Calm down. ChatGPT is not writing a book for me.

That would be boring to read, and no fun to write.

In case you missed it, I’m writing an historical fiction novel about an ancestor. I have found a few ways that ChatGPT has helped with the research and planning of the book.

Here are my favorites…

1. Extract Text From Old Newspapers

There are multiple newspapers that published articles about the 1901 murder trial that features in the novel. Before ChatGPT, I’ve saved screenshots from newspapers.com in folders for research, but it has been difficult to search for specific information.

I’ve uploaded the screenshots one-by-one to ChatGPT, asked it to extract the text and remove the line breaks. Then I copy/paste the text into a Google Doc that I can now organize and search.

Easy.

2. A Custom GPT Of Research

I’ve uploaded the news articles above, along with all my other research into a new custom GPT.

I can now ask questions about events, characters, locations, and more. The best part is that the GPT will tell me the source of where it is getting the information, so I can then follow it up for verification and to dig in more carefully.

Any other AI tricks I should be trying?

#nanowrimo