AI-Generated Story Drafts

Here’s an AI workflow that works great with writers at all grades from K-12. It’s around short story writing.
We have the kids generate the elements of a short story plot – character physical/personality description, antagonist, initial incident, problem, moral of the story. etc. This works really well in pairs. Each student or pair completes this outline in a collaborative doc like a Google doc. Check out a sample outline that we used for a school-wide story project (with sample prompts and outputs.)

The teacher takes the students’ outline and prompts ChatGPT (or CoPilot, Perplexity, etc.) to write a [insert # here] paragraph story at a [insert grade here] grade reading and writing level. The teacher then copies this AI output back into the student’s document below their outline. Each student now has a story that feels like theirs, but it hasn’t taken four weeks to write.

Here’s where the magic really comes in. Now that each student has a story draft to use, all of the real great work of writing that we never get to – the editing, developing the setting, using juicier wording, writing more interesting sentences, etc.- can finally happen. The students are willing to be much more ruthless with the story and the revision process,. We are then able to do much more valuable writing work in this editing/revision phase, than when students labour over writing their own short story for weeks.

For example, if you want to work on plausibility, it is fun to add a section to the planning out line that says, “at some point in the story this random thing must happen.” Most often, the AI assistant does an incredibly clumsy job of adding the random event to the story. It is fun to listen to groups of students as they come up with a better solution.

Some teachers take a different spin and instead of working the “writing process”, they ask the AI assistant to generate the story with a particular type of error. Students are more interested in finding and fixing the errors when the story is based on their outline.

Another twist is to take the prompt and the outline and feed it into 2 or 3 different AI assistants and share the versions back with students. The lessons that follow can be about the predictability of AI or students can use the best elements of the 3 stories to weave their own together.

In some cases, the teachers have gone on to publish all the stories in Book Creator, or a Canva presentation with AI generated images.

Please note that I am not proposing that we remove the struggle of writing from students entirely. It is absolutely crucial to instruct students in writing, and to help them build writing stamina. However, I think this workflow is a great way to let AI help us get to the parts of the writing process with our students that so often gets squeezed out.