You have a book idea that won’t leave you alone. You have journal entries, a few scattered notes, a rough sense of the story. What you don’t have is a writing plan that makes it feel possible to actually finish.
That’s exactly where I was with my second book: a memoir about the existential crisis that followed years of living with a CML diagnosis and a cross-country move to Charlotte, NC, and the quiet identity unraveling that came once everything else had settled. I had stories. I had a vague outline. What I didn’t have was a clear path from “someday” to “done.” Here’s how I used Claude, Anthropic’s AI, as a thinking partner to develop a writing plan. Alongside Claude, I am using the same proprietary framework I’ve used for years, and now it has a name: the STORIES Framework, to build a real writing plan from the material I already had.
This isn’t a story about AI writing my book. It’s a story about using it to think out loud until the writing plan became clear.
Key Takeaways
- AI works best as a thinking partner, not a ghostwriter. Claude helped me sort scattered material into a plan with shape, but the stories, the voice, and the structure decisions are all mine.
- You may already have more than you think. When I started mapping what I had, it turned out I had draft material, thesis lines, and key scenes for nearly every chapter, I just hadn’t organized them yet.
- Naming your reader changes everything. The most important question in the planning process wasn’t about structure or chapter count. It was: Who are you writing this book for?
Spark: The Moment That Wouldn’t Let Go
Every book starts with a spark, the original idea or feeling that simply won’t let go. Mine was a dinner conversation with my husband, Eddie. “I am having an existential crisis,” I told him. “I think I am burnt out from writing for others. I don’t feel the spark as I did years ago.”
That dinner conversation cracked something open. The questions underneath it were ones I hadn’t let myself ask out loud yet:
- Who am I now that the CML diagnosis has reshaped my life for years?
- Who am I now that the move is done and life looks stable from the outside?
- Who am I when the visible crisis is over, and something still feels off?
Those questions had been sitting in a brief journal entry for months. When I brought it to Claude and described the dinner scene, the response wasn’t to write the chapter for me. It was to ask what else I had. What other moments, conversations, or experiences are connected to that same question?
The question is then: What does a spark actually need to be? It doesn’t have to be a polished scene or a chapter. It is the moment that keeps pulling you back. For me, it was that dinner and one line spoken out loud across a table. That became the seed for everything else.
Tidying: Turning Scattered Notes Into Something With Shape
Looking at my notes, I knew there was a story, but I wasn’t sure where the gaps were. That’s when I started using Claude as a thinking partner through the Tidying stage of the STORIES Framework: the process of gathering and sorting existing material before organizing anything into chapters.
I shared what I had, an outline made of questions rather than chapter titles, a few scenes, some voice notes, and a growing list of experiences I knew mattered. Claude helped me see where the material already lived and where the gaps were. A year of therapy, including a medication change that became a real turning point. Three separate trips back to Arizona, each shifting my perspective a little further from the last. A mastermind group exercise where we described our perfect day, most of which has since come true. The voice note I recorded in the car when “Linger” came on the radio and I said out loud: “I think I left a version of myself that is no longer needed.”
None of that was written by Claude. All of it surfaced and was organized by talking through it. Seeing the structure external to my own head, laid out in someone else’s words, turned an amorphous year into something with shape.
Outlining: Naming the Reader and the Questions That Carry the Book
Outlining is where tidied material turns into an actual chapter structure. For this book, that meant assigning guiding questions to each chapter and deciding what order they belong in. I went from 8 chapters to 10 when we identified two real gaps in the original plan: one chapter on the actual logistics of moving two lives and a business across the country (the decision is one thing, the doing is another), and one on the role faith played in how I found clarity during the crisis.
Here’s the thing. The most important question in the entire planning process wasn’t about structure. It didn’t come from Claude at all. It came from a conversation with a friend who was working through whether her husband should take a job in another state, the same scenario Eddie and I had faced just a year before. Listening to her, I recognized the questions she was asking me. She’s my reader: a woman in midlife facing a quiet identity crisis, even one that hasn’t fully announced itself yet.
Naming that reader changed how I look at every chapter. A reader who has never relocated cross-country still needs to see herself in Chapter 1. Chapter 3, which covers therapy and a medication change that brought real clarity, isn’t just my story anymore. It’s permission for her to try something she’s been putting off. Chapter 9, which is about faith and prayer, models something she might need to do but hasn’t yet let herself name. When you know who’s on the other side of the page, the chapters stop being a list of things that happened and start being a conversation.
Claude isn’t the author.
That’s the proof of concept. Claude didn’t write the book, and it didn’t hand me, my reader. What it did was give me a place to think out loud through the first three stages of the process, surfacing and organizing material I already had, with just enough reflection back to help me see why a given moment might matter. The remaining stages, Running with It, Immersing, Evaluating, and Sharing, still have to be done by me, at the desk, writing the actual chapters. The plan for it took shape in these conversations. The book still has to get written.
If you’re carrying a book idea that feels too big to start, try one thing first: describe the moment that started it. Not the concept, not the chapter outline. The specific moment, the dinner, the conversation, the line you can’t stop thinking about. Start there and see what else surfaces around it.
Don’t be rigid about the plan and give yourself grace. You may find you’re already further along than you think. The material exists. It just needs someone, or something, to help you see it clearly.
Ready to get started? Schedule your Book Talk and let’s chat.
A quick disclaimer: none of this happened by accident. I’ve spent months, and some real money, on classes learning how to get Claude to actually sound like me, questions worded the way I’d ask them, reflections that read like a thinking partner instead of a generic chatbot. If your first conversation with an AI writing tool feels flat, that’s normal. It took real, deliberate work to get here.
Related Links
- The STORIES Framework: A New Way to Write Your Book
- Writing Prompts for Book Ideas and Building a Daily Writing Habit
- Book Coaching Services
- Memoir Ghostwriting Process
- Ethical Ways Writers Can Use AI
Frequently Asked Questions
Can AI write a book for you? AI can help you organize ideas, surface patterns in your material, and ask useful questions, but it cannot write your book. Your voice, your stories, and your specific experiences are what make a memoir or nonfiction book worth reading, and those require a human author.
What is the STORIES Framework? The STORIES Framework is a seven-stage process for moving a book from idea to finished manuscript: Spark, Tidying, Outlining, Running with It, Immersing, Evaluating, and Sharing. Each stage builds on the one before it, giving writers a clear sense of where they are in the process and what comes next.
How do I know if I’m ready to write my book? If you have a story that keeps pulling at you, material scattered across journals or notes, and a sense that there’s a reader who needs what you have to say, you’re ready. You don’t need a finished outline or a polished first chapter. You need a starting point and a plan.
What does a book coach actually do? A book coach guides you through the writing process, from pre-draft to drafting, helping you clarify your book’s purpose, identify your audience, develop a chapter structure, and stay accountable to your writing goals. A coach works with you on the manuscript before an editor ever sees it.
How is using Claude as a writing tool different from hiring a book coach? Claude is useful for organizing scattered material, asking questions you haven’t thought to ask, and reflecting structure back to you. A book coach brings human judgment, lived experience, and an understanding of your specific goals and audience that AI cannot replicate. The two aren’t interchangeable, but for certain stages of early planning, they can work well together.