Intro
You just discovered NovelAI for the first time. You click "New story". The full might of the AI is displayed before you.
You are struck with terror. Cold sweats run down your body. What are all these fields? What is this? Where do I begin? What am I supposed to do?! Blank page anxiety has struck! You die...! Do you want your possessions identified?
What does NovelAI do?
NovelAI is an online service. It runs on a distant server. What you are looking at is an interface.
You write text and it makes more text. Write a story and it'll try to continue it. Generate tasty recipes. Do rap. Force the AI to experience raunchy smut. Roleplay as your favourite furry kielbasa. Write about anything you want. It'll try to continue whatever you've fed it. Just press send.
How do you interact with it
You write in the big box and press send. Everything else is optional.
None of this is mandatory. You can -just- write and it'll -just- work.
All the other boxes are for writing more text in them, and it does different things. Generally, don't worry about it. Just write. Write as long as you're comfortable writing. Then, once you feel something is off or could be better, come back here. Give yourself time to trust your creativity. Let it run free and come to teach yourself some more once you've decided this is for you, or there is something you'd really like help with.
Also, NAI has some of the strongest privacy systems in place. Nobody is going to read anything you write as long as you don't share your account or your stories directly. You're safe. Write about your magical pony adventures all you like, absolutely nobody is going to be able to crack the several layers of encryption to get disorganized text and piece it back together.
Preparation
Okay, you hear about all the setup you need to do to get a "good" story, but there are a bunch of things with weird names and you have no idea what to use or where to put anything. It's a daunting prospect, but in reality it's just a bunch of jargon with very simple purposes. This will handhold you through the process, explaining every piece and what it's used for.
Context
When you read a book, you remember the most recent parts of the story, and maybe important things like characters, setting-relevant concepts, and stuff like that. The AI also has a big blob of text it keeps as memory. This is the context. The AI can only see the context. Everything else is saved for you, but the AI can't read it, limiting its attention span. This is mostly a good thing. You don't want it to go back to a scene hours ago and think it's happening now.
Context is made of a bunch of pieces. Or only one piece. You can do this:
Or this:
And it'll be just fine! All ways work. There are some ways people feel work better, but mostly, there are baked-in tools you can use to direct your generations with more ease.
Let's start with setting up your story's core components.
Setup
All of this goes into the memory field! Make sure you conclude it with a dinkus, which is three asterisks in a row: ***
ATTG
ATTG stands for:
- Author - The author you want to pull style from.
- Title - The work you want to pull style from.
- Tags - Elements you want to see included. You can write basically anything you want, but try to be effective in your wording.
- Genre - The genre your story belongs to. You can mix multiple genres, but try to keep it around 4 at most, and avoid combining genres that don't mesh (like non-fiction and strong fiction genres)
You don't need to use all of them. In fact, you can use only one or two of them! Simply remove any field you are not using. It's better to keep them in the same order as default, however. This is okay:
(Keep in mind that it's just text being line-wrapped, there is no need to press Enter.)
Put this in your Memory field.
Stage directions
You can also tell the AI where the story is happening, when it's happening, who is the protagonist, and so on. Just do something like this.
Put this at the very bottom of your Memory field, after the ATTG block and after the Dinkus, but, if you need a situation to change now, put this in the Author's Note instead, then put it back in memory after a few paragraphs.
Style directions
Style directions allow you to tell the AI to write in a specific style. Just put this at the end of your memory field, after the stage directions.
Wait, is there a list of genres and styles?
No! It doesn't matter! The AI has been trained with it, so it just "gets" it. Put in whatever you want, and if it doesn't work, use synonyms! You can use multiple terms at the same time too.
Why a Dinkus?
A dinkus is this : ***
Put this at the end of Memory to signal the AI that you are done writing non-story text.
Here's a fully filled Memory using all the stuff we've looked at so far:
Now just hit send and watch the Shadow Magic happen!
Data
Data is all text that is written like the story but isn't the story itself. It should be there so the AI knows what things are, but it shouldn't think that definitions just drop out of nowhere in the end of the story. You can put this anywhere, but let's put this in the Lorebook because it's really convenient.
Lorebook
Wow! That's a big thing! What the hell is this? Why are there so many fields? And buttons? What are those tabs?
OH NOOOOOOOOOOOO
Okay, don't worry about it. The Lorebook is actually pretty easy. You need to do two things:
- Immediately give your entry a key, because the first key will become the title of the entry, which saves you a bit of effort.
- Write the content of the entry!
Not sure of what to write? Just type a bit and press CTRL + Enter to start generating inside the lorebook itself! Want more control over this? Click Generation and give it more details as to what you want.
That's it. Once you've done that, the entry -just works- and will be added to the context whenever the Key has been written into it, either by you, or by the AI during a generation.
It will be added after the contents of the memory. Here's an example of an entry.
Insertion order and position
Remember earlier when I said the Dinkus helps you separate story and non-story? Well, right now, your dinkus is not separating your lorebook entries from your story. Don't worry, the solution is extremely simple, and helps you organize entries easier!
First of all, make a category.
Go to this tab and click this slider.
This will make it so all your entries in that category will be bunched up together as a single unit. For example you can have all characters listed one after another, et cetera. This is really useful for keeping info organized. Now for the only settings you need to edit:
Setting Insertion Order to a single digit will make all the entries in that category appear before the memory. After that, higher number means it's closer to the story, and thus more important. Imagine it reads 'priority' instead of order. Setting the position to 0 means it'll be put at the top. And now...
Your story is ready to go!
Attributes method
Oh, what's that? You want to hear about the mythical Attributes method that apparently works so well? First of all, Attributes are generally for characters. It's mostly untested for other things, but you can try to bend the idea to adapt to anything. Experimenting is good! It's quite informal, so let's use a working example and decompose it.
Sakura Minamoto (Female Zombie Idol), Franchouchou's Number 1 and Center
Appearance: Sakura has flowing pink hair and large, bright blue eyes. Sakura is a rather curvy girl of average height, and her outfit only serves to amplify that appearance.
Skills: Sakura is a fast learner and her determination allows her to overcome any challenge she sets her mind to. Her natural talent and motivation to achieve is second to none.
Flaws: Sakura's luck is incomprehensibly poor, and she somehow gets herself in absolutely insane situations that she manages to survive... In a way.
Wears: Sakura wears a blue school uniform with a corset waist and a white-colored chest section. She has a short white pleated skirt, long socks and brown loafers. She wears a teal and a pink polka dot ribbon in her hair.
Mind: Sakura is an energetic and cheerful girl who is always supporting her friends, sometimes at the expense of her own self-care. Every so often she gets a little depressed about her terrible luck.
Relations: Sakura looks up to Ai as the idol who inspired her most, but she universally likes everyone in Franchouchou and is appreciated right back by all of them.
Quote: "Let's do our best again today, Franchouchou!" "Even if I can be a huge klutz, I'll follow my dreams, full of joy and excitement!"
----
That's a lot of data to parse through! But you'll notice something: Attribute-based entries have two parts:
- A title with the name of the person or thing, a quick description of what it is, and possibly a in-universe role.
- Headers, followed by information in prose, where the name is often re-established.
Is there a list of Attribute types? Not really, use whatever you want! It's important to keep your descriptions clear, concise, and flowing in a simple way. As long as the content follows the header, you'll be fine.
But wait, you must have noticed the four dashes at the end, this "----" part. This is a separator and we'll use this to make entries distinct from one another without using a Dinkus (but you can use one. That's cool too.)
Story
Okay, time to actually write your story! Wait, what the hell do we do now?!
Style
Write your story how you want it to be written. The AI will follow your style. Sadly, this means that Skill is important. Want something to follow a style? ATTG and Style directions help, but fundamentally, you'll need to put in the work. Sometimes you can pull this off with no memory or entries or anything else. Just write in a very stylized way and it'll pick it up right away.
Prompting
Prompting is basically setting down the rails of your story. Just write something that establishes a scene, or characters, and you'll get something usable most of the time. This can be used to establish text formats, as an example, for a TV show script:
Directing
Now that you have your thing going on, it's important to know how you can effectively generate things in a specific direction. Let's say you have your buddy Bryan and you want to find out where the hell he's gone. Don't do this.
Guide the AI by giving it an incomplete sentence to finish for you.
Incomplete sentences are going to be your meat and potatoes. Try not to finish your input on a full stop or a line break. The AI generally has trouble figuring out where to go from there. Leave your stuff unfinished.
Adjustments
You've played around and now something terrible has happened.
The AI is having trouble breaking out of something! The sentences are too short and lack detail! What can we do?
Presets
Just change the preset for a kick to the AI's ass. It may work.
If that still doesn't break repetitions, fix your things! Input stuff! The AI's biggest weakness is generating for a long time unassisted. It's normal, and expected, to fix things.
Biases
Let's say there's something you want to see more of. Or less off. Enough Iraq in this story, but let's not ban it, Iraq has a right to exist, after all. If you click the advanced tab on the right, you'll see your context window viewer, which lets you see all the stuff we've written together so far. But it also has the Bias tool. Let's pur Iraq in there and make it a bit less likely. Like this.
Now click (the second) plus to add it to active biases. There we go!