Aim for the Top of the Room

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Around our house, we love a good puzzle. It’s part of the furniture — brain-teasers at the table, riddles in the car, a general suspicion that anything can be turned into a game if you look at it right. So when my son’s eighteenth birthday came around and he told me what he wanted, it wasn’t just a party. He wanted a murder mystery — a night where he and his friends could sit down together and solve something.

That’s a brief. A real one. A specific thing, for a specific group, on a specific night. And a brief like that is the best gift a person can hand you if you like to make things, because it tells you exactly what you’re solving for.

So I built the night. Nine puzzles in all — seven scattered around the house for the teams to move through and work out together, then two more that funneled everyone down into the final whodunit. Dinner first, then about an hour of teasers, then the Clue-style reveal at the end. And here’s the thing I had to keep reminding myself the whole time I was designing it: it did not matter one bit what I found fun.

I’m older than eighteen. I like a hard puzzle, the kind you chew on for a day. If I’d built the night I’d want, I’d have built it for me, and it would have died on the table in front of a room of teenagers. So I set that version of me aside and built for them — for what my son loves, the history and the Professor Layton brain-teasers and the wordplay he’s been doing for years, and for his friends, who are cut from the same cloth. The question was never “can I solve this?” It was “can they?”

And that turned out to be a harder question than I expected, because I got the answer wrong in the most interesting way.

I wrote a cipher — a letter-shift, where you slide each letter back three spaces to read the hidden word. I thought it would be a good challenge. My son cracked it in about five seconds. Then I wrote what I thought was a gentle riddle, a little play on making a toast, the kind of thing I figured they’d get instantly. It stopped them cold. Clue after clue, and they still had to fight for it.

I’ve thought about that flip a lot since. It wasn’t random. These are kids who grew up pattern-matching at speed — puzzles, games, screens, systems with rules to crack. The mechanical cipher was their native language; they saw the pattern before I finished explaining it. But the slow, lateral riddle — the one where you have to read every single word and sit with what it actually means — that’s a different muscle, and it’s the one they flex the least. Without meaning to, I’d run a little experiment on how this generation thinks, and it inverted everything I assumed.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say, because there’s a trap on both sides of designing for other people.

I could have handed them something easy. They’d asked for a fun night, and it would have been simple to give them puzzles a child could solve and call it a crowd-pleaser. But that’s not respect — that’s pandering, and pandering gives people less than they’re capable of. The other trap is the opposite one, and it’s the one people like me fall into: build it high and hard and clever, the way I’d want it, and let them feel the reach of my own cleverness. That gives them less too. It just dresses the withholding up as sophistication.

The whole job was to aim at neither. To build for the top of what they could actually rise to — hard enough to be worth solving, fair enough that solving it felt earned. Respecting people’s capacity means calibrating to it, not performing above it and not stooping below it.

I didn’t get every puzzle right. But I built in enough variety that when my calibration was off, there was still something on the other side that landed. By the end of the night they’d worked their way down to the killer, and it had taken them the full hour, and it was satisfying in the way only a thing you had to work for is satisfying.

A couple of the kids told me I needed to throw another one soon. That made me smile — you make something, and it lands, and that feels good.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was my son, at the end of his party, having had a genuinely good night with his friends in our home. That was the whole brief. Everything else was just me trying to be worthy of it.

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.