7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 4
My wife looked at me one day and said, “You’re supposed to be the communicator. Communicate with me.”
That’s when I started paying attention to how I actually think. And what I realized is that my thoughts aren’t fully formed until they come out of my mouth. They take substance when I hear them. I either agree or disagree with myself, and I keep going.
I think out loud. That’s how I’m wired.
For years, I forced myself into workflows that didn’t fit. Sit at the desk. Open the document. Type. That’s how you’re supposed to do it, right?
I can type. I’m decent at it. But I hit a wall every time — my brain and my mouth run faster than my fingers can translate. I’d get maybe 1,500 words into something and want to quit. Not because I was out of ideas. Because the method was fighting the way my mind actually works.
I wrote my first novel on my iPhone. Voice dictation and my thumbs. That’s how 98% of Phase Defiant was written. Not at a desk. Not in a word processor. Walking around, talking, getting it out at the speed my brain wanted to move.
Yesterday I drove from Oklahoma City to Dallas. I had a list of questions I knew I needed to work through — business strategy, distribution plans, a writing series I’m developing. I turned on the voice recorder and talked.
Two and a half hours. 18,000 words.
That’s a third of a novel. If I’d tried to type that, I’d have gotten tired, frustrated, and quit somewhere around page three. But talking? I could have kept going.
Here’s what makes it work: the questions. Having something specific to respond to turns talking into structured thinking. I’ve given hundreds of speeches through Toastmasters — my brain has a framework for taking a question and building a response without planning it out. The questions are the ignition. The talking is the engine.
Forming the right question is the hard part. Answering it is the easy part.
The talking is the generation. The writing is what comes after — editing, shaping, cutting the rambling from the substance. Eighteen thousand spoken words might be ten thousand usable ones. But ten thousand usable words in a day is more than I ever produced sitting at a desk pretending that was how I worked.
I’m a grown man who still needs to move to think. I spent a long time pretending that wasn’t true.
David Willis 