Introducing Myself

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 4

Before I can write a character, I have to introduce myself to them. That sounds strange for people I invented, but it’s the truest way I know to describe it. I have to spend time — not just in the story I want to tell, but in the world they live in — until they stop being pieces I move around and become someone I actually know.

With Phase Defiant, the one I spent the most time with was Tiffany. She’s fourteen. I am not, and never have been, a fourteen-year-old girl. (My wife has, which helped more than she’ll ever get credit for.) So I had to sit with what it would actually feel like to be that age and suddenly have a power you never asked for, while you’re still learning to manage your own emotions. Terrifying. And then the harder part — getting her to find the courage to make the choices the story needed from her. You can’t rush a person to that. You have to know her first.

Early on I wanted my characters to be perfect. Strong, capable, sweeping in to overcome evil, no flaws anywhere. A perfect character, it turns out, can’t tell a story. There’s nothing to watch. You need to see someone face adversity, take the setback, come up short and keep going — and none of that is possible if they were invincible to begin with. So I look for the flaws as carefully as the strengths now, because the two together are what tell me how far I can push a person, and where they’ll break, and where they’ll hold.

And they surprise you. In Phase Defiant, Jennifer started as a minor character — someone in the background at the Overwatch facility, barely a name. But the more time I spent with her, the more I understood she couldn’t stay minor. She ended up a hinge the whole story turns on. I didn’t plan that. I just spent enough time with her to hear who she actually was.

People call that “the characters taking over,” like it’s magic. I don’t think it’s magic. I think it’s what happens when you’ve spent so long inside someone’s head that you can brainstorm from their point of view instead of your own. You’re not being visited. You’ve just finally learned them well enough to stop guessing.

But knowing them that well cuts both ways, and this is the part I didn’t see coming. When you truly know a character, there are stretches of the story where you love them — and the work still requires you to send them somewhere hard. Somewhere they’ll suffer, or fail, or turn into someone you don’t like for a while. If they were strangers, that would be easy. They’re not. I’ve come to care about these people, and then I have to be the one who puts them through the worst of it.

I do it because I can see who they might become. The hard road is the only one that gets them there.

Phase Defiant is available on Amazon.

The Route

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 3

I sat down to work on the novel tonight and didn’t write a single sentence of it. I spent the whole session working out how the major threads connect — how one specific character has to move through the story to get where she needs to end up. No pages. Nothing I could post. If you’d watched me, it would have looked like I was doing nothing but arguing with myself at a desk.

That’s exactly what I was doing. And it was the work.

For most of my life I wrote the other way around. I started with words — got something down, anything, and then went looking for the order afterward. Find the shape in the pile once the pile exists. That’s the advice you hear everywhere, and it’s not wrong. It just isn’t right for this book.

This story has an endpoint. I know where it lands. It’s not the kind of thing that gets to wander off wherever it wants — every thread has to arrive at a specific place, and my job is to navigate the characters there without losing the intent I started with. When you already know the destination, the writing isn’t discovery. It’s routing. And you can’t route until you’ve solved the map.

So the map was tonight’s work. Getting it wrong doesn’t show up as a bad sentence I can fix later — it shows up as a whole climax that can’t exist because I built toward it on a thread that doesn’t hold. Cheaper to find that at the desk, arguing, than four chapters deep.

Here’s the part I have to stay honest about, though, because “I’m working out the structure” is one of the great writer’s alibis. It’s the most respectable-sounding way there is to not write for a year. I’ve done my own version of it.

The tell, for me, isn’t whether pages came out. It’s whether I fought. Real structural work is arguing with myself for hours — turning a problem over, rejecting the easy answer, sitting in the part that won’t resolve. Avoiding looks different. Avoiding is writing down one idea, deciding it’s good, and closing the laptop satisfied. One of those leaves me tired and further along. The other leaves me comfortable and exactly where I started.

Tonight I was tired. The story is the same on the page as it was this morning — not a word of it written — but I know how it moves now in a way I didn’t twelve hours ago.

Who Gets a Vote

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 2

Someone reached out about my Bible picture project today to tell me I was using scripture to enrich myself, that I was blaspheming God, and that I’d better change my ways before I lost my soul.

I’ll be honest about the first thing I felt: amusement, then a little annoyance. Amusement because I haven’t made a dime on this project — I’ve spent a few hundred dollars of my own on it. The accusation was aimed at a version of me that doesn’t exist. Annoyance because nobody enjoys being told by a stranger that their soul is in danger.

Any time a faith accusation gets thrown at me, I try to be humble enough to hold still and ask whether it actually applies. This one failed that test in about fifteen seconds. So my first instinct was to fire back with scripture of my own — judge not, lest you be judged. I had it loaded and ready. I didn’t send it. Answer a fool according to his folly and you become one yourself; there was no version of that exchange that ended with either of us better off. I deleted the comment and went on with my day.

Here’s the part that surprised me, though, and it’s the reason I’m writing this at all.

Being told I might lose my soul didn’t sting. But I’ve had people call these AI images “slop,” and that one stuck with me for a while. The lesser insult landed harder than the eternal one. That made no sense to me until I sat with why.

My relationship with God is mine. A stranger on the internet doesn’t get a vote on it. They can’t see my heart, they don’t know my motives, and they don’t get to weigh the state of my soul — only He does. So when someone swings at that, they’re aiming at something they have no standing to touch. It can’t land, because it was never theirs to judge in the first place.

The craft is different. When someone says the images aren’t good, they’re talking about something that’s actually out in public, something anyone looking is allowed to have an opinion on. That person has standing. Their words reach me because they’re pointed at something real and open to the air.

So the volume of a criticism turns out to tell you almost nothing. The loudest, most damning charge came from someone with no claim on the thing they were condemning. The quiet one came from someone who did.

The Room I Can’t Read

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7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 1

I recorded four minutes of thoughts on my walk this morning and never stumbled once. Then I sat down to film a thirty-second video saying the same thing, and my brain locked up.

That gap has bothered me for a while, because on paper it makes no sense. I’m a Toastmaster. I did theater. I’ve stood in front of full rooms and ad-libbed my way through, and I was fine — better than fine. Put a phone in front of me in an empty room and I freeze.

For a long time I told myself it was the camera. Being watched. But that’s not it. I record my thoughts out loud every single day on my walks and it’s effortless. Same guy, same microphone. The only thing that changes is where the audio is going. One version is just me, organizing what I think. The other is going out to people.

Here’s what I finally landed on: when I’m in a live room, I can read it. I can see which points are landing, who’s leaning in, where to push and where to let go. I ad-lib because the room is talking back to me the whole time. Online, there’s none of that. You send it out into nothing. You have no idea if anyone’s watching, if it’s hitting, if it matters at all. You’re basically talking to yourself and hoping. And without the room to read, I lose the thing I’ve always leaned on.

So I overcorrect. If I can’t read the room, I’ll make the words perfect instead. I’ll get it exactly right the first time so I don’t have to record it over and over. That’s the Toastmaster in me — I want a well-framed talk, not a ramble. Except the demand for perfect is what freezes me before I ever start.

Then I noticed where I don’t do this. Work.

I sit in meetings and I’ll start talking before I actually know what I’m saying, and somewhere in the middle I realize I do know — I just needed to hear myself get there. I give myself that grace at work without thinking about it. And I know why. Twenty years in, I trust that if I open my mouth, what comes out is worth a little credence, even half-formed. So I let myself think out loud.

On camera, for the things I actually care about — the writing, the ideas outside my day job — I haven’t earned that yet. Not in my own head. So I won’t let myself be half-formed. I make myself audition for the right to speak before every take.

That’s the real thing under the freeze. It was never the camera. It’s that the perfect-first-take I demand of myself is a stand-in for an authority I haven’t built yet. And the uncomfortable part is knowing you can’t build it in private. Nobody hands you credence for the videos you didn’t post.

The Subplot

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

I’ve been thinking about my life as a story, and about who’s actually holding the pen.

Here’s where I’ve landed. God’s design is the plot. It’s going somewhere, and it reaches its ending whether or not I cooperate. I don’t get to write that. What I get is a subplot — my contribution, my thread — and the story arrives at its destination either along with my work or in spite of it. That’s the whole of my agency. Not authorship of the plot. Participation in it.

It’s a smaller role than I’d like some days. It’s also a bigger one than I usually act like I believe.

The first thing the Bible says about God is that He creates. Before anything else is established about who He is, we watch Him bring order out of chaos — light out of dark, form out of formlessness, something out of nothing. And a few lines later, it says I’m made in His image.

I’ve read past that a hundred times without sitting in what it means. If the defining act we’re shown first is creation, then being made in that image means being made to create. Not necessarily art. Creation in the wide sense — bringing order out of chaos wherever I find it. Leading a team out of confusion. Writing the code that makes the broken thing work. Shaping a song. Raising a kid. Turning a mess into something that holds together. That’s the image. That’s the assignment.

Which means passivity isn’t neutral. When I choose not to bring order out of the chaos in front of me — when I sit on what I was given — I’m not resting. I’m refusing the one thing I was most clearly made to do.

I know this because I did it for years.

I told myself a lot of things during those years. That I was waiting. That the timing wasn’t right. That the plans I talked about would happen eventually. What I was actually doing was burying what I’d been given and calling the hole a virtue. I had a subplot the whole time. I just wasn’t writing it.

I didn’t fix this. I don’t get to fix it once. The choice to participate in my subplot instead of letting the story move on without me is not a decision I made in January and get to coast on. It’s a decision I have to make again every single day, and some days I still lose it. Some days the passivity wins and the chaos stays chaos and the gift stays in the ground.

This is a note to myself, out loud, on a Saturday. The plot is going to reach its zenith with me or without me. The only thing I actually control is whether my thread is part of how it gets there.

Today I have to choose to be. Tomorrow I’ll have to choose again.