Beats & Chapter Prose – Sudowrite

Writing your story

We’re getting close! You’ve architected your story, and with the prior elements completed you’re almost ready to write some prose.

Chapters

Chapters are where you’ll be writing your prose. Every new Project on Sudowrite begins with a single “Untitled” Document, as seen in the lefthand nav column above. Meanwhile, you’ll notice that the “Generate Prose” box is currently active within the editor—toggled on/off by the typewriter icon in the upper righthand side of the formatting bar—but that options to generate Beats and Prose are greyed out. That’s because a brand new Project doesn’t yet have any information in Story Bible. Once you do, you have all the ingredients you need to begin writing your chapters.

You can rename this document to Chapter 1, or leave it and create Chapters in the left nav using the + Add new button. If you’ve already filled in your story bible, you can also use the purple tout that appears all the way down bottom, beneath the Outline section, to “Add Chapter” based on the chapters included in your Outline. This will spin up an appropriately titled doc in your left nav.

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QUICK TIP You can create multiple copies of each chapter to play around with different approaches. Just use the + Add new button and give the pages distinct names, like Chapter 1A, Chapter 1B, etc.

Now, with Story Bible enabled and the requisite fields populated, the generation of Beats is unlocked.

Beats

Beats are step-by-step instructions for Story Bible to follow when writing the Prose for your Chapter.

To create your Beats, click the Generate Beats button.

Story Bible looks at nearly everything—your Genre, Style, Synopsis, Outline, Characters, and Worldbuilding—to create a list of Beats appropriate for the chapter you’re about to write. Each Beat gets turned into 200-300 words of prose. You can have as many Beats in a chapter as you want.

The more detailed and accurate these other sections, the better your Beats will be. And the better your Beats, the better the resulting Prose generated by Story Bible.

You’ll want to edit your beats before you generate prose to make sure you get what you want.

Be specific. Replace any vagueness with concrete ideas.

Make sure each Beat has enough going on to justify 200-300 words.

If you want more control over a specific Beat, try adding special commands in square brackets to the end of a Beat:

[describe the characters inner thoughts]

[deliver the assignment in poem form]

[make the dialogue short and punchy, free from cliches]

Our expert Story Bible users spend much of their time hand-crafting Beats. It’s the best place to offer super specific guidance to your AI writing partner, so don’t skimp out!

Generate Chapter

The Generate Chapter button will takes your Genre, Style, and explicitly mentioned Characters and Worldbuilding elements into account to write a first draft of your Chapter based on your Beats.

Story Bible has three different Prose Modes available to choose from the the dropdown menu. By default, you’ll find Most Accurate selected. Story Bible writes slowest in this mode, but is most faithful to your Beats.

In Best Prose Mode, Story Bible is able to get much more creative in its prose. It writes more quickly and with more depth. Most writers prefer the quality of the prose in this Mode, but its creativity means it follows your Beats less closely.

Finally, Fastest Mode writes at lightning speed. This Mode is best when you want to get a first draft roughed out as quickly as possible and do more editing yourself.

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Did you know? Each prose generation mode uses a different AI model, accounting for some of the difference in their results.

Once you’ve selected a Mode, click the Generate button and Story Bible will write your chapter!

As always, you’ll want to take a close look at the prose generated and make it your own. The more comprehensive, detailed, and accurate your story setup (Braindump, Genre, Style, Characters, Synopsis, Outline) and your Beats, the better the prose will be. But Story Bible can make mistakes! Common troubleshooting when the generation doesn’t seem quite right includes: checking the story setup, making your Beats more detailed, adding notes to the end of Beats or the Style section, and Generating over again. And of course, you can always make manual edits to the generated work yourself.

Notes

Story Bible writes Prose two Beats at a time. We call these sets of two Beats “Strides”. While you can pause prose generation at the end of a stride, there’s no way to pause midstream.

You can always make a copy of a chapter and rewrite Beats—or even use a different generation Mode to get different results.

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QUICK TIP: Pause While Story Bible is generating prose, the Generate button becomes a Pause button. Hit Pause to stop the generation at the end of the current Stride. You can then make any edits you want to the prose and restart generation. Story Bible will continue where it left off, taking your edits into account.