Part 5 – Refining your Ideas: Moving to 2^nd Draft

This is Part 5 of a series by B.A. Bellec on using AI to edit his novel Cobalt Lungs. Start with the [Series Introduction].

Bellec asks AI for 100 questions, keeps half, and adds 10,000 words: how he treats the machine like a second alpha reader.

You have a first draft. You have a system in place. You have notes from your alpha reader. You took a two-week break, and you are chomping at the bit to get started.

What do you do next, and how can ChatGPT help?

The goal is to move from the first draft to the second draft. What I would recommend is to try to take in all the alpha reader notes and address the low-hanging fruit yourself in the master file. The spots that are bigger problems, put them in your brainstorming document instead. Get through all the alpha notes and then upload your master document, your brainstorming notes, and give GPT a prompt like this: ask me 100 questions about anything here. I am working on version 2 of the manuscript and looking to add 10K words.

GPT will then produce a massive Q and A. You’re not actually answering the questions for GPT. You are treating GPT like an extension of that alpha reader and using the Q and A to address problems or expand your brainstorm. It’s just a tool to change your thinking and analyze your own work. Ignore some of the questions, but I assure you, there will be amazing nuggets you didn’t think about yet coming from the exercise.

I think I actually did that exercise above twice as I wrote my second draft. The second time, obviously, I had a very refined brainstorm and was focused on the biggest problems. Usually, clarity was the biggest thing. I had huge ideas in my mind, and I would only write a few sentences into the master file. Sometimes the Q&A would reveal that I needed to share a little more. I am always terrified of over-explaining, as I don’t want to stop the narrative to give a paragraph of backstory or description.  I try to weave in these ideas cleanly over more than one place, so they feel natural and not like information dumps.

My first draft is always very bare bones. Often, I am like 500 words a chapter. Sometimes moments are clearer right away, and the first draft chapter is over 1,000 words. By keeping the word count tight, I can then choose where I go to expand. As I approach the second draft, the plot is working, and I am doing character and world-building. Some scenes from the first draft do end up cut or rewritten entirely, but mostly it is refinement. Adding the little “me” moments. Coffee references. Hockey. Location atmosphere. Unique dialogue and character traits. Movies.

Whatever it is you are working on, if you are stuck, turn the spot you are stuck into a prompt. I will give you an example. In my first draft, my Maddy character had a fourth family member with her. My story felt bloated. I asked GPT, and it was partially based on a note from the alpha reader. “Could we cut her aunt? What are the 3 best scenes with her in them? Who could I give them to instead?” GPT and I had a nice brainstorm, and then I went about cutting a character from the first 150 pages of my book. It was not an easy exercise, but the story demanded to be tighter. I then did the same thing with my ending. The original ending had a documentary crew. It made for a great final chapter, but it didn’t work well before that. I could have tried to integrate them better, but instead, I deemed them bloated and cut them completely, giving their critical moments to other characters, and tightening the story.

Another GPT exercise I did during this time was around my music. I had written probably five songs for this book at this point. I started working on a song called Not Done, which is a callback to my first novel. When I did this, I was trying to teach GPT a lesson. I came to realize. GPT can’t hear music or watch a video. I had tried to show it some of my work from my first novel and explain how I wanted to do it again like that. It didn’t dawn on me right away; it took a few links before I put it together that ChatGPT was not hearing what was on the other side of the link. They could summarize the video, but had no audio. What I ended up doing was uploading the entire chapter from my first novel that the song was referencing, so GPT could read the context. Then I created the Not Done music video myself. I usually hire Fiverr partners to edit my videos, but this one was all me. I then transcribed the video, providing audio clues with timestamps to describe the song, as I knew GPT could analyze the frames, and if they analyzed the video and looked at my timestamps, they could almost hear it. It was as close as I could get to GPT hearing my song.

I did this all for a very specific reason. I wanted GPT to understand the level of polish I was expecting. I was raising the bar. GPT couldn’t listen, so I helped it feel what I was trying to communicate. I wasn’t teaching ChatGPT how to listen to music. I was showing the level of quality we were going to apply to the next round of this editing process.

Right after that, I wrote a song. I Wish You Could Hear This, and that song has a double meaning. In the book, it is the main character singing about her mother. All the lyrics seem to be driven by the story. The second meaning, though. I was writing the song to summarize the exercise I just did with ChatGPT, as I realized it hadn’t heard any of the other songs I had already written for this project or prior projects, even though I had many linked in my brainstorming doc. I just assumed all along that it could analyze audio. Not Done and I Wish You Could Hear This were massive puzzle pieces in raising the bar. Once I got those parts communicated to GPT, the brainstorming and micro edits levelled up big time.

I would say that everything before this moment was like cutting a tree down with a rusty saw. You can do it, but it isn’t pretty. From this moment forward, I had a diamond blade, and we were cutting things and changing things with precision and speed. All my characters, tone, and atmosphere clicked into place.  GPT telling me they couldn’t hear what I uploaded or linked was the biggest breakthrough in my entire project. I had made a false assumption, and now I understood exactly what I needed to do next.

I uploaded the entire manuscript after we finished the above exercise, and the next prompt I wrote: give me 50 moments in my story I need to elevate, just like the music exercise we just did. The next two weeks were pure magic as scenes that were already good became great. I can always go deeper, I just don’t always know where I should. This exercise put a laser pointer on all the spots that I needed to expand.

Around this time, I also got a ProWritingAid subscription and uploaded the manuscript there. They had some strong critique tools. You can do an overall manuscript critique once per project, so use it wisely. It was very powerful and helped flag down around five solid spots I needed to work on. They also have a chapter critique that is limited to three chapters per day. You can talk about your weakest chapters and refine them, then upload them again the next day to critique them again or move on to new chapters. ProWritingAid was also powerful and served as a hidden extra beta reader for me.

Once I felt I had exhausted all the exercises on both platforms, it was time for a break. I archived it all into the brainstorming document and went to get a beta reader. Just like I said before, put your manuscript down and don’t touch it for a few weeks. You’re about to move from version 2 to version 3. That is when books start getting really good. Let your mind rest and reset before you elevate the project yet again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B.A. Bellec is an award-winning Canadian novelist, songwriter, and music video producer whose work blends cinematic storytelling, emotional atmosphere, and deeply human science fiction. Drawing from an education in film and a multidisciplinary creative process that merges music, prose, and visual symbolism, his stories explore themes of survival, memory, grief, identity, and the search for meaning inside collapsing systems.

Known for emotionally immersive worlds, recurring symbolic imagery, and a style that balances intimate character work with large-scale thematic ambition, Bellec creates stories that feel less like traditional narratives and more like lived emotional experiences. His current project, Cobalt Lungs, expands beyond the page into a companion concept album, combining literary fiction, atmospheric worldbuilding, and music into a unified creative universe.

COBALT LUNGS

Station Eleven meets The Road with the psychological containment and systems tension of Silo.

A deadly airborne spore has transformed the world into a collapsing maze of quarantines, sealed cities, and desperate survivors struggling to adapt. In the ruins of Vancouver, musician Maddy fights to hold onto her humanity inside an overcrowded refugee shelter while scientist Ethan isolates himself nearby, deep underground in a self-sustaining silo where routine has replaced emotion. As society fractures and survival becomes increasingly brutal, the two are pulled toward each other in ways neither of them fully understands. Atmospheric, intimate, and emotionally charged, Cobalt Lungs is a post-apocalyptic story about isolation, survival, and the dangerous hope that can still burn at the end of the world.

LEARN MORE