What exactly am I going to do?

From time to time, a story pops into my head. Usually, I can quickly find the main storyline. But developing the plot into an 80,000-word novel is challenging. On one hand because it's a lot of work, but I'm willing to do that, and on the other hand because I don't really know how to begin.

• How do I ensure good pacing?
• What does the structure of a book look like exactly?
• At what point in the story should something happen, like a dramatic turning point?

For these kinds of challenges, I want to use AI. I've chosen Claude. Claude is a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on an enormous amount of written data. If anything or anyone knows how to approach writing a book in a structured way, it should be Claude.

I'm not going to have Claude write texts. I'll write all the text myself, but I can adopt suggestions from Claude. For example, about word usage or adding symbolism.

My sparring partner Claude

I also want to use Claude as a sparring partner. When I've written a paragraph, I want to have it proofread.

I have Claude reflect on my texts in relation to books I've read about writing. A good example of this is Stephen King's book 'On Writing'. When I've typed something, I ask how it relates to King's advice. Funny enough, I don't have to ask this explicitly every time, and he now does this automatically because he knows I find this important.

My research assistant Claude

Additionally, I use Claude for research. For example, when I'm working on a scenario and want to know what an expensive whiskey brand is, or when I'm writing something and doubt the credibility of the situation. I always ask for the source because an LLM, including Claude, can sometimes hallucinate and make up complete nonsense.

Why Claude?

I chose Claude because the company behind this LLM seems to care strongly about ethics and privacy. To what extent this is really the case remains to be seen, but of all the providers currently available, this one seems most trustworthy to me.

Additionally, Claude also has the ability to delete and export chats. Every week I do a cleanup and make a backup. With this, I hope that chats I don't want to keep are also permanently deleted.

Exporting the chat also helps bypass the conversation limit. If you keep chatting long enough in the same 'chat', you'll eventually get a message that the limit has been reached. This is impractical when you're writing an entire book because every chat with Claude is a standalone conversation. Claude doesn't remember anything from previous conversations you've had with him. That's why I export previous chats and upload them to the current conversation. This way, Claude still knows what we've talked about.

What about copyright?

That was actually the first question I asked Claude when I started this project. His answer:

"The copyright lies with you. You write the text and provide the creative ideas - that makes you the author. My role as sparring partner and editor gives me no rights to the work.

My contributions (feedback, suggestions, editorial comments) are supportive and fall under normal editorial help, comparable to what a human editor would do. They also don't get copyright on the book.

In short: you are the author, you retain all rights to your novel. I'm just your digital writing buddy who thinks along and helps polish."

I'm not one hundred percent sure if I can believe Claude on his digital word, but for now I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Things that stand out to me so far

• Claude is remarkably positive. Either I'm really the next Stephen King or I should take his encouragements with a grain of salt.
• This means you have to actively ask for feedback. Sometimes multiple times and very specifically: what do you think of this sentence?
• I also notice that sometimes there are obvious spelling errors or typos in the text that Claude doesn't point out on his own.
• Sometimes Claude makes connections or suggestions that I hadn't thought of myself.
• Claude's native language is not Dutch. Everything he says is English translated to Dutch. And those translations aren't always 100% correct. Sometimes English words just remain or English expressions are corrupted into Dutch.

How to continue?

I'll continue using Claude to write my novel. Claude himself suggests that I write five hundred words per day. I would then have a manuscript of 80,000 words (about 300 pages) within half a year. This seems a bit too ambitious for me at the moment, but I will periodically update this blog post with my total word count.

Word count early June 2025: 2372
Word count early July 2025: 4507