jessa

Claimed is the result of an experiment in collaborative drafting with AI on a topic I knew. About an hour to read. Free PDF below.

I wanted to experiment with co-writing fiction with an AI, and since I learned how to use Claude Code, Claimed is what came out of it. And I think it will be the first of many.

I’d been writing personal essays/blogs about spiritual abuse for a while. And since I had material to draw from, I gave my blog post archive in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file to Claude (the AI assistant by Anthropic), and we drafted a novella from the archive together. The voice and the decisions are mine and the drafting was collaborative. I’m naming this up front because the experiment was the point, not a footnote. Read more about my process here.

Claimed follows a woman who arrives in a city alone, with two suitcases and a cousin’s address written on a scrap of paper. A coworker invites her to church. She intends only to be polite, but then she ends up staying there for years. The story is about what happens after she stays—the slow work of becoming someone who already knows how to stop her own questions before they finish forming, and the slower work of starting to notice it.

The four books that shaped my understanding of spiritual abuse and inspired me to write about it are all nonfiction: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell; The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse by David Johnson and Jeff VanVonderen; The Sin of Certainty by Peter Enns; and Combating Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan. Claimed is a story rendering of what those books describe from the outside.

If you grew up in church and are still figuring out what was yours and what wasn’t, this is for you. If you’re still inside one, quietly noticing things you can’t yet say out loud, this might be especially for you. If you’re curious about what AI-assisted fiction actually looks like when the source material is personal, this is for you too.

A note before you click: the novella explores spiritual abuse, word-of-faith theology, and the disorientation of leaving a community that shaped your sense of self.

The system had borrowed the language of faith and worn it like a coat, and when I took the coat off the faith was still there underneath. Thinner than I remembered. A little cold. But mine.

If something in it lands, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section. And if you know someone who would appreciate this kind of story, pass it along.