Creative brainstorming for scriptwriting and storytelling

Generate mind maps for content topics

To start our creative brainstorming process, we can work with ChatGPT to take a single concept, in our case, “Basketball”, and generate visual mind maps to help us ideate on all the possible ideas that are related to the topic.

If you’re not familiar, a mind map is a visual tool used to organize information hierarchically. It typically consists of a central concept or idea from which various branches spread out to show connected ideas, tasks, words, or concepts.

We’ll need to use a custom GPT for this since ChatGPT can’t generate mind maps on its own. Navigate to the GPT store by clicking “Explore GPTs” on the left-side window and search for “Whimsical Diagrams” in the search box.

Click the Start Chat button in the pop-up window to start a chat window with the Whimsical Diagrams GPT.

Now that we’re in a chat window with the Whimsical GPT, we can prompt it to create a mind map for our topic of “Basketball.”

Sample prompt:

Generate a mind map for the topic of [your topic].

From here, you can dive deeper into a specific mind map branch and have the Whimsical GPT create a new mind map for that specific idea. Or, you can click the link provided below your mind map and view or edit the diagram directly in Whimsical.

We’ll create a new mind map on the NBA.

Sample prompt:

Generate a new mind map on the topic of the NBA.

You can keep generating new mind maps from various branches, diving deeper into specific sub-topics branching from your original idea. We’re going to run with the idea of “Basketball Playoffs” for the next step of our creative brainstorming process.

Generate thought starters for creative ideas

Now that we have a more specific idea for our story: ”Basketball Playoffs,” we’ll hop into a ChatGPT-4 window to have it start generating thought starters for creative stories based on this topic. Make sure to click the pencil icon in the top left corner of ChatGPT to exit out of the Whimsical GPT chat window.

Sample prompt:

Generate thought starters for a story based on [your topic].

I like the idea of the “Underdog Triumph.” Let’s have ChatGPT generate various scenes based on this creative idea.

Sample prompt:

I like the idea of the [story idea]. Can you come up with some scenes based on this story idea?

The “Final Game” scene is the one I want to develop further, so we’ll use that scene concept in the next step to generate a script outline.

Generate a script outline for a specific creative idea

Now that you have your scene, we’ll work with ChatGPT to generate a script outline. You can do this in the same chat window or a new ChatGPT chat window. Make sure to add any additional details you want captured in your script outline.

Sample prompt:

I'm working on a story about [story details]. Can you generate a script outline for a short scene for this? [More story details]. Please provide the dialogue, characters, and scenes.

I like the scene as it is, so I will use this script outline in the next step.

Create a visual storyboard from a script outline

Now that you have your script outline, you can prompt ChatGPT to generate a visual storyboard for your scene in the same chat window.

Sample prompt:

Can you generate a storyboard with graphics for this script?

And there you have it! You’ve gone from a single-topic idea to a visual storyboard for a scripted scene in minutes. You can use this creative workflow for more scenes of your script or pick and choose various elements of this workflow for other creative ideas.

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This tutorial was created by Garrett.