This Works Great

This is part Praise and part Turorial.

One of my stories is about a group of pro wrestlers in training. I would describe the experience of training to be a pro wrestler. Every chapter, if I simply described them as practicing front bumps and back bumps, the foundation of becoming a pro wrestler, the computer would describe back bumps correctly, but describe front bumps as dropping to your belly. So every chapter where they’re at practice, I would have to waste several of my 5000 characters per chapter prompt describing a front bump (jumping into the air, throwing your upper body forward, entering into a midair forward somersault, landing flat on your back with your arms spread wide to obsorb the impact, and your chin tuck into your chest to protect your head) just to get the computer to stop saying that the wrestling trainee flops not their belly (That’s called a sprawl, FYI).

Then it occurred to me that the wrestling school was included in my list of locations. So I edited the description of the school, and described what is taught at pro wrestling school, including descriptions of what a front bump and a back bump is. What a bump drill is. What a rope drill is. And so on and so forth.

In my latest chapter, I experimented with just describing the characters as doing bump drills and rope drills without any description of what a bump is or how bump drills work (you run in place lifting your knees up to your chest, and your trainer calls out bumps, the number you have to do, with varying combinations, such as “Two Front! Four back! Three front! Three back!” For anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes). Low & behold, the computer perfectly described both what a bump drill was and how to properly execute a front bump and a back bump, and how to properly run a rope drill.

So, if you are writing a story that requires certain technical details that the computer doesn’t understand, if you can describe those details in the location description, that saves you from having to describe those details in every prompt for every chapter. At least it’s worked for me so far. But I’ve only done it for one chapter.