The Rules Behind the Magic

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been building a book about a detective who believes everything has a rational explanation, and I’ve dropped him into a world where magic is real on the first page.

The detective is the Scarecrow. That’s the joke underneath the whole thing — he isn’t an outsider who wanders into Oz skeptical of it. He’s a native. But at the end of the story we all know, the Scarecrow got his brain, and ever since he’s leaned hard into it, becoming the most rigorously logical mind in a land that runs on enchantment. He’s the one figure in Oz actively trying to reason the magic away. His Watson — the one telling the story — is the Tin Man, which feels right, because who better to narrate a tale about the head and the heart than the man who went looking for one of them.

It’s called A Scandal in Emerald, and if that rings a bell, it should. I built it on the bones of A Scandal in Bohemia — the one Sherlock Holmes story where somebody finally out-thinks Holmes. That somebody was Irene Adler, and in my version she’s Dorothy. Not the little girl who wanted to go home. A grown woman who, it turns out, never lost the silver shoes over the desert the way the old books say she did. She kept them. She’s been slipping between Kansas and Oz for years, gathering what she knows, and when she reappears she looks for all the world like the villain of the piece — while she’s quietly trying to save Oz all over again.

So that’s the setup. Here’s the part I actually care about.

When the magic breaks his rules, the Scarecrow does what a mind like his always does: he gets annoyed. He needs an answer. He keeps trying to force the enchantment back into something logical, and when he can’t, it frustrates him to no end. He’s built to reduce the world to explanations, and the world won’t cooperate.

And then he starts to find that the magic has rules.

I don’t have every beat of this worked out yet — I’m still in the outline and the world bible. But the idea driving it is one I believe outside the book entirely. Somebody standing two hundred years ago would look at the world we live in now and call it magic, top to bottom. It isn’t. It’s science finally catching up to what people used to only imagine. Even in Oz, half of what everyone called magic was the Wizard behind a curtain, working the levers. The real work is finding the line: what’s genuinely wondrous, and what only looked like magic until somebody understood how it worked.

Here’s what surprised me about my own detective. Finding the rules doesn’t ruin the magic for him. It makes him love it.

That cuts against the thing everybody assumes — that understanding kills wonder, that the magician who explains the trick has murdered it. But a mind like his doesn’t run on mystery. It runs on curiosity. Take away the puzzle and he goes restless and hollow; he needs something to figure out or the engine turns on itself. So the last thing he wants is for the magic to stay unknowable. He wants to know how it works — and once he does, two things happen at once. He appreciates it more, not less. And he can finally use it, because anything you truly understand becomes something you can put to work.

We’ve got our own magic now. Tools that make the impossible look effortless, that dazzle some people and frighten others. You can stand in front of that and feel small, or you can do what the Scarecrow does and go looking for the rules. Almost everything is learnable, at least far enough to stop being afraid of it. A little reading, a little discernment, and most of the curtain comes down.

That’s the thing I’m really writing about, underneath a mystery in a green city. Not how to escape into a world of magic. How to stretch our minds enough to meet the world we’re actually in — instead of the one we wish we’d been handed.

Hold the Thread

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

If my past self walked in and watched me work now, he’d think I’d lost my mind.

On a normal afternoon I’ve got three or four conversations with AI running at once, each one chewing on a different problem. While they work, I’m answering email, checking back with people I owe an answer, reviewing something else entirely. Then a result comes back on the first window, so I dig into that, set it running again, and swing over to the third. By the end of the day I’ve moved a ridiculous amount of work forward, and at no point did I sit still and do one thing.

The old me would have called that scattered — undisciplined, context-switching myself into a fog. Because my whole picture of focus used to be singular: one task, everything else closed, head down until it was done. If I had a real problem to think through, I had to clear the desk to think at all. Anything that looked like today would have read as chaos to me — and honestly, back then it probably would have been chaos, because I didn’t yet know how to be anything but scattered.

Here’s what actually changed, and it isn’t the switching. I still bounce between things all day. What changed is that I can now hold the problem statement of every open thread at once. I know exactly what each window is trying to solve. I can set one running, work another, and pick the first back up without losing my place, because the place never left my head. That’s the whole difference between pipelining and flailing — not whether you’re jumping around, but whether you still know what each thing is for when you come back to it.

Same behavior. Opposite states. The line between them was never visible from the outside, and I couldn’t see it from the inside either, until I’d lived on both sides of it.

I want to be honest about the trap in this, though, because it’s a real one. “Productive fragmentation” is also exactly what avoidance looks like. Staying busy across six windows is a fantastic way to feel like you’re working while you dodge the one hard thing. So how do I know I’m not just fooling myself with a nicer word for scattered? One test: things are actually finishing. The board is clearing. Tasks are getting closed, not only juggled. If the pudding’s got no proof in it, I’m not pipelining — I’m hiding.

And there’s a harder honesty under that. This way of working isn’t an upgrade you can hand to anyone. It only works if you already know what you’re doing. If you’re organized underneath, the tool lets you run four threads instead of one. If you’re lost underneath, it just lets you be lost in four places at once.

So I’ve stopped believing “focused” and “scattered” describe how a desk looks. They describe whether the person sitting at it knows what they’re trying to do. Some people genuinely need one thing at a time to keep that clear, and there’s not one ounce of shame in it — that was me for most of my life. The only thing that changed is that I finally learned to hold more than one thread without dropping any of them.

The Room That Knew What I Knew

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I found an old Toastmasters competition video of myself the other night. Watching old video of myself is its own small torture — you’re looking at a former version, and you can see everything he doesn’t know yet. It’s like watching a younger sibling do the thing. But I’ll say it plainly: it was a good speech. I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now.

The speech was about my time writing for the college paper. I’d been assigned to cover a speaker one night, and I had the audacity to bring a date and cut out early, before the man even took the stage. The next day I told my professor there wasn’t a story there. She looked at me like I was an idiot — which I was — because the man I hadn’t stayed to hear was a rescue worker from the Oklahoma City bombing. So I went and found him. I learned his story. And somewhere in there I realized he was telling a very good story with his life, and I wasn’t telling much of one at all.

I knew that speech was special because I could feel the room respond when I gave it. And still I ran it, over and over, in front of people who knew the material as well as I did.

That’s the part that seems strange from the outside. I wasn’t in that room to learn what makes a speech work. I could have recited the criteria — vocal variety, gesture, stage use, the scoring rubric, all of it. Everyone in that room could have. And that’s exactly why it worked. There’s a wide gap between knowing the academics of a thing and putting them into practice while you’re standing up there, and nobody can see across that gap from the inside.

Because here’s what a blind spot actually is. It isn’t ignorance. It’s what happens when you’ve rehearsed something so many times it’s dropped into muscle memory — and the very repetition that makes it effortless is what makes the flaw invisible. You’ve done it a hundred times. It feels right. It has to be right. Then somebody who’s watched a thousand speeches tells you you’re repeating a word, or your gesture is overplayed and pulling attention off the line it’s supposed to carry, and you realize you’ve been doing it every single run and you never once saw it. The room wasn’t teaching me anything I didn’t know. The room was seeing me.

I made the district finals with that speech. I don’t believe I get there without those people — not without the corrections, not without the energy they gave me, not without being sanded down enough times to be genuinely polished instead of merely talented. I’ve competed since. I’ve never gotten that far again, and I know exactly why: I’ve never worked that hard again.

But the room isn’t magic, and I want to be honest about that, because I’ve been on the other end of it too. A different competition, a loss I didn’t think I deserved, and a man I’d never met walked up as I came off the stage and asked if he could give me feedback. I wanted to punch him. Not because he was wrong — I don’t even remember if he was wrong. Because he cared more about the method than about me. He wanted to stand on his knowledge for a second. That’s not sharpening. That’s the difference between a supportive community and a religion, and the feedback is identical in both. What changes is whether the person is for you.

And there’s one more thing, which I only saw watching that old video back.

The speech made it about me. I was so busy connecting his story to my own that I never finished it through his eyes — and it’s less powerful for it. It’s a smaller speech than it should have been, and the man deserved better than to be the setup for my lesson.

Nobody in that room ever told me. They couldn’t. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because I gave them a speech I’d already decided was mine, and they helped me deliver the speech I brought them. The room can only sharpen the blade you hand it.

When Nothing Comes

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 8

Creativity isn’t a hobby for me. It’s close to the center of who I am — the thing I’d still be doing if nobody ever read a word of it.

Which is exactly why the nights it won’t come feel like more than a bad night. I sit down to work on something specific and get nothing. Not a slow start — nothing. And because creativity is so tangled up with my sense of myself, an empty night doesn’t register as an empty night. It registers as a verdict.

Tonight was one of those. I sat down with a specific thing to make and it wouldn’t come.

So I recorded a video instead. Here’s part of what I said into the camera, mostly to myself:

Is there something you want to do? Are you willing to do it now? If you’re not willing to do it now, put it down for a little while. Go do the other things you are willing to do now. If you want to get it done, come back to it. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Because if it’s something you really want to do, you’ll figure out how to do it. But if it’s just something you’re talking about, then maybe it’s not for you. And it may come back around one of these days. You never know. Be nice to yourself.

I didn’t realize until afterward that I’d answered my own question.

The thing I couldn’t make tonight didn’t stop existing because I couldn’t make it tonight. It’s still there. It’ll still be there tomorrow, and I’ll still want it, which is how I know it’s mine. The empty night wasn’t a verdict on whether I have it in me. It was just a night I wasn’t willing, and there’s a difference between a well that’s dry and a well you’re too tired to lower the bucket into.

What I could do tonight was that video. So that’s what I did.

The Room I Don’t Walk Into

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 7

I’ve spent this year trying to be one person.

Not one person at work and another at home. Not a version for the office, a version for church, a version for my family. Same guy everywhere. Part of that is conviction — I don’t want to play games or keep track of which face I’m wearing. But part of it is that I’ve found it actually works. What I learn at work sharpens what I do at home. What I figure out at home comes back and makes me better at work. The lessons only flow both directions because there’s no wall between them. There’s just one of me, learning.

There’s a line I’ve always liked, from Remember the Titans: I may be a miserable cuss, but I’m the same miserable cuss to everybody. Consistency is its own kind of fairness. People know what they’re getting. So do I, which means I get to be at ease instead of performing. Performing is exhausting — it never lets you rest in yourself.

Which brings me to the room I won’t walk into.

I don’t rest well. I’m bad at it in a way I can’t explain away as a scheduling problem. There’s always something left on the list, and somewhere underneath that is a conviction that getting it all done depends on me. So I keep moving. And if I’m honest about why I don’t stop, it isn’t that I lack the time. It’s that admitting I need rest feels like admitting I’m failing.

I know that’s not true. I can tell you exactly why it isn’t. The rest is what makes the working hours worth anything — I’m sharper, kinder, more useful to everyone around me when I’ve actually stopped. My faith tells me the same thing, more plainly than I’d like. Rest isn’t a reward for finishing. It’s commanded. It’s built right into the week, no achievement required.

So here’s the crack in the whole thing. I’ve been going on about being the same person everywhere, one integrated life, nothing walled off — and the one part of my life I’ve quietly refused to bring into the system is the exact part God explicitly asked for. My theology says rest is holy. My gut reads it as weakness. Those two have never met.

The way through, I think, looks like tithing. I already trust God with ten percent of the money. Not because the math works — the math never works, that’s the whole point — but because I believe He does more with the ninety than I’d ever squeeze out of the hundred. That’s not a budgeting strategy. That’s faith, applied to something I can count.

I’ve just never extended it to the calendar. Rest is a tithe of time. You give back the seventh and trust that six days in His hands beat seven in yours.

I believe that about my money. I’m still learning to believe it about my week.