I'm not a writer but about three years ago, while I was driving to work, I heard this song on my CD player that I really liked. I kept playing it over and over, thinking about it and asking myself questions. The lyrics really stuck with me. I'm caught beneath with nothing left to give, forever (Why) I can't give up, I can't give in (Why) I'll carry you and we will live forever (Who is he carrying, eternally it sounds like) I will stand And I will let this end (What is he standing against) The sun begins to rise And wash away the sky (How does a sunrise wash away the sky, it must be fire) And I will never say goodbye I just kept coming up with theories about why this was happening, and it kept pushing me backward further, asking more whys, creating a story in my head where someone gives up his life for another. A year later, I thought, "I should write this down." So I took the plot from my mind and put it on paper, and then it really took off. My writing looked a lot like a fifth-grade book report. That’s when I discovered ChatGPT and tried to use it to fix my sentence fragments. It asked me if I wanted to turn my writing into a novel. I said "sure" to see what it would do, but it changed too much. I ended up making a lot of rules for it to follow. I often had to remind it about those rules, and it felt like I was fighting with it the whole time. To sum it up, yes, I use ChatGPT to suggest better words than mine, but then I have to edit it to sound like me. I’ve found if you don’t have a plan, ChatGPT will go off on tangents or add things that weren’t in your story and try to connect them. I wrote everything important: the world, characters, timeline, and lore because I created it. ChatGPT begrudgingly helped me polish it, but it didn’t create anything. I guided the story, not the other way around. Yes I had to browbeat it to keep it on track. But in the end it worked for me and if it randomly spits out something that agrees with my story I consider using it. I'm not concerned about being known as a writer; I'm not going to have a profile picture of me smoking a pipe trying to look all intelligent. I think I’m more of a “story creator” than a writer. I'm aiming to create a book/audiobook of my story, which is super engaging, and I want to catch the attention of an animator who can help turn it into a video series. With the hope to get noticed by a team that works on videos for Love Death + Robots and have it featured on the show. I know, I'm a big dreamer, but hey, why not dream?