if you have a good story then you want to be able to sum it up in a single one or two sentence pitch and if you can't do that then that means you haven't really gotten to the heart or Essence of your story yet thankfully I have found a way to use AI to actually help you with this process and it's also surprisingly a fantastic way to brainstorm new novel ideas let's get into [Music] it so the thing that I'm talking about here is the long line specifically what Blake Snider talks about with log lines
in his book save the cat if you haven't read save the cat yet it's a fantastic book I'll link to it below but it is a one of my favorite books on the structure of Storytelling and one that everybody should definitely pick up this is a blog post from the Save the cat website and it puts the whole log line in a nutshell as this formula right here someone the protagonist wants something the story goal and goes after it against Great odds and or obstacles meaning the antagonist and the conflict and that's the basic concept
right but there's a little bit more to it for instance Blake Snider talks about irony there should be an ironic element to it for instance a struggle that the protagonist faces in themselves happens to be the exact sort of thing that they have to struggle against in the story for instance you have someone who is an arachnophobe having to go up against giant spiders that's an ironic sort of Rel reltionship and it's really good to have an ironic element in the log line and so what we're going to do is we're going to do a
two-part Chain of Thought prompt and we're going to do so in all three of the major chat Bots we're going to look at this in GPT 4 we're going to look at this in Claude 3 and we're going to look at this in Gemini Advanced so the first prompt we're going to give it is what do you know about Blake Snider's log lines if I go ahead and sent that going in chat GPT and then we'll also do it here using Claude 3 specifically CLA 3 Opus and I'll also run it through in using Gemini
Ultra in Gemini Advanced all right so let's take a look at the output here it gave us a a decent overview of the log lines it's clear that chat GPT and the others know what a log line is it mentions the irony here compelling uh having a compelling mental picture a bunch of other things that are mentioned I wouldn't say not all of these are included in the log line uh but it did get the gist of it Claude 3 same thing um Claude 3 failed to recognize the irony part of it but it did
give us a example here from Die Hard a cop comes to LA to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists not actually that close to what a log line is so H could have done a little bit better Gemini was surprised to me by being actually pretty good it mentioned all of the elements of a of a log line the protagonist the antagonist the conflict irony mental image all of that stuff so it did pretty well here so now we're going to give this a second prompt and to do
that we're going to go to this blog post and make sure we grab this template here because I want to make sure it's writing in this template no matter what and we say using the following template and your knowledge of the log lines give me 10 potential log lines for a science fiction Beach romance and then we simply add in the little template there and hit go and we're going to run this prompt on all three major models so here are a few from Chad gbt a marine biologist discovers an ancient alien artifact on a
remote beach and her quest to uncover its sequence she finds herself falling for the mysterious Guardian tasked with Protec in it setting off a galactic conflict so definitely conflict definitely protagonist after a shipwreck on an alien planet with beaches of shifting sand a lone astronaut must navigate an unfamiliar world and its animatic inhabitants to find a way home only to be torn between the love of an alien who saved him and the desire to return to Earth so these aren't too bad they aren't necessarily following what I would say is a good log line uh
in general but they aren't bad and certainly a lot better than the kind of output that you would get just by asking chat GPT for ideas let's see what Claude gave us a lonely astronaut crash lands on a mysterious Beach planet and falls in love with a stranded alien but their inters species romance is threatened by a looming Supernova that's actually not too bad right there a time traveling scientist arrives at a crucial moment in her past where she must choose between saving her beloved from a tragic Beach accident or preserving the future again you
got that a little bit of that sense of irony with this being a time traveling scientist and then having to choose between someone she loves and preserving the future so it's getting some of this and I'd say Claude 3 definitely wins out over chat gbt in terms of the quality of these ideas from what I can see let's take a look at Gemini our inclusive alien researcher yearning for human connection Falls for a spirited Surfer defying Intergalactic laws and risking her lifelong Mission a heartbroken time traveler stranded in a Beach Town seeks solace in the
arms of a local artist unaware that unaware their Whirlwind romance could alter the timeline forever that seems very similar to what Claude gave us a mermaid princess desperate to explore the human world disguises herself to win the heart of a handsome lifeguard jeopardizing her secret and the safety of her undersea Kingdom so basically the the little and these are not too bad as well I would say both Claude and Gemini did better than chubbt in this instance and I've tested this with past versions of Claude and Claude does did not do as well and so
I was actually in the past I would have said Gemini is surprisingly the best one at doing these log lines and it still is it's still really good at doing the log lines but if you have clae 3 access to clae 3 it seems that it is just as good if not maybe slightly better than for this specific task that's why I wanted to try all three so I could demonstrate that for you so that is the general gist using Blake Snider's log lines in order to create story ideas additionally what you can do is
take your story idea kind of explain the essence of the story and then say bring this down into a log line according to Blake Snyder so for instance I'm going to take the entire book description of one of my books here I'm going to run it into claw just for demonstration and say given the following book description create a log line for this book style of Blake Snider then I paste the book description here and run that in a world filled with magic a young girl with seemingly worthless Powers must unlock her true potential and
embark on a dangerous quest to save her mother in the Kingdom from the clutches of evil demons and the Mysterious Shadow Fay yeah that's that's not too bad I I like the addition of the worthless Powers cuz that adds that sort of ironic twist to it and is consistent with my story so yeah um this is a really good way to try and narrow down your story even further so that you have something that you can easily pitch as what your story is about now I want to note also that my membership is actually still
open even though I mentioned over a week ago that I was closing it I actually changed my mind around the same time that that video went out I had recorded it a week prior and decided to that I wasn't going to close it down but I am going to increase the price I made that decision and that is happening at the end of this week so if you haven't signed up for my membership already it will be going up from 27 a month to 37 a month at the end of this week so be sure
to get in on it now so you won't have to pay that price and when the price goes up you you will still keep the old price that you signed up under so be sure to check that out right now and I will see you in the next video
