Excellence Knows No Age

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We watched Down Periscope tonight. I’ve loved that movie for thirty years and it holds up — silly and sweet at the same time, which is harder to do than it looks.

I quote it more than I should. There’s a scene early on where the captain is meeting his crew, gets a look at his new executive officer, and says something about him being a little young for the job.

Rob Schneider straightens up and says: excellence knows no age, sir.

It’s a joke. It’s also true, and I’ve thought about it more than a comedy line probably deserves.

My son is in the middle of a painting challenge right now — a series of watercolors, a different theme each time.

He showed me the collection tonight. Spread out, all of them together.

They’re good. Not good-for-his-age good. Good.

I’ve never had any interest in painting, but I’ve always drawn. I still doodle while I think — always have, half the margins of my life are covered in it. And what I put on a page is not in the same category as what he puts on one. He draws it, then he paints it, and it’s finished, and I’m looking at it.

I’m thirty years older than him and I’m not close.

Here’s the thing I noticed about myself tonight, standing there looking at his work.

Nothing in me wanted to compete with it. Not a flicker. I was just proud of him and glad to be looking at it.

And I compete with everything. I keep score on myself constantly — I’m not as far along as I should be, I haven’t had the success I wanted, I still haven’t found the groove in half of what I’m doing. Writing included. I run that tally in the background most days.

But not with him. I don’t grade myself against my son and I never have.

Which makes me wonder who I think I’m grading myself against the rest of the time.

The honest answer about the writing is that I haven’t been at it long. Not seriously, not the way I’ve been at it this year. I’m early. Early looks like failure if you compare it to someone who isn’t.

He’s early too. He’s just been early at the right thing for longer, and he practices, and it shows.

He put them all back in order when he was done showing me.

Ok, So Now What?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a papasan chair in that upstairs office. I’d hauled it up there myself.

Toward the end I’d go in, shut the door, turn the lights off, and sit in it. Not praying. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in the dark in the middle of a workday, numb, in a building full of people who had no idea I was up there.

What I remember turning over in that chair wasn’t how do I fix this. It was where do I go from here.

I found out over the next eighteen months, and the answer was: five jobs.

I had a sociology degree I couldn’t do anything with. My wife worked while I applied for things and didn’t get them, and after a couple of months of that I put on the best clothes I owned and talked my way into selling art at the Thomas Kinkade gallery in the mall.

I knew nothing about selling. I knew nothing about Kinkade. The paintings were pretty.

The model was this: a new piece would come out, and we’d work a list of everyone who’d bought before. I still remember most of the script. Hi, my name’s David, I’m with the Thomas Kinkade Gallery — we know you’re one of our loyal customers and we wanted to say thank you. Tom’s got a new piece in. Based on what you’ve bought before I really think this one’s a fit. Can I get you to come down and see it?

At twenty-four that felt like the stupidest thing I had ever been asked to do. I didn’t have the money to buy anything in that store and I was supposed to stand there talking about the work like an expert who loved it.

I never made a single call. Not one, the whole time I was there. I sold a few pieces to people who walked in the door, and the rest of the time I wrote poetry in the back.

I lasted under two months.

Pizza Hut next. Assistant manager, about six months.

They made an enormous deal about management trainees putting in forty-five hours a week — and then didn’t always schedule forty-five hours, and told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t hit it anyway.

There was also a thing at closing where you’d estimate how long your final tasks would take, clock out with that estimate, and then stay and finish. One night I clocked out about thirty minutes long and the district manager came by and I wasn’t there.

He accused me of cooking the books and fired me the next day.

That one was on me. I put the number in and I left before the number said I could. I wanted to go home; it was midnight. But it was my hand on the keypad.

Then a month spraying lawns in Oklahoma City. Weed killer and pre-emergent. That was the shortest one, and it ended for reasons I’ll leave alone.

Then February 2004. My mother had been quietly watching for anything I could do, and a friend of hers worked at an insurance adjustment firm that needed an office manager. That’s the job I’ve written about before — the one where the owner eventually offered me a dime.

Youth pastor to art salesman to Pizza Hut to lawn spray to office manager. Eighteen months.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I sat down and started writing a book called Okay, So Now What?

I still have the opening. It’s about being sold a lie — a degree that was supposed to guarantee a career and didn’t. And the diagnosis in it is correct, which is the part that gets me. Twenty-four years old and I wrote: I never sat down and planned out what I was going to do. I took the blame cleanly. I didn’t blame the university, I said the choice was mine.

Then I wrote this: This book is not as much for you as it is for those of you out there who are just like I was, clueless.

I was unemployed. I had no plan. I’d been fired twice in a year. And I sat down to teach other people how to plan their lives.

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until much later.

I’m forty-seven now. I could deliver that Kinkade script today with a completely straight face, because now I know what it’s for. It’s not a lie. It’s an invitation to a person who already likes the work, offering them a thing they’d want to know about. Every business that’s ever sold anything does some version of it, and the ones who do it well are doing a service.

Nobody ever told me that. Nobody said here’s why we call, here’s what it does, here’s the person on the other end and what they get out of it. I was handed the script and pointed at the phone, and because I couldn’t see the why, I decided it was beneath me and wrote poetry in the back of a store I was failing out of.

That’s the pattern. Not laziness. I’d have run through a wall for someone who explained the wall. I was headstrong and certain and completely willing to work — and utterly unable to move on anything until I understood what it was actually accomplishing.

Nobody came alongside me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not anywhere in that stretch.

The kid in the papasan chair should have been keeping a journal. He wrote a manual instead.

I’ve spent this year trying to do the work rather than theorize about it — documenting what I’m going through instead of teaching from the far side of it. It took me until my forties to work that out. Turns out I got the posture wrong the first time I ever sat down to write something for other people, and then didn’t notice for twenty-three years.

I could still be saying the sentence I was saying at twenty-four. That if somebody would just lay it out in a way I could act on, I’d go and do it.

Nobody is coming to lay it out. I make the plan or there isn’t one.

I am not twenty-four anymore. There are times I have to remind myself not to think like he did.

Three Hundred Dollars

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The summer after my freshman year I called my grandmother from a pay phone and asked her for three hundred dollars.

I was already on the mission trip when I made the call. The arrangement had been seven or eight hundred for the summer, some of it up front — except none of it came up front. It all came at the end. I could not make the leaders understand that college students still have bills that show up monthly whether you’re at camp or not.

Mine were a credit card minimum payment and a Sprint phone card, and the phone card was because I kept calling a girl in Oklahoma City from that camp. She’s been my wife for twenty-seven years.

I called my mother first to ask whether Grandma would even consider it. She said, for you, I think she probably would.

So I called Duncan.

She got quiet. Not upset — the kind of quiet where somebody is taking in what you’ve just asked and has decided not to react until they’ve finished thinking about it. Then she said, that’s some money.

She was right. She was a nurse who’d raised four daughters, married to an oil man, and they had means. She’d never once spent like it.

She didn’t mail it. I had to come get it.

So I told my leaders I had bills to pay and drove ninety minutes from Davis to Duncan, and she put cash in my hand at the house she’d lived in my entire life.

I told her I’d pay her back at the end of the summer. I told her she had my word.

The check came in August. I was in Edmond by then.

I drove back down to Duncan — a weekend, knowing me. I called first. I’ve never been a man who shows up unannounced.

I put the bills in her hand and told her thank you.

She said thank you too. And she got a look on her face I have never been able to name properly — pleased and proud and satisfied, all of it at once, all at the same time.

Grandpa was out mowing, I think. I stayed long enough for pie or brownies or cake, whatever she had, and visited a while, and drove back to the city.

Thirteen years later she was dying at home, in that same house.

A few weeks out, I arranged to come spend a morning with her. She sat in her sitting room with her legs kicked out and her pain medication beside her, and we talked for a good while. Two of my aunts were there. I made breakfast for all of us, and I got to show off a little, and I told her about my family — my son was five that year. He’s eighteen now.

At some point my aunts stepped out and it was just the two of us.

I told her I loved her and that I was thankful for her. I read her a letter I’d written for her.

And she watched me the whole time with that same look. The one from the money.

That was the last time I saw her.

I’ll be forty-eight before long, and I still miss my grandma and being looked at that way. She loved me. I love her.

She never said a word about the three hundred dollars.

I Knew The Guy

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In my twenties I worked with a man who got fired over something he said. I’ll leave it there — it was his to carry and it isn’t mine to publish. Today it would be called an HR violation.

We both worked for the owner of the company. A client told the owner the man was careless and unkind, and that put the owner in a spot. Ultimately it cost the man his job, because the alternative was losing the client.

The owner started to adopt the client’s story. If that version was all I’d had, I’d have believed every word.

But I knew him. He was one of the sincerest people in that office and he was kind in ways nobody was keeping track of. He’d also grown up somewhere that hadn’t taught him where the lines were in a place like that one, and he crossed one, and it cost him his job.

I never argued that he shouldn’t have been fired. The mistake was real. What I couldn’t do was accept that the mistake was the man, because I had information the story didn’t contain.

Almost nobody else in that building did.

That’s the part that stayed with me. Not that the man had done wrong. That it got repeated as if it were all he was. The client, the owner, the office.

They weren’t being cruel. They had one account, from one person, delivered with authority, and no reason on earth to go looking for a second. Five people repeating it wasn’t five sources. It was one source with five mouths. From inside, that feels exactly like confirmation.

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed since, and it’s worse than plain repetition.

You’ve probably heard that “blood is thicker than water” is a butchered version of an older line — the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb — meaning the bonds you choose beat the family you were born into. Great story. Sounds like a hidden truth somebody’s been keeping from you.

It appears to be invented. The covenant version traces to a couple of authors in the nineties and two-thousands, neither of whom cited a source, and it doesn’t turn up in older texts at all. The actual proverb has always meant what you’d expect: family runs deep.

So the correction is the distortion, and the people passing it around are certain they’re the ones who saw through something.

That’s the sharper trap. It isn’t repeating what everybody says. It’s repeating the thing that let you feel like you’d stopped doing that.

I carried a misquoted Bible verse about money for most of my adult life and never once went and looked at it. When I finally did, one word was missing and it changed the whole meaning. I’d been wrestling with a sentence that was never the sentence.

Decades. Never checked. And I’d have told you I was a careful person.

There’s a live version of this running right now and it comes in a matched pair.

One crowd is selling seven prompts that will change your business. I use these tools every day and I read the prompts — they’re vague, overgeneralized, and will get you back something that sounds intelligent and says nothing. That’s the grift.

The other crowd has decided the whole thing is a bubble and none of it is real, and they roll their eyes and feel superior about it.

Both are handing you a conclusion you didn’t build. One says it’s magic, one says it’s nothing, and neither has any interest in you going to look. If you looked, you wouldn’t need either of them.

I still think about the guy sometimes.

There are people who worked in that building for years who never knew anything about him except the worst afternoon of his life, told by somebody else, and there was nothing in it that was untrue.

It just wasn’t him.

What I Didn’t Say

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In January of this year I used an AI tool to help me edit my novel. The chapter that came back wasn’t mine.

Same characters, different scene. Events I hadn’t written, in a book I’d already spent a hundred and five thousand words on. I got about halfway down the page before I stopped and said out loud, what the heck is this?

I’d asked for everything I could think of. Check the voice for consistency. Tell me if I’ve dropped a plot thread. Fix the grammar, look at the pacing. Everything you’d want from an editor, and I thought I could name all of it.

What I never said was don’t change the story.

I asked it why afterward. It told me my instructions left room and it had filled the room. Which is a fair description of what happened — I’d written a job posting with no scope, and something with no other context to work from took the widest reasonable reading of it.

I’ve known for a while that the gap was mine. What took longer was working out why it was there.

I’ve never worked with an editor.

Not once. Everything I’ve ever written I’ve edited myself, the long way, reading until my eyes slid off the page. So when I finally handed a chapter to something outside my own head, I was specifying a job I had never in my life watched anyone do.

I knew editing existed. I could name the tasks — anybody who’s read a book about writing can name the tasks. What I couldn’t name was the line. Where this sentence is weak ends and this scene should be different begins.

That line isn’t in any book about craft. It’s the kind of thing you absorb sitting across a desk from somebody in your first year, and after that nobody says it out loud again, because everyone in the room already knows it.

So I listed the parts I could see and left silent every part I’d never had to think about, which turned out to be all the boundaries.

You can’t put a fence around a field you’ve never stood in.

What I built afterward was a standard set of instructions I’ve used on every chapter since. Read for these things. Tell me what you find before you touch anything. Suggestions first, not revisions.

And the one that actually mattered: when you do revise, revise my words — I want it to still be materially mine when it comes back.

I’d never have thought to write that sentence if I’d worked with an editor even once. It would have been assumed. It’s assumed by every writer and every editor who has ever sat in a room together, and I had to lose a chapter to arrive at it from scratch.

The chapters started coming back the way I’d wanted them the first time. My sentences, tightened. My scene, still mine.

Twenty years of writing and I’d never once had to define what an editor does, because I’d always been both people. The handoff happened somewhere inside my own head, and nothing that happens in there ever needs saying.

So the instructions weren’t really for the machine.

They were the first honest description I’ve ever written of a job I’ve been doing to myself, alone, since I was in my twenties.