For those who may not know, I've been dreaming of becoming an author pretty much my entire adult life. Embarrassingly, I've been working on this same book off and on for decades, without ever making much progress.

Then towards the end of last year, my son challenged me to stop dragging my feet and finally finish my book before the end of 2026. This seems to have given me the motivation I needed since I've made more progress on my book in the last six months than in the previous six years combined.

So where exactly am I today?

Behind the paywall you can read about the current state of my book, how I've been leveraging A.I. to help my writing process, what I think of its capabilities, and how all of this relates to my faith journey.

As of today, I finished what we'll call the fourth draft of my novel. About two months ago, shortly after finishing the third draft, my family took a vacation to Korea, during which I took a break from writing. It was during the tail end of that vacation that I decided on a whim to try and build this site using Claude and was shocked by what was now possible. As a result, I spent the entire month of April building and improving Proof of Writing while hardly touching my novel.

But I promised myself to get back into writing starting in May, and that's what I did. Honestly, it was a grind. Writing for me has always been a solitary endeavor. I don't belong to a community of writers. I also never share my work with others. So that means I've always had to rely on my own judgement and taste when it comes to my work. But since I'd just used Claude to build this site, and I thought it did a great job given my limitations, I wondered if it would be just as helpful in writing my book.

I had my reservations at first. Mostly about whether this would mean the book no longer belonged to me. So I compromised and decided to start by feeding it only the first chapter and seeing what it said. I was surprised by how good the feedback was. It was not just comprehensive, but it rang honest and true. I found myself agreeing with almost everything it said, both what it said was good, and what it said needed work. My immediate impression was that it was like getting the opportunity to work with a world class fiction editor for only $20 a month.

Here's a taste of what it said about chapter 1:

"The voice is the strongest thing here. There's a quiet, introspective quality that feels authentic — like listening to someone think out loud rather than perform for you. The narrator is self-aware without being insufferable about it, which is harder to pull off than people realize. Lines like "an iceberg that had broken off from a glacier and drifted out to sea" land cleanly and tell us a lot in a small space."

Here's an example of it pushing back:

"The middle sags. Roughly from "I was twenty-seven years old" through "do it all over again" is a long stretch of telling us the narrator's life is unremarkable — and the prose enacts the unremarkableness a little too faithfully. We get the apartment, the rent, the job, the monthly budget, the workout routine, the weekend chores. Individually these details are fine, but collectively they slow the chapter to a crawl right when you need momentum building toward the phone call."

I don't know any other writers. If I asked one of my friends or relatives to read a chapter of my book and give me feedback, I can't imagine any of them having offered the kinds of insights that Claude Opus 4.7 provided. There's also the fact that since Claude is an A.I., I don't have to worry about it judging me like my friends would. I don't have to feel bad about taking up its time, or asking it to be more specific, or any of the other complications that arise in every normal human relationship.

Instead what I suddenly had was an amazing tool that wasn't available to me before. So I fixed up chapter 1 based on its feedback, then went on to chapter 2, and so on, until we had done this for every chapter.

Here's what I think now that I've gone through this entire process. Claude is great for some things, and bad at other things. I guess you could say it's like most humans in that way.

So what's it great for? It's a great tool for getting a second opinion. It tells you what it thinks is working and what isn't, and tells you exactly why it thinks those things. Many times I found myself agreeing with its points like sections of my book that I knew were self-indulgent but had trouble discarding. The A.I. made it easier for me to finally let those things go.

It's also great for brainstorming. You can ask it to do a revision pass that you can then revise yourself. If you feel a passage needs more detail but can't think of exactly what to write, the A.I. could do a first pass, and that might give you ideas for things you'd want to include.

Finally, something I wasn't expecting and was probably most impressed by was the A.I.'s ability to highlight symbolism or thematic undercurrents that had not been obvious to me even though I was the writer. It called out subtle connections I hadn't realized before. It was like it was seeing my subconscious in a way I couldn't see on my own, which helped me to better understand the kind of book that I was trying to write. For example, there was one thing that had gnawed at me, something I felt was missing from my book, but the A.I. helped me to see that it wasn't actually missing at all, but that it was subtly sitting beneath the surface. This blew me away.

So what is the A.I. not good for? For some reason, it's not good with keeping track of things like time or dates. You have to be careful or it will think your story is taking place over two years instead of one. Or that three days have passed since the last scene when it's really been four. It also tends to forget plot points you've changed, or introduce a detail that doesn't make sense given what's come before. These types of hallucinations don't happen often, but they do happen. I'd also say that it's not great at writing in general. It can produce good sentences, but it is also as likely to produce sentences that lack flow or sound unnatural. It's up to you to decide what's worth keeping and what isn't.

The bottom line is that I think A.I. is an extremely useful tool for writers. Of course literature is subjective, so not everyone will agree. I'm sure there are some gifted writers out there for whom A.I. may only make their writing worse, but for every one of those, I'd guess there are a thousand others for whom A.I. will make them a much better writer than would have been otherwise possible.

I've still got a long ways to go before I finish my novel. The next draft is going to be focused on expanding the book so it adds more realism and emotional depth. The draft after that will be focused on the language itself, making sure every sentence flows into the next, so the reader won't want to put it down. I'm confident that if I keep working hard, I'll be able to meet my son's deadline, but that's a big if.

Finally, while I will definitely be using A.I. to assist me, I have no doubts that the book is still mine, because it's my story and no one else's. The A.I. did not add any major plot points, or create any of the characters. It only helped me to see what scenes were self-indulgent, or what scenes were missing or needed to be expanded, which is often what a good editor will do.

I recently read an interview with an author whose book I had just finished reading, and in the interview, he talks about how he initially had a different approach for his book and had to completely change it because of his editor's comments. The editor even rewrote the first chapter to help him see what he meant, and the author realized his editor was right. The editor certainly deserves credit for improving on the author's original work, but I would argue that the book itself still belongs to the author, because it wouldn't exist otherwise. Maybe it would exist in a lesser form, and the editor deserves plenty of credit for making it better, but the ability to make something better is different from the inspiration that led to it existing in the first place.

Now you may be wondering what does any of this have to do with my faith journey? The book I'm talking about in the paragraph above is called "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel, and if there's one thing in my life that is comparable to my book writing journey, it's my faith journey.

I grew up going to church as a kid, but the truth is, while I thought about God frequently in my youth, I stopped going to church after high school, and I mostly stopped thinking about the subject of faith up until recently.

A few years ago, at the behest of my wife, we started attending a church near our home, and for the first time, I found myself looking forward to attending the weekly Sunday service. At first, I liked it because I thought the pastor's sermons were interesting and insightful, but lately, I found myself sitting there feeling things I haven't felt since I was a teenager. Like something is suddenly pulling me towards God. Like I was searching for something once again.

So far I've only felt this pull without ever reaching what's on the other side. The pull is both emotional and intellectual. I can feel it happening to me while we are singing praise songs during worship, or listening to the pastor's sermons. Both seem to be urging me to want to "know God", making me curious what it feels like to have faith and believe that God and heaven exist. I even started praying for God to help me finally find what's eluded me thus far. Not only because of my curiosity, but because I think it would be good for me and my family, especially my wife who worries about what will happen if all of us don't make it to heaven together.

Earlier I mentioned our family vacation to Korea. I bring it up again, because for about a week afterward, I had the worst jet lag I've ever experienced. No matter how badly I tried, I couldn't sleep. Part of it was probably related to this site. I'd be in bed trying to sleep, but after hours of being unable to do so, I'd eventually give up, get out of bed and start using Claude and Cursor to keep improving upon what I had. This went on for about ten days. I was literally sleeping only an hour or two a night, using my lunch break to take naps in my car during work, then going home and repeating the same pattern all over again.

I've never felt so exhausted in my life. I wanted to sleep so badly, and yet it wouldn't come. I was even scared that my heart was going to give out on me. There were multiple occasions when I felt like I was just about to fall into a state of slumber only to have it snatched away again. And when I did finally fall asleep, it usually lasted only an hour or two at the most.

I'd lie there in bed for hours, forcing myself not to use my phone, or my computer, but nothing worked. Sleep remained elusive. I even prayed to God to let me have a good night's rest. I practically begged him. Then at one point it dawned on me that my quest for sleep was similar to my search for God. Because even if I wanted to find God, it felt like it was out of my control, the same way falling asleep appeared to be out of my hands.

So in my sleep deprived state I ended up writing a long email to my church, explaining where I am on my faith journey, and asking if I could speak with someone who might be more experienced in these matters. One of the outreach pastors wrote back and said he would love to meet me or have a phone call with me to talk. We had coffee together a few weeks later. I'd been afraid that he was going to pressure me into participating in one of the small groups the church offered, but instead he told me about his own journey, answered my questions, and recommended several books for me to read, including "The Case for Christ".

I wasn't expecting anything, and I'm still searching, but thanks to that pastor, I can't help but feel like I'm further along in my search for faith than I've ever been before, just as I feel like I'm further along in my book writing journey than I've ever been before.

You see in the past, I always thought of God as this enigmatic, mysterious being that I'm supposed to believe is the creator of all things. Maybe that's why I struggled to ever have faith. It didn't feel real. But now my search has shifted its focus from God to Jesus Christ. I've started thinking about what it means that two thousand years ago there existed a man who by all accounts walked this earth and performed miracles, was crucified, dead, and buried, only to be resurrected from the grave on the third day. I have also learned there are other historical documents besides the Bible that provide evidence of Jesus's existence. Then there are the accounts of witnesses who testify that they saw or spoke to Jesus after his crucifixion. And there's the spread of Christianity itself, and how it continues to this day, thousands of years later. Because if Jesus didn't rise again, would Christianity have taken off the way it did?

I'm still trying to figure out what all this means. Even if I accepted the gospels as true, how would it change my world view? All I know is that for the first time in my life, I feel like I have something to hold onto and help me in my search, like there's something there that wasn't there before.

One last thing I'll leave you with is that the pastor I met with told me I should try reading the book of John. A few years back, I'd read the book of Matthew, and I'd always thought the 4 gospels were mostly telling the same story, so I didn't see the point in reading any of the others. When I read Matthew, I would say it didn't have much of an effect on me. I was already familiar with the parables, and the story of Jesus, and while I agreed with his teachings and values, the book didn't speak to me in any special way.

But this pastor told me that John was different. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke were known to be similar and therefore referred to as the synoptics, the book of John stood apart. So I decided to read it, and I was shocked to find several passages that seemed to be speaking directly to me, specific details that I could connect to the book I've been trying to write for all these years. I'm not ready to share any of those details today, but I hope that as my journey continues, one day I will.

As always, thank you for reading, and thank you for using this platform.

Progress update on my book, what it's like using A.I. to help write fiction, and my faith journey 🎧