Walking With Your Story

I am a renegade. Why? Because I want AI to help me write better. I do not want AI to write for me. I realize a lot of people use AI to just “generate this.” I know, I see it in my company, and emails, and on the internet all the time. There is now a legion of perfectly articulate, polite, emotionally intelligent people telling me I can’t have what I want and I should feel (somewhat) bad for asking for it. Or conversely, I get thousands and thousands of words to explain to me why I want to buy this lovely service I’ll never need.

Yes, I am a cynic. But I also love to write in hand made journals with fountain pens. And when I sit down to my computer, I can select from an array of mechanical keyboards perfectly tuned for sound and satisfaction when typing. Some are delightfully silent and springy, like the sound of a puppy padding across a carpet, or they make a deep thock-thock-thock with a marbly creamy goodness of nails strumming on a stone countertop.

I am a renegade because I love to write.

But that does not mean I do not use AI. What it does mean is that I rarely ask Claude or ChatGPT to write for me. Instead, I use them to help me write better.

“So, what’s the problem?” You might ask. The problem, in a word, is “Process.”

Every writing tool I use treats AI as some kind of bolt on, yet even that does not capture the level of frustration I experience working with conventional tools to improve my writing. Most editors and most documents feel like they are tuned for document level editing, not creative process coaching. The AI either generates the entire document for you, or acts like spell check on steroids.

This meant I would sit down with a tool (my favorite is Obsidian), write a draft and drag the document to Claude¹. Claude would then proceed to proofread and review my document. This is when the trouble set in. Now what? Claude would give me back a version of the document and I would… overwrite the last version? Or make a new version? Either way, I found myself becoming what I call the copy-paste-monkey. No matter how careful I am, if I make changes to the document, I introduce new mistakes with each draft. Claude wants me to correct those (rightfully so) and so the round of copy-paste continues. Before you know it, I have a mess of documents in my Obsidian vault. By the time I’m ready to publish the article, I’ve spent more time wrangling documents than writing.

I think of this as my writing to wrangling ratio. When I spend more time wrangling than writing, I get frustrated and sad. And with the traditional process I can spend three or four times as much time wrangling as writing². It kind of sucks.

Now I can hear you say, “why don’t you just use something like Visual Studio Code?” It’s very techy, and AI can work right alongside you. I could also use Claude Cowork, which sort of works by modifying the files directly in my vault. Except, I do a lot of writing on my phone. That’s why I like using Obsidian, because it runs on Windows, my phone, iPad, my Android tablet. It runs just about everywhere. I am not limited to my work machine in my office with its lovely big monitor. And so do most of the AI apps. They too are everywhere. However, they do not play together nicely everywhere.

I want my writing experience to be seamless. But who am I to want such a thing?

If it was not 2026, and Anthropic had not released Fable³ a few months ago, I would probably do what I had always done: Suffer. You know, just put up with it. After all, who can afford to develop their own software?

What if I Could Afford to Develop My Own Editor?

But it is 2026, and I have access to Fable. What if I created the editor I really wanted? And not some tool that was just the old way with AI bolted on, but a tool built around the way I most enjoy working? What would that be?

What if I could have a tool with:

• Native markdown support like Obsidian.
• Flexible outline support like Bike App
• Sync / save across all devices everywhere like Simplenote.

But it could add something none of these editors really have? What if it had an MCP⁴ which allowed Claude to act like a Cowriter.

Oh, and it would need to have some real quality of life features like the ability to spit out markdown for blogs like Ghost, Micro.blog, Astro, and of course I would want it to support Obsidian YAML as well.

What would that look like?

An Everywhere Markdown Editor for Cowriting

Welcome to FuzzDog Edit⁵. (see: https://fuzzdog.md). As far as I am aware, it’s the first Everywhere Markdown Cowriting Editor. But it’s not the editor itself that makes this such a powerful tool, it is the workflow it enables. Here’s one thing I learned when I really started to study story writing.

I rarely think of story elements in the order people read them. My brain is like most brains: highly associative. That means I tend to recall things out of order. Let me give you an example.

If I wanted to tell you my EO Story⁶, I built that story by remembering my reason for joining first, but that’s the end of the story. There was a time when I learned that reason. This is the pivotal moment (second to last), and then I can recall when I didn’t know why I would join EO. This is the beginning. Once I know the beginning and the end, I can fill in the middle. This means I “recover” my story like this:

End → Pivot → Beginning → Middle

But the way I want to write that story is:

Beginning → Middle → Pivot → End

Because FuzzDog Edit is connected to the AI via MCP and we have built-in version control, I can use a completely new workflow, one where it is easy to recall a story naturally and organically, creating drafts, and then when I have all of the content in one place, I can revise the document into a coherent story.

It turns out, the AI can even help, by giving me templates, structure, and prompts to help me fill in the gaps. It’s not writing the story for me, but it is helping me discover and share my ideas.

But you’re probably wondering, “How does that work?”

Let me tell you. I call it Story Walking.

Story Walking

Because FuzzDog supports multiple simultaneous editors, version control, and live AI connection, here is how I use it. You do not have to follow all of these steps (I know I don’t) but it gives you a sense of what is possible. The process follows these seven steps:

1. Talk it out ← exploration
2. Pick the Shape
3. Build an outline
4. Fill the Gaps (Writing time!) ← expansion
5. Proofread and Review, Continuously ← find focus
6. Take off the Training Wheels ← polish and revise
7. Finish for Publication ← expression

These seven steps give me the ability to explore my story, fill in the missing pieces, then find the focus and revise and polish with minimal format wrangling and maximum focus on writing and expressing myself. Here’s how each step works in practice.

1. Talk it out

This is my favorite part. Every article starts with a conversation. I sit down and talk to Claude about what I want to say. It is organic, it is messy, it is fun, but one thing it is not, is linear. It feels like a chat with a friend over coffee and that’s actually the point because Claude remembers way more of what we said than I do, and can help put it back in the right order.

For the rest of this post I am going to use the analogy of building a house from the ground up. In this first part, we are talking with the architect. What kind of home do we want to build? Here is where we first discover what we want.

On a practical matter, the order we first recall a memory in is almost never the order a reader needs to receive it. Trying to only recall things in the order they need to be written feels like a nightmare to me. Instead of creating with confidence, I end up frozen, self-editing and full of doubt.

But when I start by talking with Claude, it feels like fun.

2. Pick the Shape

There is a variety of familiar shapes to most stories. I have spent the last year studying favorite authors to learn how they share their stories. Some are great at the personal revelation (Matthew Dicks for example). Others are great at using a narrative to illustrate an idea (which I call Idea in Action, see Charles Duhigg, or James Clear for these). And others still use a variation of narrative journalism I call the Modified Wolfe technique where they show you the lesson they want you to learn through someone else’s eyes as they are learning it. There are more… many more formats, but these are just a few.

Picking the story frame is about finding the right floor plan for the home we want to build. Do we need a big garage? Room for a nursery? Or do we want an indoor gymnasium? Do we want a private, secluded getaway, or are we talking about a house to entertain family and friends? Just like homes have common shapes, so do stories.

Together Claude and I have created templates for each type. So when we talk through a story, the next logical step is to pick the structure that feels like the best fit.

3. Build the Outline

Once we know what we want to say, and how we want to say it, in my mind this is where the real magic happens because Claude can take our discussion and the right template and map them together.

The analogy here from building a home is putting up the frame of the house. You can see through the walls, but you get a sense of the rooms and where they belong.

My long rambling exploratory conversation with Claude gets mapped into a nice, clean outline thanks to the template after Claude creates a new document in FuzzDog Edit.

Of course there are always gaps. Parts we didn’t talk about. Maybe I don’t have a hook yet. Or perhaps I haven’t identified the nut graf⁷, but Claude can give me prompts for each story element of the outline.

I am now ready to move from conversation to writing.

4. Fill the gaps

This is where I start to write. Now I can see the shape of the whole thing. Instead of staring at a big blank screen I see the outline, like the skeletal framing of a house, and I can have confidence my writing will result in a story.

Claude put up the frame and handed the work back to me to sheetrock the walls. The rooms quickly take shape.

I never thought I would like working with an outline this much, but this makes it feel like I am revising a work in progress, not starting from scratch. And that I love. I don’t feel the same pressure I feel when starting from a tabula rasa⁸.

5. Proofread and review, continuously

Now the proofread part is really a loop. I list it here as a single step, but the entire time I am working on step four, I am also going back and forth with the AI on this step.

I write a little, then I ask for feedback.

Then I write a little more, and ask for feedback.

This process makes actually revising and improving the work so much easier, but it also holds a very cool advantage.

Claude and I focus on just the part of the document that I am working on. We don’t have to deal with the whole document, we can move from section to section. This allows us to focus, which I love.

6. Take off the training wheels

Once we (me and Claude) get each section filled in, the headings have done their job, and it’s time to remove them. We don’t need to label the parts of the blog post, that was for me, the writer. In a traditional editor, pulling out an outline level or header feels like major surgery. But not with FuzzDog. Each row in a document is its own thing. It is easily moved or removed. So we can go from highly structured to flat document in a few keystrokes.

The closest analogy I can think of here is when the builders take down the scaffolding they used and all that is left is the house itself. The support structures they put in place to hold things together while building are now gone, and all that is left is the final product, ready for polish.

7. Finish for Publication

By the time I get here, we have gone from exploration and expansion to focus and now finishing polish. It’s time to put the shine on the piece. Together Claude and I knit the pieces of the post together until it feels cohesive and whole. This is like a builder taking care of a punchlist.

We are ready to publish.

Why I Built FuzzDog

I started creating FuzzDog because I wanted a tool that let me work with Claude the way I wanted, spending more time writing and less time wrangling. As I worked with it, the truly collaborative cowriting aspect of working with Claude came to light.

But not only did I use Claude to develop FuzzDog Edit, we used FuzzDog Edit to figure out and document how to make FuzzDog Edit. In short, I started by eating my own dog food. I used the tool to create blog posts, and relentlessly refined and tuned the applications as we proceeded.

It started as a web application. Then became a desktop application, then I built an Android app for my Boox Palma, and finally I bit the bullet and became an Apple Developer and installed the iOS version on my phone. To reach for the obvious pun⁹, I ate my own dog food, because if I’m not willing to use it, why should you?

And that is why this article started on my iPhone.

What FuzzDog Edit Is

FuzzDog Edit is a markdown editor built from the ground up to work with AI as a companion, not to have AI do the work for you. Native on macOS, iOS, and Android today, Windows a compile away, Linux waiting for someone who actually needs it. Most tools that bolted on an AI button built an answer-bot: hand it a prompt, get back a draft, learn nothing about how you got there. That’s a surrogate, not a coach, and it makes you worse at the thing you were trying to get better at, not stronger.

A companion is different. It’s a reader who can get all the way inside a single paragraph’s stakes in seconds, no ramp-up, no re-explaining the story so far, and who argues with you about what to cut instead of just handing you a rewrite. Pair that with edits that land in the same live rows instead of a separate copy, and revision stops being a hand-off between two documents. It becomes a conversation, in place, about what a piece actually needs and what it can afford to lose. That’s what cowriting means here: not a feature name for “has an AI,” a description of who’s actually driving.

Try It

Hey, this is not for everyone. If you want AI to write for you, then this might not be the tool for you. But if you want to focus on writing with AI, using the power of AI as a coach so you can become a better teller of your own stories, then I invite you to give FuzzDog Edit a try. It was written by a guy trying to become a better storyteller, and I am happy to share it with my kindred spirits. If you want to give it a try, reach out and let me know. I’ll send you the link to try it out on the web. You can even set up a sync account, connect the MCP, and give it a spin.

It’s different, and I hope you find it fun to use, but sincerely, all that matters is if it helps liberate your stories. Give it a try, it worked for me. Maybe it will work for you.

Footnotes