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| Comparison of prose generated by the default General Purpose scene beat completion prompt in Novelcrafter vs my Ghostwriter prompt. | |
| They were given the same scene beat instructions. The two sections of output from the prompts are not altered or human-edited in any way. | |
| Below those is the writing sample I used, which is also the first chapter of the story and immediately precedes the scene written by the LLMs. I wrote that manually. |
Using the Ghostwriter prompts:
Rev's engine thundered through the mountain night, each curve a new challenge in the darkness. The big bike leaned into the turns like a dancer, finding the perfect line through each switchback. Wind hammered Chox's face, his greasy hair whipping back like water breaking over rocks. The mountain air bit sharp and clean through his leather jacket.
The warding spell's aftermath sang through his left hand, a familiar symphony of torn ligaments and stressed joints. Just another night's work.
Red and blue strobes painted the cliff faces ahead, bleeding through the darkness like fresh wounds. Chox squeezed his knees against Rev's tank, and the bike's rumble dropped to a predatory growl. They slowed, prowling closer, Rev's chrome catching fragments of the emergency lights.
What's this? Locals shouldn't be up here.
The flashing lights resolved into a wall of law enforcement vehicles. Black SUVs and tactical vans stretched across both lanes, their lightbars painting the scene in alternating crimson and sapphire. White letters blazed on black kevlar vests as figures moved between the vehicles: FBI.
Damn. Corporate bought themselves some federal muscle.
Chox pulled Rev to a stop well back from the roadblock, hidden in the shadows between two curves. He counted vehicles, positions, personnel. Three SUVs, two tactical vans. Maybe fifteen agents total, all wearing standard-issue tactical gear. No magical protection visible through his rose-tinted goggles.
Rev's engine ticked impatiently. The bike could feel Chox's tension.
The feds were clearly waiting for someone, but their positions showed they didn't know exactly who or what to expect. Amateur hour compared to the contractors. But with those runed-up APCs bearing down from behind...
Caught between the devil and the deep blue bureaucracy.
The USB drive in Chox's pocket felt heavier than ever. His client's deadline – and unstated threats – weighed even more.
Rev's chrome caught a reflection of approaching headlights from above, too high off the ground to be civilian vehicles. The contractors were coming.
Here's my manually-written Chapter 1 that was used as the writing sample for the style guide, and gets pulled in to both prompts above as the "words before" context when executed.
The big bike, Revenant, roared with a dragon's fury. Chox's left hand throbbed with pain. His warding spell curled around him and the motorcycle, a scintillating carapace of spacetime. They streaked over the quad, a howling dervish, chrome and lightning and vulcanized rubber clawing for traction. Straight at the steel gates. Gathering speed. Unrelenting.
Ward wizard and bike rocketed into the gates. As the leading edge of the ward punched into the steel gates, they yielded like clay to a thumb. Instantly they warped and flew wide, with a deafening crack. The mangled gates clanged off the perimeter wall on both sides. This genteel corporate research campus suddenly had a boxer's grin.
The pain of his dislocated left thumb forgotten, the wizard's smirk twisted into a gleeful sneer.
Shoot, he thought. Busting out of stuff is fun.
The collision with the gates stole their momentum, and they were stopped. Rev's rumble paused, sucking down a gulp of mountain air. Its throttle blipped once or twice as if clearing its throat—Chox trusted the bike to set itself for the coming sprint over the dark mountain roads.
Chox planted his left foot on the ground, a devilish grin on his broad face as he looked back through the ruin he had created. Distant, confused shouts echoed through the gap where the gate had been. Faintly reflected in his rose-tinted goggles, the Brutalist factories steamed with midnight labors, groveling beneath dark skyscrapers with their star-freckled faces, giants with their feet in a lake of artificial light inside the walls. Here in the alpine wilderness, he thought this place blended in about as well as a potted plant in the jungle. Not the most conspicuous spot to hide the item his client had demanded, Chox decided, but pretty close.
Chox noticed a clock-puncher sprinting and stumbling across the manicured grounds while trying to flip through what Chox assumed was his crisis binder.
He chuckled. Good luck with that, square.
Rev recovered and jerked beneath him; Chox squeezed his knees around the bike. Revenant thundered again, pistons pounding out a war-drum rhythm. They hurtled down the wide lane that divided employee parking lots A and B. Spotlights kicked on and danced out like so many fireflies from the wall.
Chox looked ahead and squinted through his goggles. Headlights had appeared between them and freedom. Chox and Rev hooked left and sped down a row of parked cars. The source of the headlights was a small electric security cart, buzzing along parallel to them three rows up, moving to cut them off. There were two more clock-punchers in the cart, security guards. The guard that wasn't driving braced himself and fired a handgun in Chox's direction. Chox's ward sparked as bullets whizzed across it and around Chox and Rev. At this hour, the cars parked around them were the aged and dented vehicles of third-shift factory cogs. Bullets thunked into the body panels of Accords and chacked through the windshields of Pacificas, never touching Chox or Rev. The security cart fell further and further behind.
Those two clock-punchers had gambled that their electric cart could catch Rev in the parking lot. It was a laughable hypothesis. But the adrenaline of his escape, and his ward's comprehensive protection from the gunfire, already had Chox grinning from ear to ear. He didn't have any room left on his wide, ruddy cheeks for the chances of that little cart, too.
They reached the end of their row well ahead of the little cart in its own. Chox whooped out a wordless war-cry. He swung his butt out low over Rev's right side, put his weight on that footpeg, pushed on the handlebars and snapped open the throttle. Rev's back wheel spun and painted a wide "U" at the row-end as they made the corner. At the next row, Rev's tire found purchase and its engine raced, a wild heart unleashed.
More bullets from the guards in the cart whizzed past. Chox leaned low over Rev's handlebars as they passed by the cart in its row, the guard driving it fumbling to turn it around. Chox chortled.
Pathetic
He looked ahead to the parking lot exit. Between them and freedom stood one lonely guard booth, no more formidable than a comma.
A guard gaped, saucer-eyed, from that flimsy plywood and plexiglass booth. He sat frozen as the howling cannonball of steel and lightning hurtled toward him. Rev's headlamp dipped a touch, then jumped skyward. The big engine's scream found a higher octave as Rev reared up into a near-vertical wheelie. Rev smashed belly-first through the white and orange parking gate arm in a thunderclap. Chox, laughing, extended his middle finger at the stunned guard as they blew past the booth.
The bike's front wheel crashed down again. Chox and Rev had only one goal now, to run as hard and fast as they could. Chox grabbed his left hand in his right and squeezed his thumb back into its socket with a grunt. The lightning-bright protective ward vanished. Rev winked off his lights, too. They left the last pool of illumination as they tore out of the lot and onto the road. Smiling proudly, Chox thumped Rev's tank, and the big bike bounced its tail in cheerful response. Night swallowed the pair, Chox hooting triumphantly, the roar of Rev's engine seeming to fill the dark.
Behind them, the compound erupted in a cacophony of shouted commands. The whole glossy-green research campus reacted as a single organism, wailing with klaxon lungs, searching with spotlight eyes. But Chox's own eyes didn't widen, his head didn't turn to look back, until he heard the sudden crackling rumble of engines built for war.
Headlights speared through the darkness, too high off the ground. Their pursuers emerged. Chox had anticipated being chased by, at worst, discreetly-kitted corporate Escalades or Land Cruisers, hiding more guards behind polycarbonate glass and quarter-inch steel plate, armed with nothing heavier than M60s.
What he saw were APCs, armored personnel carriers. Big ones. Eight-wheeled monsters. Matte black armor fixed at sharp angles. Military-grade, and then some. Chox's sneer faltered, then faded altogether as he saw runes shimmering on the armored beasts. Runes that Chox could only see through his rose-tinted goggles. The kind of runes that required a dozen people to die in screaming agony to create.
Hell
The pack of techno-magic armored fighting vehicles stampeded single-file through the open mouth of the gate, then turned directly toward Chox and Rev and charged heedlessly over the employee vehicles in the parking lot, massive tires crushing them into carcasses. They weren't slowing. They were deadly serious, predators hungry for their prey.
But Chox and Rev were nothing now. They were echoes of thunder on the wind.
And Chox intended to keep it that way.
Using the General Purpose scene beat completion prompt that comes with Novelcrafter and Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
Rev's engine thundered through the mountain passes, each curve demanding perfect harmony between machine and rider. The night air hammered Chox's face, turning his greasy hair into a waterfall of stinging whips against his neck. Rev's chrome pipes glowed orange with each downshift, the bike's frame vibrating with contained power as they carved through another hairpin turn.
Chox flexed his fingers on the grips. His left hand protested the movement, joints stiff from maintaining the ward spell earlier. Nothing new there - just another night, another chase, another round of spell-strain.
Red and blue strobes flickered in the distance, reflecting off the guardrails ahead. Chox eased back on the throttle, scanning the road below through the switchbacks. As they descended, details emerged through his rose-tinted goggles: multiple vehicles arranged in a standard roadblock pattern, FBI logos clearly visible on tactical vests.
"Well, shit." Chox brought Rev to a stop, keeping several turns worth of distance between them and the blockade. "Someone's been greasing palms at the Bureau."
Rev's engine grumbled in agreement.
Through his goggles, Chox counted at least eight agents moving between the vehicles. Standard tactical gear, no magical enhancement visible. They had positioned themselves at a natural chokepoint where the mountain road narrowed, steep drops on both sides making any off-road escape impossible.
The thumb drive in his jacket pocket felt heavier than its negligible weight should allow. His client's deadline loomed larger than the cliff faces surrounding them. Behind them, the contractors' APCs would arrive any minute, bringing their deadly combination of military hardware and blood magic.
The feds had no idea what kind of nightmare was bearing down on them. They were just pawns, bought and paid for by the corporation, set up as the first layer of a trap meant to pin him down for the real hunters.
Rev's engine ticked as it cooled, the only sound besides the distant idle of FBI vehicles. Chox adjusted his goggles, mind racing through scenarios, each one worse than the last. Trapped between corporate killers and federal agents, with his client's threats hanging over it all.