the future will mainly be made of prompt engineers engineering prompts to engineer more prompts. This sounds more like a definition of hell on earth than the utopian heaven we were all promised thanks to the revolution of A.I., At that point in the future, one will wonder who the machine is: The human generating at nauseam prompts using a machine? Or the machine using humans at nauseam to generate prompts?

[@syphon8408]

@@Sams.Videos the thing I've noticed with ChatGPT 3.5, is that it was acting more like a yes man. It wansn't really challanging my Ideas. I would say it would be an effective search engine to find examples and context.

[@truenemesisprime550]

It's also the quality of the ORIGINAL writing in the video game. Both Last of us games have good stories. They are 10/10 games for a reason, so the writers already had a good template. The series is successful because it mostly stuck to the game. Other so called game translations fail because they go away from the original story and subject matter thinking they can do it better and fail miserably. Like for instance Halo having The Master chief walking around with his mask off the majority of the time when in the game he NEVER takes it off. It would be like The Mandalorian just no mask Pedro Pascal. It would be a terrible idea and that's what they did and why us Halo fans were annoyed and we are the ones that should be your target audience. Silent Hill was good because it stuck to the games more than most game to movies do. Resident evil sucked because they went too far away from the games aswell and casting, terrible casting never helps. That Leon casting swell as the poor character writing for Leon just kills the whole movie in the Welcome to Raccoon city movie. Leon in the games is not weak and nerdy and getting bullied, but they did exactly that and killed it. He has to be a strong confident character to get through that situation or its not believable. Another thing that failed miserably which should be successful was a Dragonball movie. Yet they turned it into Karate kid with an alien. Stupid ideas like that deserve to fail. Stick to the template that was proven popular, they over complicate it. George Romero wrote Resident evil in the mansion and he's the best in the business at Zombie movies, match made in heaven, but they rejected it because it was too like the games I heard? Thats exactly what we want? lol to see our game retold on the big screen. Don't reinvent the wheel. In conclusion, Last of us is working cus they are sticking to the game's story and just building on it and telling it in an interesting way with more detail cus you've got more time. It's not rocket science. The failures tried to reinvent the wheel.

[@AuthorNationLive]

So true. I know many that were original game players that were so worried that it would be ruined.

[@abarnswell]

I wish John Truby was right, but I'm afraid he's missing the point. Many readers don't care how well crafted a book is. They just want a quick, cheap (or better yet, free) read. They'll be happy to settle for far less, especially if it's cheaper.

[@AuthorNationLive]

You are both right. The question is who are you focused on winning over to read your books. Today there is a endless supply of free reading. Will AI make more yes, but it to won't resonate with readers. At the same time there are more authors than ever earning a full time living from writing. The market has expanded. There are more people able to read with more free time and discretionary income. Here's the rub... Publishing is a winner takes all market. 1% make 60% of the money. more than 99% of titles on Amazon earn sell less than a book a day. So the focus must be on winning the attention of the right readers. When you do get that attention and the book sucks you won't get them to pick up the second book. If the book is compelling they will be customers for life.