I want to be honest with you about the history of how my memoir came about.
I started writing this book about ten years ago when God whispered to me, “Write your book.” I knew nothing about writing a book.
These stories came out of me one at a time, one memory at a time, in whatever order my brokenness, my Holy Spirit-driven lessons, and my healing brought them up. Apparently, my memories didn’t structure well for a book. How does a person take a story and put it in the right order for a book that tells about themselves?
I finally got around to reading books on how to write and asked lots of questions. I went to a conference for authors and loved it. Most of the advice made little sense in actual practice. I kept trying to put memories and feelings into words a reader would understand. I wrote many drafts, one at a time, in Microsoft Word, Pages, Scrivener, Google Docs, Obsidian, and Notion, and then I tried to do those rewrites I heard from all the research I was doing. But I hated English in school, and still hate it. I never learned to spot first person or figure out tenses.
I knew I couldn’t afford to pay for structure or editing, so I turned to the tools offered on the internet: Grammarly, ProWritingAid, a paper-checker website, a free text-to-speech reader, Reedsy, and a lot of YouTube. None of them seemed to help my story be understood. I dragged my feet from one bad rewrite to the next. Nothing felt right. Nothing felt worthy of a book. My friends read my story and loved it, mostly because they love me and they knew the transformation.
I asked people for help, too. An agent loved my story but said it needed too much work to become a book at this time. A ghostwriter didn’t capture my voice. An editor told me my tenses were all over the place and I needed to fix them first. A book coach thought my memoir was fiction. Another editor said it was a good story, but the structure was completely wrong, and if I let her fix it, it would cost thousands of dollars.
Then AI came along. I started studying the Bible with it. I asked it hard questions, like “Give me the context of this verse” and “What do scholars say this story means?” Through all that back-and-forth, I learned so much about God and His character. I put some of those conversations on my blog so readers could see how I studied.
Then I started talking to it about my book. I found out it could help with structure. It could fix my grammar and my tenses. It helped me turn my ramblings into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters a reader could follow. I talk my ideas out in rough, rambling sentences, and Claude, the AI, helps me put them in order. The ideas, memories, and decisions are mine. I read every line and keep only what is true.
So yes, I used AI to edit and structure this book. The tools were Claude and EditGPT, and I am thankful for both. I could not have put my story into written words without them, or at least I could not have afforded to. Help like this would have cost me thousands of dollars. AI cost about twenty dollars a month.
But here is what AI didn’t do. It didn’t live my life. The stories, the memories, and every moment I spent with God to bring these words to book form are mine. This book began long before any AI program. It began when God quietly told me, “Write your book.” Words are not my gift. I did it anyway, because He asked.
I think using AI will be a normal and everyday thing someday. For now, I want you to know the truth. If AI in books isn’t something you’re comfortable with, I understand.