Writing with Voice, Memory, and AI

Why Using Every Tool Available Isn't Cheating—It's Craft

At 73, I'm writing a memoir trilogy about events that happened over fifty years ago. The first book, "Surfing the Interstates," chronicles my 1973 hitchhiking odyssey across America. I want to be transparent about how I'm creating this work because the way I'm using AI is the whole point—it's a new form of collaboration, not substitution.

Ken Kesey once said that writing Sometimes a Great Notion in his twenties was like a two year obsessionthat consumed him entirely. He couldn't have written it later in life—it simply required too much raw energy. He was right. At my age, that level of intensity isn't just unavailable—it would probably kill me. But the stories still need telling. So I've developed a different approach.

The Architecture of Memory

I'm an architect of my own past. Like any architect, I insist on mapping out the structure before I build. Parts, chapters, beats—all planned in advance. Starting in medias res was a deliberate choice. Then I build sequentially, chapter by chapter from the beginning, like laying bricks.

My process begins in my tall-boy La-Z-Boy recliner, iPad Pro suspended on a desk arm so it floats over my lap, leaving my hands free. I started with my 1973 "record"—a journal I kept during the journey with daily expenses, experiences, poetry, musings. These contemporary notes are the foundation.

I'd been struggling with this material for two years before discovering Anthropic’s LLM called Claude Opus 4.1. That journal had sat in my possession for fifty years—half a century of dust and forgetting—before the anniversary triggered something. I even published the raw text on a previous Substack, but it felt incomplete, undeveloped, unexplored. Just historical fragments without connective tissue. Then Claude Opus 4.1 arrived, and suddenly I could attack what had felt like a monumental, impossible task. This tool helped lift me out of the mire—fifty years of accumulated forgetfulness, my own blindness to patterns in my life, the sheer weight of trying to novelise something so distant yet so formative. Two years of struggling became two months of breakthrough.

From that chair, or sometimes while taking my morning walk, I dictate voice memos—one chunk at a time. These aren't polished narratives but raw memories, often contradictory, frequently tangential. I'll record fifteen minutes about the smell of the Rockies at morning, then veer into a memory of my grandmother's kitchen, then suddenly remember a crucial detail about a driver who picked me up outside Cheyenne.

These voice memos pass through Claude Opus 4.1 for clarity and consistency, often with some back and forth where I’m able to pursue further memories and realizations, then get saved into Scrivener. It's exactly like building a house—foundation, framing, walls, finishing work.

The Two-Voice Innovation

I developed a technique I'm particularly proud of—two distinct narrative voices for different temporal states:

Present-tense sections (the 1973 journey): Short. Fragmented. Verb-forward. Like screenplay action lines. "Getting up. Survey the clutter. Secondhand guitar safe in its hard case."

Past-tense sections (memories and flashbacks): Flowing, reflective, traditional narrative prose. "I was eight, trying out my new skis in the yard when something made me turn back toward the house."

This was entirely my innovation—a way to make readers feel the visceral difference between being in the moment and remembering the moment.

The Novelized Memoirist’s Prerogative: Three Fictionalizations

I've stayed true to what actually happened, with three major exceptions that I believe fall within the memoirist's prerogative—what makes this a "novelized memoir":

1. "Sasha Among the Giants": I combined three real elements: meeting a girl at a Healdsburg vineyard party who I immediately fell in love with but never saw again; my solo trip to the redwoods where I ate peyote (old buttons—threw up, didn't really trip); and a screenplay treatment I'd written at UPenn with Rudy Wurlitzer about a woman named Sasha who could talk to trees. These three truths braided into one chapter.

2. Steve Ferry's Compression: I compressed Steve's 30-year arc so his infamous 2017 death-by-cops in Napa happens in 1973 at his rental chicken coop at 5630 Old Redwood Highway. (Google his name—it's all documented. Dispute with neighbor, heavy drinking, history of threats, shots fired, car chase, shot over 100 times by two dozen police.) This compression stays true to his life while illustrating my themes about the war coming home.

3. The Big Bend Detour: Those realizations about getting away, buying yourself—they really happened on the roadside outside Las Cruces. But I'd always wanted to see Big Bend, and it made a more dramatic ending with the fasting, phantom jets, Steve Ferry's ghost, and the guitar theft. Sadly, I did lose that guitar, just years later.

The UFO scene? That's exactly as it happened. I'll never forget those orbs, those lights, the way they moved.

The Writer's Room of One

Think about how films get made. A director doesn't apologize for working with cinematographers, editors, composers. My aunt, Niki de Saint Phalle, built her Tarot Garden in Tuscany using scores of Italian craftsmen. She didn't personally set every piece of mirror or tile. Her vision, their hands. Nobody questions whether it's "really" her art.

With Claude, I have a combination of editor, writer's room, and what I can only describe as an archeologist of meaning. Claude identified patterns invisible to me—themes of inheritance, recurring motifs of windows and barriers, how I kept seeking father figures while fleeing my actual father. These weren't conscious choices. They were buried in those rambling voice memos, waiting to be excavated.

Research Partner and Fact-Checker

The research alone would have buried me. When I mention passing through a town in Wyoming in 1973, Claude helps verify what was actually there. Which highways existed? What was playing on the radio? What did gas cost? Memory lies. I need facts to anchor truth.

Every morning, I sit with yesterday's voice memos, Claude, and Scrivener. We discuss not just what happened, but why it matters. Claude challenges me: "You keep using the word 'disappeared' about yourself—disappeared from home, disappeared into the road, wanted to disappear into the redwoods. But disappearing means never being truly seen. Is that what you wanted?" These aren't Claude's insights replacing mine—they're Claude helping me see what I'm already saying but not yet understanding.

Why This Matters

There's a generation of writers my age sitting on extraordinary stories, convinced they're too old, too tired, too scrambled to tell them. Meanwhile, these stories—about times and places that no longer exist—are dying with us.

The 1973 America I hitchhiked through is gone. Not just changed—erased. The trust between strangers, the assumption of basic goodwill, the ability to disappear with $80, a backpack and an old guitar. If I don't document it, who will?

The Bottom Line

I remain the author. Every memory, every decision about what to include or exclude, every acceptance or rejection of Claude's suggestions—that's me. The dual-voice technique, the structural architecture, the three fictionalizations that serve the deeper truth—all my choices.

But I'm an author working with the most sophisticated editorial assistant ever created. One who never tires, never judges, and has read more than any human ever could.

My memoir is built from my memories, my pain, my journey. Shaped with technological help that allows a 73-year-old man to excavate and arrange half-century-old memories into something coherent, maybe even beautiful.

If that's cheating, then so is every film that uses CGI, every building that uses CAD software, every song that uses Auto-Tune. We can be purists about process, or we can focus on results.

The road is calling, even if it's calling from fifty years ago. And I'll use whatever help I can get to map that journey for readers who will never know that particular America unless someone remembers it for them.

Ship captains used to navigate by stars, then compass, then GPS. I'm navigating fifty years of memory with the tools of my time. And I'm proud of every word.