Tag: Books

The Voice I Like to Read

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 6

I read Phase Defiant somewhere between eight and ten times before I finished it. Not just to fix it — I’d already fixed a lot of it. I read it because I liked reading it. Every pass, it still struck me. I’d written the kind of book I actually enjoy picking up, in the voice I reach for when I read for pleasure, and it landed on me every single time.

I’m thirty thousand words into a new one — Welcome to New York, a 1920s mob story — and something’s been off, and until tonight I couldn’t name it. The writing is fine. The plot works. I like it, in the way you like something competent. But it doesn’t strike me. I’ve been reading my own pages and feeling nothing move, and I kept telling myself that was normal — that not everything can hit the way the first book did.

Tonight I finally understood why. It’s the voice. It isn’t mine.

When I sat down to write a 1920s gangster story, I decided — without ever really deciding — that the story required noir. Shadowy, clipped, that particular cold register the genre is known for. So that’s what I wrote. Thirty thousand words of it. The trouble is I’m not a noir guy. I love a thriller. I read thrillers, I think in thrillers, and it turns out the story I’m telling would sit perfectly well as one. The genre never asked me for noir. I asked me for noir, because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do with this kind of book.

And here’s the part that actually rattled me: the tell was there the whole time, and it wasn’t in the writing. It was in the reading. The reader in me — the one who read Phase Defiant ten times, part of the process and because I enjoyed every pass — kept picking the new pages up and setting them down unmoved. He knew before I did. The writer had drifted; the reader caught it. I just wasn’t listening to him.

So now I’m looking at thirty thousand words I have to take back apart. Not throw away — take apart, and rebuild in my own register. I’d be lying if I said that felt great. That’s real work I already did, and a good chunk of it doesn’t survive the change. There’s a version of me that wants to argue those words are fine, that finishing matters more than fussing over style, that I should just push through.

But I know what pushing through gets me: a whole book that reads the way these thirty thousand words do — competent, fine, and never quite mine. I’ve already got the proof of what happens when I write in a voice that isn’t my own.

So I’m going back to the start, and this time I’m writing it the way I’d want to read it.

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.

The Surgery

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 14

I used to think that when I finished writing something, I was done. The story was out. The work was complete. Move on to the next thing.

That was shortsighted and a little arrogant.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop tonight working on the editorial pass for my second novel. The bones are solid. The arcs are where they need to be. What I’m doing now is polish — adjusting the reader experience, tightening scenes, making sure the story feels cohesive from the first page to the last.

And I’m enjoying it. That’s the part I didn’t expect.

I used to dread editing. It felt like going backward. The creative rush was in the writing — getting the story out, discovering the characters, finding out what happened next. Editing felt like admitting the first version wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t. And that’s not a failure. That’s how stories work.

The things we love in books — the moments that land perfectly, the detail in chapter two that pays off in chapter twenty, the line of dialogue that feels inevitable — those aren’t first-pass items. They’re the result of careful editorial surgery. Someone went back in and made the good parts great and cut the parts that were only there because the writer liked them.

Here’s what the surgery looks like today. I discovered I was being too on the nose — telling the reader what to think about events instead of trusting them to pick it up. The story elements are all staying. The structure is solid. But there’s a pattern running through the manuscript where I’m explaining what a scene means instead of letting the scene do its own work.

That’s the kind of thing you can’t see in the first draft. You’re too close. You’re too in love with making sure the reader gets it. The edit is where you learn to trust them.

The other thing that’s changed is the standard. A younger version of me would have been satisfied to just do a good job. Get it done, ship it, move on. I’m not that guy anymore. I want the work I put out to be the best I have — not perfect, but the best version I can make. I want the reader to smile, or think, or feel something they needed to feel. And I owe it to them to go back in and make sure I’ve given them that chance.

The first draft is where you create the story. The editing process is where you learn to trust your reader with it.

In Search of Soho People

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 11

Malcolm Gladwell opens The Tipping Point with the story of Hush Puppies. A dying shoe brand — almost pulled from production — that exploded into a national trend because a handful of kids in Soho started wearing them. The company didn’t cause it. They nearly killed the brand. The tipping point happened because the right people found the product in the right place at the right time, and it spread from there.

I need to find my Soho people.

I have a five-star review on Amazon from a guy I went to high school with. We haven’t spoken in almost thirty years. He found my book off a single Facebook post, read it, and left a review comparing it to Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan. He said he put everything else down to read it. He wants the sequel.

One Facebook post. One reader. Thirty years of silence, and the book broke through it.

He’s not the only one out there. I know that. The problem has never been the product. Every person who’s read Phase Defiant has told me they couldn’t put it down. The problem is that almost nobody knows it exists.

I have a how-the-heck-do-I-get-this-in-front-of-people problem.

Gladwell’s point isn’t that Hush Puppies were great shoes. It’s that tipping points have structure. They don’t happen by accident — they happen because conditions are right. The right people, wearing the right thing, in the right neighborhood, at the right time.

I’m a storyteller who wrote a book. I don’t know where my ideal readers gather. I just know the book is good, and the few people who’ve found it agree.

So this week, I’m not trying to sell to everyone. I’m looking for my Soho — the small group of readers who will grab this book and not be able to shut up about it. I don’t need a million of them. I need a few in the right place.

I’ve spent five months building things I believe in. Now I have to learn how things spread.