Tag: communication

I Told AI To Edit My Book. It Rewrote My Plot.

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

For about twenty years we all learned the same skill. Type a few words in a box. Scan the blue links. Pick one. If the results were bad, change the words and try again.

That habit worked. It made us decent searchers. And most of us carried it straight over to AI without noticing, because the box looks the same.

But search retrieves and AI answers, and that difference matters more than it sounds. With Google, you did the choosing at the end — ten results came back and you picked. With AI there’s one result, and it did the picking for you, quietly, before you ever saw it. You never find out what the other nine would have been.

I learned that the expensive way.

The mistake

I had a finished manuscript. A hundred and five thousand words. I handed the whole thing over and typed something close to: read this manuscript and help me edit where needed.

Pure Google prompt.

What came back was good work. That was the problem. It wasn’t making errors, it was making decisions. It rewrote passages. It changed plot points. It smoothed out scenes I had left rough on purpose.

And I didn’t catch it at the prompt. I caught it pages in.

The word carrying all the weight in that sentence was edit, and I never said what I meant by it. Edit can mean fix my commas. It can also mean fix my book. Those are different jobs. I meant the first one. It heard the second, which was a perfectly reasonable thing to hear, and went to work.

A human editor would have asked. You want me touching the plot, or just the prose? Four seconds, and we’d both have been fine.

The AI didn’t ask. It can’t show you a confused face. It shows you confidence either way, and that’s the gap nobody warns you about.

The rebuild

I went back to my original file and started over, which is the real price of a vague request. You don’t get worse work. You get to do the work twice.

Three things changed.

I asked it to report, not to change. Read for story strength. Point out grammar and continuity errors. Review pacing and plot development. Every one of those asks for an assessment instead of a rewrite, and I kept the keyboard. It’s also the easiest of the three to start doing — you can make that change on your very next message.

I split the verb. “Edit my book” turned out to be four jobs wearing one word. Story strength isn’t continuity. Continuity isn’t pacing. Pacing isn’t grammar. Separated out, each one had an answer I could actually judge.

I went one chapter at a time. This was the one that mattered most. A whole manuscript is too big to check — by the time you can tell whether it understood you, it’s already produced fifty pages of the wrong thing. A chapter is small enough that a misunderstanding shows up before it multiplies.

And it’s what made the rest possible. Once the pieces were small enough to judge, the whole thing turned into a loop. Read, edit, reread, evaluate, reedit, read again.

Look at who the subject of most of those verbs is.

None of that is about books. Before you send the next one:

What’s the vague word in what I just wrote? Usually it’s the verb. Help. Improve. Look at. Clean up.

Am I asking for a report or a rewrite?

Is this small enough that I’ll catch a misread before it costs me anything?

A hundred and five thousand words became sixty thousand

I want to be careful with that number. My book had fat in it. Yours might not.

And the tool didn’t cut a thing. What it did was make me able to see what wasn’t earning its place, and then make me ruthless enough to pull it. I’d been protecting scenes I was fond of. Asked chapter by chapter whether a scene served the plot, the honest answer was often no — and once you’ve seen that, you can’t unsee it.

The part I didn’t expect

It changed how I listen to people.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t before. When somebody hands me something vague, I don’t experience confusion. I resolve it instantly and silently against everything I know and they don’t. And it feels like understanding.

That’s the whole trap. Ambiguity doesn’t feel like ambiguity from the inside. It feels like you got it.

With the AI I got to watch that happen in full. It took my vague words, picked a path, went and did it, and I could see precisely where my words had landed. With a person, the wrong path usually stays invisible until something downstream breaks.

Same mechanism. No error message.

Second Place

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I was holding the trophy when he got to me.

Second place. I hate second place trophies. Nobody builds a shelf for them. I’d worked on that speech for weeks, rehearsed it in the truck, rehearsed it in the kitchen, ran it for people who’d tell me the truth, and I walked into that contest expecting to win. Then they read the names in the wrong order and handed me a piece of wood with a little plate on it, and I walked off the stage trying to figure out what had just happened.

I got maybe ten steps.

A man I’d never met stepped in front of me, put a hand out, and said, “Let’s talk about what you could’ve done better.”

Here’s the part I’ve had to be honest with myself about since. He wasn’t wrong to think I needed that conversation. I did. Walking off that stage, the only thing in my head was how did he beat me? I truly didn’t understand. The other speaker was good. I thought I was better. Call it pride or call it competitiveness, whichever fits. I wasn’t mad about losing so much as confused by it, and confusion is worse. Somebody was going to have to explain it to me.

It just wasn’t going to be him.

I’ve given more evaluations in Toastmasters than I can count, and taken more than I’d like to admit.

Feedback is the whole point of the place. Every speech gets one. There’s a person whose job that night is to stand up after you sit down and tell you, in front of everyone, what worked and what didn’t. That sounds brutal from the outside. It isn’t, and the reason it isn’t is the room.

You know the evaluator. You’ve watched them bomb a speech in March. They watched you lose your place in April. You’ve eaten bad cookies together during the break. By the time they stand up to talk about your delivery, you decided months ago whether they get to. The evaluation lands because everything around it was built first.

And when you want feedback from somebody outside the club, you go find them. You pick the person. You ask.

What almost never happens is a stranger walking up cold with a diagnosis.

So when that man opened with what I could’ve done better, I wasn’t hearing an evaluator. I was hearing somebody who’d watched a contest, formed some opinions, and decided my ten seconds off the stage was the right moment to deliver them.

He may have been dead on. I’ll never know.

I said something polite and kept walking, which is about the best I had in me.

I think about that when I’m the one in the audience.

I’ve sat through a lot of speeches from people I don’t know and I’ve had plenty of thoughts about them. What I say afterward, if I say anything, is this: I really enjoyed your speech — if you ever want to talk about it, I’d be glad to.

Then I let it sit.

Most of the time they smile and say thanks and that’s the end of it. Every so often somebody finds me a week later and asks what I saw. Those conversations are good, and they’re good because they asked.

The other contestant beat me.

It took me a while to be able to say that without the word “probably” in front of it. The explanation came eventually, from a couple of people who’d known me for years, who’d heard early versions of that speech and could tell me exactly where it had gone soft.

They were right. He was better that night, and the reasons weren’t mysterious at all once the right people said them out loud.

The trophy’s in a drawer.

Fifty Pounds

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I’m twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me.

Two weeks before that picture I’d had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor’s instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds.

I don’t remember deciding to pick it up. That’s the part that gets me now. There was no moment of defiance. I reached over and lifted the heavy thing, because that is what I did, because that is what I was.

I watched Trouble with the Curve the other night for the first time.

Clint Eastwood plays an old baseball scout who is going blind and telling nobody. His whole life runs on his eyes — he evaluates players by watching them and by the sound of a ball coming off a bat — and the the most important tool the whole thing depends on is failing, and his response is to keep driving at night and say nothing.

The title refers to a hitter in the film who can’t handle a curveball. If you don’t follow baseball, the problem with a curve is almost always that the hitter commits too early. He’s looking for the fastball. His hands start moving before the ball has finished doing what it’s going to do, so he swings at the place he expected it to be rather than where it went.

The old man’s version of that isn’t baseball. He lost his wife when his daughter was six, and he responded by gripping the one thing he still knew how to do, which was the work. He swung at the pitch he’d already committed to years earlier, and his daughter grew up on the other side of that swing.

I had committed to a pitch too, and I’d done it long before 2004.

I was the strong one. In my house the man who lifts heavy things. I had never once in my life been the one being carried and I had no framework for it, no plan for it, and no intention of finding out.

So when they told me I had cancer, my whole approach was that I’d muscle through it. Same as everything else. That is not a strategy — it’s a reflex — and it worked right up until March, when the chemo treatment started and took the strength first.

I couldn’t eat. I started to lose weight. The one attribute I’d built an identity on was the exact thing that went, and it went early.

My wife took care of me.

I want to be careful with that phrase because people use it loosely. What I mean is that she waited on me hand and foot for months, and I am sure I was not an easy patient. I’m no good at being sick. I had a very fixed idea of what I was for in that house and none of it involved my young bride giving me my medicine.

She’s told me since that it was very hard on her, and I believe her. She was trying everything she knew to comfort me and most of it didn’t land, and I’ve spent years since wondering how much of that was the illness and how much of it was me not letting it work.

But here’s the thing she never said out loud and demonstrated for months.

She was more than equal to it. She carried the whole house and she carried me, and she did it in such a way that a man who wasn’t supposed to lift ten pounds never once felt like less of a man in his own home.

I didn’t understand at twenty-six what an achievement that was. I began to understand it more at forty.

The hit wasn’t the day my strength came back. It did come back, eventually, and I’ve got more of it now at forty-eight than I had then.

The hit was being carried, and letting it count.

I picked up a fifty-pound bag two weeks after surgery and I took it, because I could not yet imagine a version of myself who put it down. It took a woman I love four months and considerably more strength than I had to teach me otherwise.

Halftime

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house.

My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it.

Then we went grocery shopping. All three of us, because the house needed food, and we talked and laughed our way through a store for an hour doing something completely ordinary that I don’t get to do on a workday. They picked up what they needed to make me a pineapple cheesecake, which is one of my favorite desserts I haven’t eaten in forever.

Pizza for lunch. A nap. Kung Fu Panda, which I hadn’t seen in years. Then hamburgers and Trouble with the Curve, which I’d never seen and which is a whole separate post.

That was the day. Waffles, groceries, a nap, two movies, and cheesecake.

It’s the best birthday I’ve had in a long time.

We were out earlier and my son ran into some friends at a coffee shop. One of the girls wished me happy birthday and asked if I’d gotten everything I wanted.

I told her I’m getting to be a little bit of an old man, and that the older you get the less you want — you mostly just want to be around the people you love, and I was doing exactly that.

I said it to be friendly. Then I thought about it and realized I’d told her the truth.

There were more than sixty messages by the end of the day. Some of them were the auto-generated kind and that’s fine. A lot of them weren’t. People from a long way back who wanted me to know they were still out there and still thought well of me.

My wife got me a couple of bottles of wine we’d had on the cruise a few weeks ago. She knew I liked them but wouldn’t likely get around to getting them. She was just paying attention, the way she does, and bought them without saying a word.

My son’s gift is that he’s taking me out to eat and paying for it himself. An experience instead of an object, which is an awesome present. Time with him and good food? That’s a win.

I’m in better shape at forty-eight than I was at forty. Stronger, lifting more, and considerably better at my job. More patient than I used to be, and steadier.

What I’ve lost is the not thinking about it. When I was young the future was theoretical. It sat out there somewhere and I never once did math on it. Now it’s close enough to see and I do the math without meaning to.

That’s a strange thing to say for a man who has had cancer twice and should have lost that feeling at twenty-six. But that sense of being invincible is stubborn, and it does eventually go.

Here’s the part I’ve been turning over.

I’ve always thought of fifty as halftime. It’s a comfortable frame — I’d be genuinely grateful for another fifty, and it lets you feel like the second half hasn’t started.

If I’m honest, I’m in the third quarter. And I’ve got some ground to make up.

The thing I don’t want to carry into forty-nine is the inability to act. That, and the assumption that a thing won’t be well received before anybody’s had the chance to receive it. Neither of those has ever been true and both have cost me.

The wine is still in the house, unopened. I am saving it for some special occasion down the road.

I’ve got no idea yet what the occasion is. But I’m counting on there being one. A random Tuesday may work too.

Ripe

~ David Willis ~ 4 Comments

A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties.

Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was on a folding table with a price on it.

I bought it immediately. What I thought, standing there, was: that book is ripe.

I have a drawer full of them.

I’ve loved paper my whole life. Reams of copy paper for no reason. Notebooks I don’t need. The school supply aisle in August is, to me, a genuinely exciting place.

And I know exactly what I believed every time I brought a new one home. I was going to sit down and create something. Start the story. Build the plan. Have the explosion, fill the whole book, do something worth doing.

That did happen. Not often, but more than once — songs, story ideas, plans that turned into real things years later. Some of them I’m still working from.

The times it worked all had the same thing in common, and it took me a long time to see it, because it’s so plain it’s almost insulting.

I sat down and made something. I didn’t admire the potential. I spent it.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t at twenty-five.

I don’t think on paper. I think out loud. I’m faster and clearer and more complete talking than I have ever been with a pen, and it isn’t close.

A pen runs at maybe twenty words a minute and I talk at a hundred and fifty. But speed isn’t really the point. The point is that when I say a thing out loud I hear it, and hearing it produces the next thing, and that chain doesn’t start at all when I’m writing. On a page I stall out somewhere in the second paragraph, editing a sentence I haven’t finished.

I can walk for an hour and talk the entire hour. That’s just how I’m built. I’ve known it about myself for decades and I had nowhere to put it.

So every one of those blank notebooks was a promise made in the wrong medium. It wasn’t lying to me. It just needed something from me that I don’t have and never had.

Most of Phase Defiant, I talked.

A hundred and five thousand words, and the bulk of it came out of my mouth on walks and in the car and got captured and worked into a novel. I did not sit at a desk and write that book. I talked it into existence and then edited what came back.

Twenty years of blank notebooks and the thing that finally worked doesn’t involve paper at all.

Which leads to the question I don’t especially enjoy. If I’d had this in 2005, my first book comes out twenty years ago. I’d have been publishing novels this whole time.

I don’t know what to do with that except say it.

Some things still belong on paper and I won’t be talked out of it.

Lists. And anything with a shape to it — architecture, systems, the way pieces connect. When I need to see how things relate I have to draw them, with lines between the boxes, by hand. I’ll still talk through it while I’m drawing. But the drawing has to happen on a page.

That’s a real category and paper owns it outright.

I’m not going to stop buying notebooks.

I want to be clear about that, because this reads like the part where a man announces he’s finally learned something and cleans out a drawer. I’m not doing that. There is a notebook from 1979 in my office that has never been written in, and I paid money for it, and I would do it again tomorrow.

I just know what it is now. It isn’t a promise about what I’m going to make.

It’s a beautiful thing that somebody didn’t use.