The Creative Partnership: How AI Became My Writing Companion

Build in Public Series — IterLight The cursor blinked mockingly at me from the blank Google Doc. For three weeks, I’d been trying to write about Uncle Ethan’s dining table, that scarred piece of furniture that had taught me more about parenting than any book ever could. Three weeks of false starts, deleted paragraphs, and frustrated sighs that made my wife look up from her own work with concern. “Just write the story,” she said one evening, watching me stare at the screen again. But that was exactly the problem. I had the story, every vivid detail of it, but translating those memories into something worth reading felt like trying to catch smoke with my bare hands. Then I remembered something that changed everything.

The Experiment That Started Small

Six months earlier, I’d been wrestling with a different piece, one about my son Oliver’s soccer team and the quiet wisdom of his assistant coach, Al Sr. After two weeks of circling around the real story, buried somewhere beneath coaching philosophies and youth sports observations, I tried something that felt almost like cheating. I opened Claude and dumped everything onto the page. Not polished prose, just raw material: *- Al Sr. starts as distant dad at practice

His son Al gets cut from competitive team, doesn’t make it
Al Sr. becomes assistant coach to help his kid understand team play
Penalty shootout at tournament, Al misses, dad comforts him
Something about how teaching your own child is different
Message: being part of something bigger makes everything you do matter more* Beneath this scattered list, I added my writing preferences, the principles I’d learned from years of trying to craft stories that felt authentic rather than manufactured: Show the scene where Al Sr. kneels beside his crying son after the missed penalty. Don’t tell me he was a good father, show me his hand on his son’s shoulder. Use specific details, the piercing whistle, the way the ball rolled away. Start with a moment of action. Avoid the extended metaphors about weaving tapestries or cooking ingredients. No tricolons unless they emerge naturally. End with one clear image, not multiple conclusions. What came back wasn’t perfect, but it was remarkable. The story structure was there, the emotional beats landed, and most importantly, it sounded like me. Not some generic sports writer, not an AI trying to be inspiring, but me telling a story I actually cared about. Two hours of revision later, I had “The Sideline Transformer,” a piece that friends still mention months after reading it.

The Pattern That Emerged

That success wasn’t a fluke. Over the next few months, I discovered a creative process that felt like the best kind of collaboration, one where technology amplified rather than replaced human insight. The method became my new routine: I’d sit with my morning coffee and scribble notes about whatever memory or observation had been circling my mind. Not sentences, just fragments: Vietnamese parents wanting bilingual roadmaps for their kids. The moment I realized IterLight needed to be a compass, not a super app. That conversation at dinner that started everything. Or: Trading floor mistake, extra zero in the order. Senior trader’s hand on my shoulder. “Just breathe.” How that applies to everything now. These weren’t outlines in any traditional sense. They were emotional archaeology, digging up the moments that mattered and identifying the thread connecting them to something larger. Then came the crucial part: defining my voice. Not just “write well,” but specific instructions born from years of reading my own work and cringing at the artificial parts: Focus on sensory details, the whiteness of a grocery store receipt, the delirium of sleepless nights. Use short, clear sentences mixed with longer, flowing ones. Start scenes in the middle of action. When you find yourself writing “I learned that the true meaning of X is not only Y, it’s also Z,” stop and rewrite. End with a single image that contains the entire emotional weight of the piece.

The Creative Dance

What happens next still feels like magic, even after dozens of iterations. I feed these scattered thoughts and stylistic guidelines to Claude, and what emerges is a first draft that captures not just the facts of my experience, but the feeling of it. The AI doesn’t write my stories, it translates my memories into prose. When I read that first draft of the Uncle Ethan piece, I could see his weathered hands pointing to the mark on the table, hear his chuckle, feel my own embarrassment transforming into understanding. The technology had found the narrative spine I’d been searching for, the through-line that connected a simple dinner conversation to deeper truths about priorities and permanence. Sometimes the first draft nails it completely. Other times, I’ll spot a section that feels too polished, too clean, and I’ll prompt for revision: This paragraph about building the business feels generic. Make it more specific to Uncle Ethan, include his daughter helping with taxes, show rather than tell his pride. The revision process became a conversation. I’d identify moments that didn’t ring true, phrases that sounded like they came from a writing manual rather than lived experience, and the AI would adjust accordingly. Not blindly, but with an understanding of the voice we were crafting together.

The Vietnamese Experiment

The real test came when I decided to try this process in Vietnamese, writing about my thirty-year relationship with German football for a local audience. This wasn’t just translation, it was cultural adaptation, requiring different metaphors, different emotional reference points, different ways of expressing the peculiar heartbreak of loving a team that rarely rewards such devotion. I provided the same kind of raw material: Five-year-old watching Germany lose to Denmark in 1992. Thomas Häßler’s tiny frame. Peter Schmeichel’s giant hands. The seed of a lifetime obsession. Different losses over the years, Balakov in ’94, Conceição in 2000. Then 2014, the 7–1 against Brazil, Mario Götze’s winner. Still wearing Müller jersey because he plays football with his head, not his feet. But the cultural instructions were different: Write for Vietnamese readers who understand football passion but maybe not German football specifically. Use Vietnamese expressions for heartbreak and devotion. Reference the concept of “định mệnh” (destiny) that Vietnamese readers will connect with. Keep the German names and moments but make the emotional journey universal. The resulting piece, “Định Mệnh Ba Màu,” felt like authentic Vietnamese sports writing while remaining deeply personal. Friends who read it said it captured something essential about what it means to love something that consistently breaks your heart, a feeling that transcends language and culture. Curious about the authenticity of this process, I began running my finished pieces through various AI detection tools. The results surprised even me: GPT-4, Claude, and other major AI models consistently rated my work as having only a 5–20% likelihood of being AI-assisted. One colleague, a writing professor who’s become obsessed with identifying AI-generated student essays, read three of my pieces and declared them “unmistakably human” before I revealed my process. The irony wasn’t lost on me, AI helping me write stories so authentically human that AI itself couldn’t detect its own involvement.

What This Changes About Everything

This process has compressed what used to take weeks into hours. Not because the AI writes faster, but because it eliminates the paralysis of the blank page. When I know I can dump my scattered thoughts and stylistic preferences into a system that will give me a coherent first draft, I spend more time thinking about the story itself rather than worrying about how to tell it. The quality hasn’t suffered, it’s improved. Having a writing partner that never gets tired, never suggests clichéd metaphors about tapestries and symphonies, and never defaults to formulaic endings has made my work sharper. The AI pushes me to be more specific in my details, more intentional in my structure, more honest in my emotional excavation. But here’s what hasn’t changed: the stories are still mine. The memories, the insights, the particular way I see connections between coaching youth soccer and building startups, between trading floor mistakes and parenting philosophy, between German football heartbreak and Vietnamese family dynamics, all of that comes from three decades of living and paying attention.

The Collaborative Future

My friends in the writing community often ask if I’m worried about AI replacing human creativity. After months of this process, the question feels backwards. The technology isn’t replacing anything, it’s revealing what was already there. Every story starts with a human being noticing something worth sharing. The soccer coach who transforms his son’s understanding of teamwork. The uncle whose scarred dining table teaches lessons about what really matters. The parent who discovers their toddler’s questions contain genuine scientific insight. AI can help shape those observations into compelling prose, but it can’t manufacture the observations themselves. It can suggest better ways to structure a narrative, but it can’t invent the narrative. It can polish language and improve clarity, but it can’t inject meaning where none exists. When I sit down to write now, I’m not fighting with technology or surrendering to it. I’m collaborating with it. The AI brings technical precision and structural insight. I bring lived experience and emotional truth. Together, we create something neither could achieve alone. The stories that emerge from this partnership sound unmistakably like my voice because they are my voice, amplified and clarified through a process that eliminates the mechanical parts of writing while preserving everything essentially human about it.

The New Creative Process

Last week, I finished a piece about my morning bike rides with my children and how they let me into their universes. The story came together in an afternoon, from scattered observations about “Baby Sharks” to a little girl’s obsession with her bike helmet, to a complete narrative about shared activities and how I get to hear my kids’ voices amidst the cacophony of the summer mornings. But the speed wasn’t the point. The point was that I could focus entirely on the emotional truth of the experience rather than wrestling with transitions and paragraph structure. The AI handled the craft so I could concentrate on the art. This is how we should embrace AI, not as a replacement for human creativity but as a tool that frees us to be more creative. The technology works best when it’s serving a human vision, when it’s amplifying something real rather than generating something artificial. The future of writing isn’t human versus machine. It’s human with machines, collaborating to tell better stories, faster and with more precision than either could manage alone. I still have that blank Google Doc from three weeks ago, the one where I struggled to write about Uncle Ethan’s table. But now it’s filled with a story about wisdom and imperfection, about choosing people over things, about the beauty of surfaces that show their history rather than hiding it. The story was always there, waiting in my memory of that weekend. I just needed the right partner to help me find it.