Hello NovelAI community!
By way of a quick introduction, I go by Basileus on our Discord community where I am a community researcher and contributor, and as u/NotBasileus on Reddit. I’ve been enjoying NovelAI for about 3 years now, and I hope this introduction will help new users pick up some helpful habits to get the most enjoyment out of their early experiences with the NovelAI platform.
Hope to see your creations, questions, and contributions shared with the community.
Happy writing!
This is some guidance for those who are new to NovelAI and may be struggling to get a story started for the first time. While it’s perfectly valid to “just write” and let the AI build upon your own writing, a lot of users are looking for more of an “entertainment” type of experience.
This post will cover a few elements that together make for a foolproof simple, reliable method of starting a compelling story based on only a few sentences and phrases, and we will put these together to create an illustrative example at the end.
Once you’ve read through this, you should be able to reliably spin up any story you can imagine in a matter of minutes.
We’ll cover:
- Memory
1. Author, Title, Tags, Genre (“ATTG”)
2. Synopsis - Author’s Note
1. Style
This information is present in various forms elsewhere (official docs, unofficial KB, Discord, etc…), but I’ve seen enough questions recently about this sort of thing I thought it might be worthwhile to collect and share some quick tips here for those who aren’t aware of or don’t visit those resources. If you’ve already used NovelAI for a while, there probably won’t be much here that is new to you.
Information is current as of Kayra 1.1 model.
Memory
Memory is simply text that gets injected at the very top of your story every time you hit “Send” for generation. There are some very specific “tags” used in the training dataset that are very powerful tools in shaping NovelAI’s output, and anything you put here will always be present in what the AI “sees”, regardless of how long your story context grows to be.
Author, Title, Tags, Genre
You may see the acronym “ATTG” used in the context of NovelAI, and this refers to a specific format of tagging that is used in the training data for NovelAI’s models, where bodies of work in the dataset are labelled with their Author, Title, Tags, and Genre. By creating a tagline like this at the very beginning of your story, you can give the AI a springboard to start your story off right and keep it on guiderails as it develops.
This should always go at the top of the Memory section, since it is present in the training data at the beginning of stories (remember Memory always gets injected at the top of the story), and the formatting is very precise and should be followed exactly for best results (including spaces between brackets and capitalization):
[ Author: ; Title: ; Tags: ; Genre: ]
Author and Title aren’t particularly necessary unless you want to imitate a particular work, and can be safely omitted most of the time if you aren’t sure what to put there. However, don’t completely discount them — Author in particular can be highly influential on the AI’s writing.
Tags can be any keywords or phrases that you want to be significant to the story, such as themes or plot elements, and this is a very flexible field. Feel free to experiment here, just keep it relatively simple (the more you put here, the more diluted it is, so there are diminishing returns to adding more Tags) — I personally like to use 3 to 5 keywords or phrases.
Genre should stick to well-known, well-defined genres. You can use Wikipedia’s list of writing genres as a reference, or something like Goodreads or even Amazon’s lists of genres as guidance. You can use multiple, but keep this limited (1 to 3 should be enough). Here is an example:
[ Tags: intrigue, assassins, dramatic; Genre: dark fantasy ]
Note that you can often get away with just the ATTG line and immediately start generating if you really just want something unexpected out of the AI, but let’s assume that you want a little more control over the story and continue…
Synopsis
Immediately below the ATTG line, it’s helpful to give the AI a rough idea of the kind of story you want to see. This doesn’t have to be long or complex — think of the kind of summary you’d see on the back cover or dust jacket of a book. It really only needs to be a couple sentences and cover three main things:
Setting: what kind of place and time does the story take place in?
Main Character: who is the character/protagonist whose perspective defines the story?
Main Conflict: what is interesting about or at stake in the story?
It’s helpful to write this synopsis in the person and/or tense you want the actual story to be in (third person past tense is very common in fiction and almost universally works well, but others also work to varying degrees). Similarly, using the kind of language and sentence structure you want to see in the story text gives the AI something to mimic. You can also phrase it like a story pitch, including a cliffhanger ending to invite plot development.
Prefixing this synopsis with “Story so far:” is also supported by the training and can be helpful, though it isn’t used in this example.
Finally, end your synopsis with a “dinkus” on the line below, which is a series of three asterisks (“***”). Dinkuses (dinki? dinkopodes?) are used in the training data to indicate scene or chapter changes, and putting one here helps separate your synopsis from the story text (which the AI will see as immediately following the Memory text).
Here’s a tropey example we’ll add to the Tags and Genre we set up above:
[ Tags: intrigue, assassins, dramatic; Genre: dark fantasy ]
The august and formidable Lord Commander Kaldus had commanded the defense of the fortress city of Eredane for nearly a decade, holding fast against the demonic hordes that churned and roiled in the wastelands beyond the border. However, on a storm-lashed night the forces of evil would send their cultist assassins to end his life and break the defenders of Eredane once and for all…
***
See how this isn’t much more than a teaser?
Author’s Note
Similar to Memory, Author’s Note is text that gets injected into the story text three lines/paragraphs up from the current line in the story context every time you hit “Send” to generate — nothing more and nothing less. You may see Author’s Note sometimes discouraged or described as outdated, but it is still a very powerful too when used appropriately. Since it is injected so close to the current line in the story it can be disruptive, so you want to keep anything you put here short and simple (usually a single line bracketed like the tags in Memory to help the AI distinguish it from story text).
Style
The main thing we’ll use Author’s Note for is Style tags, which guides the AI on what kind of prose to generate. There are specific keywords used in the training dataset, but generally Style tags can be any type of writing, tone, complexity, or other descriptors you can think of.
For instance, a few descriptive words and a reminder to show rather than tell using all the sense goes a long way for the how the AI will write descriptions.
Here’s an example of a very explicit Style tag we’ll use for demonstration:
[ Style: florid, visceral prose that descriptively engages all senses of taste, smell, touch, sound, and sight ]
Feel free to experiment with different words and phrases to find what gives you the kind of results you like. For instance, more recent discussion shows that you can get really good (maybe even better!) results out of short and simple tags such as “[ Style: descriptive senses, complex prose ]”.
That’s It!
That’s all we need! Altogether, those examples are less than 150 tokens total can be created in a couple minutes to shape any story you can imagine.
A couple final notes before we see the results of the examples above:
As your story grows and exceeds the context size that the AI can “see” at once, you can add significant plot developments to Memory, after the synopsis and before the dinkus.
I won’t get into generation settings here, so I’ll simply add that you should play around with different presets to see which ones you like. Switching between them (even mid-story) can help keep the prose varied and fresh.
There are numerous other tools in your NovelAI arsenal, like the lorebook, biases, context viewer, token probability viewer, etc…, but this guide is simply meant to get you started quickly with an interesting story if you’ve never used NovelAI before, so check out some of the resources linked at the top of this post to dig into more advanced techniques. The Discord has many helpful people and resources in the #novelai-discussion, #ai-writing-help, and #novelai-content-sharing channels.
Example
To illustrate what this simple setup can do, here’s some sample output from a “blank page” with only the example Memory and Author’s Note from above. This is purely AI-generated with no editing (aside from a few retries for taste). Remember, you could get better results by editing and adding in text as you go between generations:
The thunder of the summer storm reverberated off the battlements of Castle Tusca in a fury of crackling energy and explosive concussions. The stout walls kept the rain out and gave shelter to those soldiers unlucky enough to be standing watch, but not lucky enough to have drawn someplace dry, or warm, or quiet.
Lord Commander Kaldus had taken no supper this night — a rarity for one usually so disciplined — and he stood at the top of the westernmost tower, gazing into the darkness that held its own threats on this night.
He wore the armor of his order, made from heavy chain covered in interlocking bands of dark iron. A breastplate inlaid with gold filigree hung over the mail; etched along it were wards against magic and evil that glittered with faint magical light. His long sword, sharpened to a razor’s edge, lay sheathed across his back; its hilt was set with emeralds and pearls worth more than most men would earn in their entire lives.
Kaldus watched the shadows dance through the torchlight of the walls, waiting patiently for one shadow to break away and climb up the last hundred feet of the tower. He knew they were coming tonight, assassins sent by the demon lords from beyond the mountains to kill him.
He was the reason the Eredane army could hold out against an enemy ten times their number, the focus of his men’s belief, and their powers. Without Kaldus they would falter and fall.
And so, like every night since he had come to Eredane as a young knight, Kaldus walked alone, giving his warriors a chance to rest in preparation for the next day’s battle.
There was another flash of lightning, and Kaldus saw the black outline of a figure silhouetted on the wall. The lord commander waited until he heard the soft scuffing sound of a man climbing on stone. Then Kaldus moved forward and placed his boot on top of the man’s hand, crushing down slightly.
The climber hissed in pain but kept silent, knowing there was no way to hide from the lord commander’s mage-sight. “You move too slowly,” he whispered hoarsely, trying to keep quiet so that the other guards didn’t hear and grow curious.
The assassin tried to pull himself up onto the ledge, but Kaldus increased the pressure on the fingers beneath his foot.
“It seems you’ve lost your grip,” he said dryly. “Climbing this tower is hard enough when you’re alive; I imagine it gets much harder when you’re dead.”
The assassin sighed. “I suppose it does.”
With a swiftness Kaldus wouldn’t have thought possible with only one free hand, the man pulled a dagger from its sheath on his belt. It was an elven weapon, made of folded steel with runes etched along the blade. A green mist wafted off it, stinking of sulfur and rotting flesh.
The knife came up toward the bottom of the lord commander’s boot, but before it could reach him Kaldus grabbed the assassin’s wrist, pulling the arm taut, then stomped his heel down. There was a crunch of breaking bone, and the blade fell away into the darkness.
Kaldus stepped back and leaned over the parapet, watching as the body tumbled down the side of the tower, smashing on the stones below. He smiled at the memory of the man’s surprise, and then turned his thoughts to the others that were still out there.
They’d be more cautious now, but he was certain they would come.
Please check out this short YouTube video Basileus made that covers the information posted here if you would like to watch a visual guide along with this article: https://youtu.be/nqUCKl9i_gM?feature=shared
