The Nerdy Novelist brought me to this product. My wife and I were looking for a tool to help busy parents write the book we always talk about. I’m very optimistic.
This is surely one of the best tutorials I have seen on any subject, and also a wonderful primer on NC, which I've just started trialling but already know I will subbing to. I'd tried that other AI writing app, mainly because where I live Claude isn't easily accessible. But for the life of me couldn't get it to stick to the beats enough to even consider starting to edit the output. It would introduce info from beats further down the line, and even if I let it run only removing the last few sentences, it would completely skip over the most important beat of the scene. I've had better luck with a different story before, but NC clearly gives you the control you need to keep things on track and moving towards what you actually have in mind, not what you'll grudgingly settle for after burning through a quarter of your tokens trying to write one scene. Really excited to get into it!
Some models are notorious for wanting to rush through the story and get to the end - the best way I use to counter these is to not tell it what happens in later beats >< Getting Ai to take a breath and think about what it's doing is surprisingly hard. -Kate
@@novelcrafter Hope to give NC a spin later today, but I have good hopes I'll get it to work better after I watch a few more of your tutorials. The other app I tried has you put all the beats of a chapter and then generates prose stride by stride, and I just could not get it to stick to the chronology or contents. Even tried copying the beats in as needed, but still it refused to stick to my order, not to mention turning out kind of meh prose, no matter the style prompts or model. The ability to tinker with temp settings and open access to the system prompts alone I believe will make a huge difference. Again, loving the tutorials
This actually looks really good! I’ve been using NovelAI for a while and I’m more of a pantser than a plotter, but this allows you to go between the two approaches which kinda fits the way I write.
Hey, good morning Kate. This is so funny. I was studying about acts, chapters, and scenes this past week. I thought “scenes” were the smallest units, but I see that “beats” are. So if I’m understanding this correctly, acts contain chapters, chapters contain scenes, and scenes contain beats. It looks like I wrapped scenes and beats together as one. I’m very happy you made this video. I’m going to update my notes. I hope you have a great day.
I'm glad this was useful! When writing traditionally, beats often aren't thought about consciously, so it's a new concept for a lot of us! Sommetimes a chapter might only be one scene, sometimes more, but regardless they are then broken down into beats. Have a great day too :)
I've just delved into writing my first novel with no clue where to start and came upon Novelcrafter through the Nerdy Novelist's channel. This is one of the most epic platforms I have ever seen and an absolute game changer to people like me with good imaginations but little attention span. I have thoroughly enjoyed planning out the story and creating characters through the use of the codex and AI has helped me tremendously. One question I have though is there doesn't seem to be anywhere specific to note your novel outline or summary. I created a global codex and pasted it into there just giving it the title of "Novel Summary". I used this to chat with the AI about created chapter summaries. Can I assume that this global entry will be considered by the gpt when delivering prose? I checked the box, "Always include this entry in the AI context" so I assume it will. You guys have been extremely thoughtful in putting this together, well done and thank you!!! :)
Very very helpful, I've now loads of ideas when I get stuck, Thank you ! Can you please make a short video(if thats possible) how to use the new 'fine tuning' function ?
@@novelcrafter Yay 😁! I’d love to learn more about fine tuning, chatting to do world-building, and how to maximize the individual sections in the codex. In truth, I understand how to use NovelCrafter, I’d love to see ways to maximize what I’m doing to make my output better. Doubling down on individual tasks really helps to understand how I could use the product better.
The issue I am having is that I have created a prompt for the Scene Beat Completion that is working really well for me. It was a bit of a ride, but I used prompts that were meant for Claude in ChatGPT 4.0 to develop the kind of "writer's voice" I wanted and then I adjusted it further to work within NovelCrafter. And Huzzah! It works!. My problem that I am running into is that a the majority of my prose was used using a different prompt and I can't figure out how to just run those paragraphs or chunks of prose and get them adapted my my current Scene Beat Prompt. I know more than likely this is user error or at least my misunderstanding of how it works. But is there a good way of taking a paragraph you've written and having in reworked by your current Scene Beat Prompt?
I tried the product for a few weeks, wife had a baby, and I’m back into the product. This beat topic could do with some expansion. Do you have more on beats to prose?
Thank you for this. I was wondering if there is any way to stop it from constantly using the character's names over and over. I've noticed for me, and maybe its the model I'm using, but I seem to get the AI using the character's name in every other sentence, or starting three paragraphs with the same name. It could be the model, or maybe I could add more aliases/nicknames to call said character?
Both would be good ideas to try - in third person it's hard to avoid that due to the AI training, but experimenation is always valuable. Let us know on here if either of those answers work :)
Thanks, this is very helpful. I always wrote the first paragraph or two of each scene because it was difficult to get the AI to handle the scene change well, but your explanation of guided beats gives me something to try to see if the AI will do better at that in the future.
If you found that the initial paragraphs, when written by hand, would produce better AI prose, it might make sense to stick to it. We've seen a much improved coherence in following the instructions when you always start your scenes/chapters manually :)
@@novelcrafter Another trick that I've found works really well to help the AI write prose that closely mimics my own is to submit a decent chunk of prose to ChatGPT and then ask it to provide a detailed description of the authors writing style and prose. I then take that analysis and paste it into a global codex entry for my writing style. I tell the AI that this is the style I want it to use for narration. It actually does a pretty good job off-the-cuff of imitating me when I do this. I have made a minor tweak here and there, but for the most part this has been sufficient to approximate my style.
I will usually either write dialogue beats, putting the words in myself or you could try telling it to write the conversation - phrase your beats as an instruction. Some models follow instructions better than others, so it's worth trying a couple out too. Recently I was writing with Claude and it kept ignoring the first two sentences of my beat -Kate
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. First, I dont get the difference between beats and expand features. They seem to do exactly the same thing. Second, I would expect that beats are stored in a beatsheet. I.e., in the column on the right, just like the scene summary. Third, I expected to be able to write a beatsheet (just as you mentioned in the beginning) and once I have finished it, let the AI write the text of multiple beats at once. Fourth, I expect the beat node that opens after you type / to create a beat (and not the prose). This would be a form of creative expand that populates the beatsheet, not the actual prose.
I am having real trouble getting novel crafter to work properly. It keeps forgetting what happened in previous chapters. that openrouter is going to be very very expensive. is there an alternative? Do i need to use openrouter? I imported my book into it but it is really not working well.
An alternative to OpenRouter would be to use a local AI model. You would need to have a computer capable of running the AI models. There are a lot of factors involved in how much an AI remembers of past chapters, and in the prompting this is based on what you include in your chapter/scene summaries. I would advise looking there first if there's anything explicit that you would like the AI to remember. I hope this helps.
@@novelcrafter The issue has more to do with me being a newb to writing than Novelcradter itself.but Im slowly picking up the craft though. As a musician terms like Beats and Prose had me totally confused at first but now Im getting it. Prose are simple the lyrics and Beats are more like Bars in a song or Verse vs Pre-chorus etc
Great. I was just using beats as a summary for a scene but didn't realize you can use different kinds.
The Nerdy Novelist brought me to this product. My wife and I were looking for a tool to help busy parents write the book we always talk about.
I’m very optimistic.
Only a few days into Niovelcrafter, but amazing! These videos are tremendously helpful. I feel like Kate is in the office next door!
Nice to see a video alongside the streams. :)
Glad you like them! There are more to come :)
Novelcrafter is The Shyzznit i love NovelCrafter its only going to get better
This is surely one of the best tutorials I have seen on any subject, and also a wonderful primer on NC, which I've just started trialling but already know I will subbing to. I'd tried that other AI writing app, mainly because where I live Claude isn't easily accessible. But for the life of me couldn't get it to stick to the beats enough to even consider starting to edit the output. It would introduce info from beats further down the line, and even if I let it run only removing the last few sentences, it would completely skip over the most important beat of the scene. I've had better luck with a different story before, but NC clearly gives you the control you need to keep things on track and moving towards what you actually have in mind, not what you'll grudgingly settle for after burning through a quarter of your tokens trying to write one scene. Really excited to get into it!
Some models are notorious for wanting to rush through the story and get to the end - the best way I use to counter these is to not tell it what happens in later beats >< Getting Ai to take a breath and think about what it's doing is surprisingly hard. -Kate
@@novelcrafter Hope to give NC a spin later today, but I have good hopes I'll get it to work better after I watch a few more of your tutorials. The other app I tried has you put all the beats of a chapter and then generates prose stride by stride, and I just could not get it to stick to the chronology or contents. Even tried copying the beats in as needed, but still it refused to stick to my order, not to mention turning out kind of meh prose, no matter the style prompts or model. The ability to tinker with temp settings and open access to the system prompts alone I believe will make a huge difference. Again, loving the tutorials
Great video. I love Novelcrafter. It's worth every penny, IMO.
This actually looks really good! I’ve been using NovelAI for a while and I’m more of a pantser than a plotter, but this allows you to go between the two approaches which kinda fits the way I write.
Hey, good morning Kate. This is so funny. I was studying about acts, chapters, and scenes this past week. I thought “scenes” were the smallest units, but I see that “beats” are.
So if I’m understanding this correctly, acts contain chapters, chapters contain scenes, and scenes contain beats.
It looks like I wrapped scenes and beats together as one. I’m very happy you made this video. I’m going to update my notes. I hope you have a great day.
I'm glad this was useful! When writing traditionally, beats often aren't thought about consciously, so it's a new concept for a lot of us! Sommetimes a chapter might only be one scene, sometimes more, but regardless they are then broken down into beats. Have a great day too :)
I think chapters contain acts…?
Very clear and instructive demo.
wow you're a real person! i thought it was an AI voice
Aha I am indeed real! Is it good or bad that I sounded like an AI vid? -Kate | Education
@@novelcrafter really good! I wish Siri sounded like you :)
I've just delved into writing my first novel with no clue where to start and came upon Novelcrafter through the Nerdy Novelist's channel. This is one of the most epic platforms I have ever seen and an absolute game changer to people like me with good imaginations but little attention span. I have thoroughly enjoyed planning out the story and creating characters through the use of the codex and AI has helped me tremendously. One question I have though is there doesn't seem to be anywhere specific to note your novel outline or summary. I created a global codex and pasted it into there just giving it the title of "Novel Summary". I used this to chat with the AI about created chapter summaries. Can I assume that this global entry will be considered by the gpt when delivering prose? I checked the box, "Always include this entry in the AI context" so I assume it will.
You guys have been extremely thoughtful in putting this together, well done and thank you!!! :)
Very very helpful, I've now loads of ideas when I get stuck, Thank you ! Can you please make a short video(if thats possible) how to use the new 'fine tuning' function ?
Hi Daniel! We'll add that to our list - I'm not sure how "short" it'll be, but we'll see what we can do :)
Thank you ❤. Can you do more shorts like this on specific topics? These are very helpful. I ❤the deep dive in a short span.
Hi Alicia! We intend to do his in the coming months - do you have any topics that you'd like to request?
@@novelcrafter Yay 😁! I’d love to learn more about fine tuning, chatting to do world-building, and how to maximize the individual sections in the codex. In truth, I understand how to use NovelCrafter, I’d love to see ways to maximize what I’m doing to make my output better. Doubling down on individual tasks really helps to understand how I could use the product better.
I am new to Novel Crafter and this is a wonderful tutorial! Thank you
Glad it was helpful! -Kate
This was so helpful. I've been having such a hard time with the beats.
Glad we could help :)
Great video. Well thought out. Thanks.
Excellent tutorial!
Thanks! Gad you enjoyed it!
This was great! Thank you.
You're welcome - glad this was helpful!
The issue I am having is that I have created a prompt for the Scene Beat Completion that is working really well for me. It was a bit of a ride, but I used prompts that were meant for Claude in ChatGPT 4.0 to develop the kind of "writer's voice" I wanted and then I adjusted it further to work within NovelCrafter. And Huzzah! It works!. My problem that I am running into is that a the majority of my prose was used using a different prompt and I can't figure out how to just run those paragraphs or chunks of prose and get them adapted my my current Scene Beat Prompt. I know more than likely this is user error or at least my misunderstanding of how it works. But is there a good way of taking a paragraph you've written and having in reworked by your current Scene Beat Prompt?
Thanks for this!
I tried the product for a few weeks, wife had a baby, and I’m back into the product. This beat topic could do with some expansion. Do you have more on beats to prose?
How do you get it to write in the right voice and tone of your story?
I'd like to watch how to adjust AI instruction, such as changing the tone for each scene, changing the POV, etc.
We'll add that to our list! I'll have a think about how best to format the videos :)
Thank you for this. I was wondering if there is any way to stop it from constantly using the character's names over and over. I've noticed for me, and maybe its the model I'm using, but I seem to get the AI using the character's name in every other sentence, or starting three paragraphs with the same name. It could be the model, or maybe I could add more aliases/nicknames to call said character?
Both would be good ideas to try - in third person it's hard to avoid that due to the AI training, but experimenation is always valuable. Let us know on here if either of those answers work :)
Thanks, this is very helpful. I always wrote the first paragraph or two of each scene because it was difficult to get the AI to handle the scene change well, but your explanation of guided beats gives me something to try to see if the AI will do better at that in the future.
If you found that the initial paragraphs, when written by hand, would produce better AI prose, it might make sense to stick to it. We've seen a much improved coherence in following the instructions when you always start your scenes/chapters manually :)
@@novelcrafter Another trick that I've found works really well to help the AI write prose that closely mimics my own is to submit a decent chunk of prose to ChatGPT and then ask it to provide a detailed description of the authors writing style and prose. I then take that analysis and paste it into a global codex entry for my writing style. I tell the AI that this is the style I want it to use for narration. It actually does a pretty good job off-the-cuff of imitating me when I do this. I have made a minor tweak here and there, but for the most part this has been sufficient to approximate my style.
is there a way to tell the ai to make the story focus more on dialogue? I try but it just keeps feeding me paragraph after paragraph
I will usually either write dialogue beats, putting the words in myself or you could try telling it to write the conversation - phrase your beats as an instruction. Some models follow instructions better than others, so it's worth trying a couple out too. Recently I was writing with Claude and it kept ignoring the first two sentences of my beat -Kate
How can I get Novel crafter to write the beats for me?
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. First, I dont get the difference between beats and expand features. They seem to do exactly the same thing. Second, I would expect that beats are stored in a beatsheet. I.e., in the column on the right, just like the scene summary. Third, I expected to be able to write a beatsheet (just as you mentioned in the beginning) and once I have finished it, let the AI write the text of multiple beats at once. Fourth, I expect the beat node that opens after you type / to create a beat (and not the prose). This would be a form of creative expand that populates the beatsheet, not the actual prose.
I am having real trouble getting novel crafter to work properly. It keeps forgetting what happened in previous chapters. that openrouter is going to be very very expensive. is there an alternative? Do i need to use openrouter? I imported my book into it but it is really not working well.
An alternative to OpenRouter would be to use a local AI model. You would need to have a computer capable of running the AI models. There are a lot of factors involved in how much an AI remembers of past chapters, and in the prompting this is based on what you include in your chapter/scene summaries. I would advise looking there first if there's anything explicit that you would like the AI to remember. I hope this helps.
IM such a newbbb. haha Im even more confused after watching this vid SMH.
Is there anything in particular that confused you? How can we help with this? -Kate
@@novelcrafter The issue has more to do with me being a newb to writing than Novelcradter itself.but Im slowly picking up the craft though. As a musician terms like Beats and Prose had me totally confused at first but now Im getting it. Prose are simple the lyrics and Beats are more like Bars in a song or Verse vs Pre-chorus etc
"a novel comprises of"???
Someone who slaughters the language in that way has no business talking about novel writing or any other kind of writing.
What a piece of crap. I will do my utmost to let people know how bad this software is.