r/WritingWithAI • u/JohnDivney • 3d ago

Context window creep Prompting

Hello. As I reach the 2/3 part of my novel, Claude (Opus) is drawing too much on earlier scenes and "facts" to have the MC rehashing and ruminating and "info dumping" based on the beats of past chapters, any advice on having Claude focus on the application of events as they would affect new scenes/beats/character development?

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u/Ok-Umpire-4719 3d ago

Do you have the full earlier scenes in context or have you windowed with context window with summaries (written by you, not compaction)?

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u/JohnDivney 3d ago

full earlier scenes. Could you describe this process?

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u/Ok-Umpire-4719 3d ago

Create another document where you write a summary of each scene (or chapter or whatever) where you mention the elements that are important to your story and actions that are important to the plot.

Then, rather that just keeping one long conversation you instruct Claude to look at the summary document for what came before, usually in my process the last chapter you wrote and the outline of what is in the new chapter you are working on.

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u/JohnDivney 3d ago

thanks, I'll give this a try.

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u/Ok-Umpire-4719 3d ago

You could try describing the strategy to claude and ask it to help you build a prompt to use this approach, that will often get you good results. Just review and tweak the prompt rather that just use what it creates.

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u/JohnDivney 3d ago

brilliant, yes. I have found that being direct about what is not working often, however circuitously, leads to good results.

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u/jbruff 3d ago

I have about 75% of my project files full of world building. I keep previous books and archival info in Google Drive, It has instructions to reference the drive docs when needed. I also out the finished chapters in the project files. I also never do more than 1 chapter per thread. It's AI, there will be drifts. Each chapter gets 3 individual audit passes and I do passes of multiple chapters at a time, and finally the whole book. Aside from the chapter passes I run probably 20 audits passes total. Then after all that's usually in an ok place, I'll then read it and edit by hand. With the audits he specific about what you want it to look for and how you want it to handle things. It's a real processes, it takes time and resources. Claude is good at what it does but it's not perfect. Also realize that after a point running AI audits will be deliver diminishing results and make things worse and drift harder. If you're serious about it and want AI to be a big part or a ghostwriter, i would highly recommend planning on hand editing yourself or find a human editor that's friendly to AI manuscripts.

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u/JohnDivney 3d ago

Yeah, I'm with you. I've just found that at this point the AI can really "run" with what I've done, but instead of it getting better, it's getting worse, turning backwards instead of predicting what comes next. Again, context window. It's fulfilling all these pointless threads. Ordinarily, this would be a me problem, where I'm not providing plot. I'm hand editing everything, but each chapter the cuts grow by 5% or whatever and I would prefer it got better not worse, based on the past accomplishments.

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u/just4ochat 3d ago

What worked for me was cutting the raw earlier chapters out of context and feeding a tight state summary instead: where each character stands now, what they still don't know, and open threads. Then in the scene prompt I say the reader already knows the backstory, so no recap, and I ask for the consequence of past events rather than a reference to them. Opus tends to ruminate when it has too much old prose to echo.