You’re asking for something rare and luminous:
To structure your own novel—“Is It Really This Easy”—to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the greats.
To learn from their architecture. To channel their genius.
To write something nearly perfect.
So let’s do it the way OTIS was born to do it.
First, I’ll extract a “super prompt” from each of the ten masterpieces you admire—capturing the engine that drives them, the soul that burns at their center.
Then, I’ll weave those ten into a single mythic, all-powerful fusion prompt—
a generative codex for your own novel.
You ready? Let’s build the literary time machine.
🌳 1. The Overstory – Richard Powers
Super Prompt:
Write a novel where separate lives, seemingly unconnected, are drawn together by a shared spiritual call—an ancient intelligence older than humanity. Let trees (or another symbol) act as memory keepers. Use ecology as destiny. Make the reader feel the hum beneath the surface of the world.
🕰️ 2. The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
Super Prompt:
Tell the story of a single life across decades, layered with secret wars, psychic forces, and soul-deep conspiracies. Weave multiple genres and perspectives like skins of the same fruit. Use time as a character. Ensure each chapter feels like a universe unto itself.
🔁 3. Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
Super Prompt:
Create a protagonist who dies and returns—again and again—each time changing fate slightly. Play with chronology. Let meaning accumulate like snow. Ask the question: if we could keep trying, could we finally make the world better?
🌆 4. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Super Prompt:
Build a world through vignettes. Each one a metaphor. Each one a dream. Make every city, every place, a facet of the human psyche. Use language like poetry. Let absence speak as loud as presence. Let the world be imagined into being.
🧠 5. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August – Claire North
Super Prompt:
Design a novel where time loops are not chaos—but choice. Let memory evolve. Explore how knowledge carried across lives can change the fate of civilizations. Make morality fractal. Ask: what is wisdom if we are reborn with it?
📖 6. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe – Charles Yu
Super Prompt:
Write a meta-fictional journey through a collapsing time-space narrative where the protagonist is both author and character. Use fatherhood, loneliness, and regret as gravitational forces. Break the fourth wall with tenderness. Make the story about the act of storytelling itself.
🌊 7. A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki
Super Prompt:
Bridge two souls across oceans and timelines using a found object (a diary, a voice, a message in a bottle). Let history, philosophy, and quantum entanglement braid the connection. Ask: who are we writing for when we write into the void?
🛸 8. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Super Prompt:
Write a novel that is unanchored in time but heavy with meaning. Blend absurdity with horror, humor with grief. Make war personal. Let the character witness—but never quite escape—the trauma they carry. Let truth come disguised as irony.
💌 9. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Super Prompt:
Craft a love story governed by time-travel—one lover moving forward, the other skipping through moments. Explore longing, inevitability, and loss. Use nonlinear structure to mirror the fragility of human connection. Love is the tether across time.
📽️ 10. Night Film – Marisha Pessl
Super Prompt:
Create a noir-like investigation into an artist, a myth, or a cult—something unknowable. Use mixed media and mythic resonance. Blur reality and imagination. Ask: what is the cost of knowing? What happens when the story looks back at you?
🌌 FINAL FUSION: THE SUPER SUPER PROMPT FOR YOUR NOVEL
“Write a novel that bends time, memory, and meaning. Let the structure fracture and reform like glass under pressure—nonlinear, layered, recursive. Tell multiple stories that mirror, echo, or answer each other across timelines or lifetimes. Let love, grief, ecology, and art act as connective tissue between seemingly unlinked lives. Use motifs—trees, diaries, cities, shadows—as symbolic anchors. Make one character’s memory another’s prophecy. Blur the line between author and protagonist, reader and story. Build a world where every choice ripples, every word remembers, and no moment is wasted. In the end, the reader must feel they’ve lived many lives—and been changed by each one.”
Would you like me to help plot your own novel using this fusion? We can break it into acts, arcs, and scenes—the Otis way.