I'm a 34M who has wanted to write professionally since high school which over the years has developed to include everything from novels to video games to comics. The problem is while I'm great with coming with ideas, developing them into an actual story outside my head has been an uphill battle.
The last couple years, I've fiddled with AI and have found it useful for worldbuilding though it hard to get it understand what I want without it going off tangent or taking my prompts too seriously. The main problem I'm having is to get it to help with the narrative side of things.
So for the a better understanding of what I want its help with, I'd like to give some context on what I'm working on, which is around a half dozen half-baked story ideas all taking place in my version of an original fantasy-kitchen sink-superhero universe but on the ground floor. One is a story about firefighters and police officers dealing with everyday emergencies in this kind of universe (think 911 and The Rookie crossed over with shows like Gotham and Daredevil). Another is a Slice-of-life in a small town where the residents deal with normal problems in a place where weird shit happens like an annual blizzard that cause people to act out on the their hidden desires and thoughts.
For the AI, I'd like help with questions like "What sort of emergencies involving a city bus could happen in world like this and how would the first responders handle it?", "If the town was facing bankruptcy, what measures could they take, ranging from tried-and-true methods to the outright bizarre?", or "What federal agency would take custody of a mad scientist's weather machine?" I also want help with character development, expanding on ideas for character traits and backgrounds to make them more rounded.
If you're still reading at this point, I want to thank for dealing with my craziness and would appreciate any advice you can give on the matter even if its that I just need to practice more with it. I solely use Gemini and ChatGPT since they're free and have been reliable to me in the past but I know people they're not the best for fiction writing. If you have a suggestion that's free, more efficient, and help me with my problems, i'm all years.
Thank you.