Behind-the-Scenes: How I Wrote a Book Chapter in 60 minutes with AI Assistance

Plus a bonus writing template in ChatGPT for paid subscribers so you can write a family story in less than 30 minutes.

What if your family history stories didn’t take hours or weeks to write?

What if, armed with in-depth questions, a loose outline, and some help from AI, you could go from scattered research to a complete story draft in under 60 minutes?

That’s exactly what I set out to do while drafting a chapter of my upcoming guide, Write Your First Family History Story in 30 Minutes or Less. This post pulls back the curtain on how I used ChatGPT to make the writing process faster, more focused, and fun to do. I’ll walk you through step-by-step of how I worked with ChatGPT to build an outline, then write and revise three drafts of a chapter.

Since the chapter is about writing a story in 30 minutes or less, I’ll show you how you can do just that using AI. I’ve included a writing template of the ChatGPT prompts in the book chapter in a custom GPT (prewritten set of prompts). Simply open the GPT I made for you, and it will ask you questions to walk you through writing your own family history story.

So if you’ve been wondering how to incorporate AI into your writing workflow to have it write with you, and not for you, this is the post for you!

This is Just a Teaser…

This behind-the-scenes look is just one piece of the method in Write Your First Family History Story in 30 Minutes or Less. The full book will walk you through every step of the process—and it will be free for all subscribers of this newsletter.

Let’s go behind the curtain and show you my process—

Step 1: Pick the Reader of the Book

The most important thing to do before writing anything is to pick my reader.

I am writing to help solve the problems of genealogists, over the age of 60, who want to write their family history, and are interested in using technology to get it done both fast and well.

That’s a pretty specific reader!

Ok sure, anyone can read what I write, but the more focused it is, the more I will reach my goal to see 1 million family histories published over the next 5 years. So I’m focused on the age group with the most genealogy research to publish, which is those over 60.

Who are you writing for? Be clear with yourself and write it down.

I have an in-depth post on this coming out next Sunday, if you need help deciding and seeing how your decision affects your writing.

Step 2: Share My Answers and Current Outline with ChatGPT

Next, I described my readers in detail to ChatGPT and dropped in basic outline I’d written for one chapter. I asked ChatGPT to examine my outline, my previous writings on chronicle writing, and suggest additions to the outline that would be most useful to my readers.

Here’s the exact prompt I used: