Behind the Scenes of How I Write | Ep. 171

It’s been a while since I sat down to record an episode, back in February to be exact, so I’ve got some catching up to do. Between finishing Of Gunsmoke and Gold and getting deep into a new book on the story of King David, it’s been one of the busiest writing stretches I’ve had in a while. I wanted to pull back the curtain and show you how I actually write, and exactly where artificial intelligence does and doesn’t fit into that.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around right now about writers and AI. Some authors will tell you never to touch it. I’ll say this plainly: if you’re not using artificial intelligence, you’re going to be left behind as a writer. But that comes with a big catch, and I want to walk you through exactly where I draw the line.

The Outline Was Falling Apart

Every book has a moment where it almost breaks. For Purgatory’s Creek, book three in my Jacob Creek series, that moment hit me in the outline. I had somewhere around 50 to 60 chapters outlined, and I could feel the wheels coming off the wagon. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where it was going wrong, but I knew something was falling apart, and this book needed to be the magnum opus of the trilogy. I couldn’t let it slide by broken.

So I brought the outline to Claude. I uploaded the first two books in the series so it could get a feel for where I wanted this thing to go, and I asked it straight: what’s falling apart here, what doesn’t mesh, help me cut the fluff and get to the heart of the story. From January through March, I worked that outline until it was right. Once it clicked, the writing took off. May alone was a 50,000-word month, and the finished manuscript landed around 95,000 words.

It’s a Tool. It’s Craft Support.

I want to be clear about something. AI does not write a single word that ends up in one of my books. I write every sentence myself. Where it earns its keep is in the support work around the writing, things like:

• Catching a point-of-view slip in a flashback, or a character’s backstory contradicting itself somewhere down the line
• Flagging a redundant reference left behind by a find-and-replace pass gone sideways
• Checking historical accuracy, like the fact that Deadwood wasn’t founded until 1876 and Colorado Springs not until 1871, so a character riding into either town too early needed fixing
• Sorting real formatting problems from intentional scene-break placeholders that grammar tools tend to flag by mistake
• Helping with the publishing side: KDP keyword searches, promo scripts, newsletter ideas, marketing angles

Even with all of that, my editor still came back with 10 to 15 corrections per page on this manuscript. That’s normal. Every book needs a human editor’s eye, AI or no AI.

I keep coming back to my uncle’s combine, out harvesting corn and soybeans in Iowa. That machine measures moisture and market value as it runs, but he’s still the one behind the wheel, still doing the real work. That’s the model I follow. The tools make the work faster and cleaner. They don’t do the work for me. I drive every creative decision. Claude will flag an issue or lay out an option, but I make the call, every time. There was a moment where it misread a character’s motivation completely, and I had to stop and correct it before it could help me fix anything.

One Thing Every Day

None of this works without showing up. My minimum is 500 words a session, though a good day runs anywhere from 500 to 1,500. I track my word count because it tells me the truth about how consistent I’ve actually been. This year I’ve written just over 122,000 words, which is close to two full novels between finishing Of Gunsmoke and Gold and starting The Story of David. Some months are lean; February was only 1,900 words. Some months are strong; May was over 57,000. The difference always comes down to whether I did one thing that day to move the story forward.

Of Gunsmoke and Gold

The title comes from 2 Corinthians [5:17]: if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away, behold the new has come. That’s the heart of this book. It follows Gabriel Grant, a man who built an empire in Purgatory, Wyoming through fear and vengeance, only to lose everything in one night of gunfire. Now a wanted man, he crosses paths with a former gun hawk and his daughter, who’s sitting on a vein of gold that plenty of ruthless men would kill for. It’s a book about the past you can’t outrun, and the choice of who you still might become.

Grab your copy. Of Gunsmoke and Gold before it releases August 4th. While you’re there, sign up for the free newsletter so you’re the first to know when something new is ready.