Tag: Life

What I Didn’t Say

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In January of this year I used an AI tool to help me edit my novel. The chapter that came back wasn’t mine.

Same characters, different scene. Events I hadn’t written, in a book I’d already spent a hundred and five thousand words on. I got about halfway down the page before I stopped and said out loud, what the heck is this?

I’d asked for everything I could think of. Check the voice for consistency. Tell me if I’ve dropped a plot thread. Fix the grammar, look at the pacing. Everything you’d want from an editor, and I thought I could name all of it.

What I never said was don’t change the story.

I asked it why afterward. It told me my instructions left room and it had filled the room. Which is a fair description of what happened — I’d written a job posting with no scope, and something with no other context to work from took the widest reasonable reading of it.

I’ve known for a while that the gap was mine. What took longer was working out why it was there.

I’ve never worked with an editor.

Not once. Everything I’ve ever written I’ve edited myself, the long way, reading until my eyes slid off the page. So when I finally handed a chapter to something outside my own head, I was specifying a job I had never in my life watched anyone do.

I knew editing existed. I could name the tasks — anybody who’s read a book about writing can name the tasks. What I couldn’t name was the line. Where this sentence is weak ends and this scene should be different begins.

That line isn’t in any book about craft. It’s the kind of thing you absorb sitting across a desk from somebody in your first year, and after that nobody says it out loud again, because everyone in the room already knows it.

So I listed the parts I could see and left silent every part I’d never had to think about, which turned out to be all the boundaries.

You can’t put a fence around a field you’ve never stood in.

What I built afterward was a standard set of instructions I’ve used on every chapter since. Read for these things. Tell me what you find before you touch anything. Suggestions first, not revisions.

And the one that actually mattered: when you do revise, revise my words — I want it to still be materially mine when it comes back.

I’d never have thought to write that sentence if I’d worked with an editor even once. It would have been assumed. It’s assumed by every writer and every editor who has ever sat in a room together, and I had to lose a chapter to arrive at it from scratch.

The chapters started coming back the way I’d wanted them the first time. My sentences, tightened. My scene, still mine.

Twenty years of writing and I’d never once had to define what an editor does, because I’d always been both people. The handoff happened somewhere inside my own head, and nothing that happens in there ever needs saying.

So the instructions weren’t really for the machine.

They were the first honest description I’ve ever written of a job I’ve been doing to myself, alone, since I was in my twenties.

This Is Him

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I had a grown man’s voice by the time I was fifteen. On the phone nobody ever knew.

One afternoon somebody from a radio station called the house asking for my dad. He’d won something. All he had to do was be the one to claim it.

Three words. This is him. Nobody in the world would have known — not the station, not my father, not anybody. And I stood there holding the phone and couldn’t make my mouth do it.

I have no idea what the prize was. 1993, some station, some giveaway. We lost out on it.

Years later I walked into a car dealership with I’m a moron written across my face.

The salesman read it in about four seconds and sold me a car I didn’t need for considerably more than it was worth. Six months on I sold it back at a three or four thousand dollar loss. That part was expensive and completely ordinary. Everybody buys the wrong car once.

What I actually remember is the phone call before I gave the car up, when I was broke and couldn’t make the payment and a creditor got me on the line.

He was friendly. Asked about my situation, got me talking, and I told him things — I was young and scared and he was the first person who’d sounded like he cared. Then somewhere in the middle he turned it around and used every bit of it on me. Told me I’d lost the car. Hung up.

He didn’t want the money. If he’d wanted the money he’d have worked out a payment with me. He wanted me frightened enough to find some, and he had a script for producing that.

I made myself a promise after that call. Not at either end of that again. Not that end, and not his.

I’ve been listening to Chris Voss’s book about hostage negotiation, which is a good book, and every time I read one of these I run into the same discomfort. The creditor was a skilled negotiator. He used real techniques competently. He just used them on a kid to take something.

So where’s the line.

Here’s what twenty years of work has shown me, and it’s not what I expected. I’m a data guy. Almost nothing I negotiate involves money. I negotiate for understanding — what gets fixed first, what can wait, what was never actually broken, who owns it. Nobody calls that negotiating. We call it getting things done. It’s two people holding different pictures of the same problem and trying to end up with one.

And in twenty years of that, the people who reach for manipulation are the people who have nothing else to reach for.

I interviewed someone a while back and asked what an acronym stood for. He guessed. Confident, fluent, completely wrong. The next candidate said she hadn’t run into that one, so she’d looked it up, because she was curious. He answered the question and failed it. She couldn’t answer it and got the job.

I wasn’t testing the term. I was testing what happens when they don’t know something.

Same thing runs the other direction. I’ve broken things at work — real things, with consequences. What has always kept me whole is walking in and saying: here’s what’s wrong, here’s what caused it, that was my call and I got it wrong, here’s the fix. People let you back in after that. They keep believing you, and believing you is the only asset in the room that can’t be rebuilt from scratch.

Somebody who actually knows their material doesn’t need a technique. Their standing does the work. Manipulation is what gets installed where credibility should have been — the salesman and the creditor reached for pressure because they had nothing true to offer me.

Except that only explains the part with witnesses.

The fifteen-year-old had no credibility to protect. No boss, no team, no reputation, nobody in the room. A phone, an easy lie, and a prize on the other side of it. Every incentive pointed one direction and there was no cost to lying.

I’ve told that story like it says something good about me, and I’m not sure it does. I didn’t weigh it. I didn’t decide. I stood there and my mouth wouldn’t form the sentence, and I’ve never known whether that was character or just not having the nerve. Truthfully, it was me trying to be honest which is what I want to be. Even if it cost me a prize.

Learning the tools didn’t make me trust persuasive people less. It changed what I listen to. I spend a lot less attention now on how well someone is making their case and a lot more on what’s actually under it — whether there’s anything there when you take the technique away.

The books will hand you every tool in the kit. What they can’t tell you is what you’ll do with them on an afternoon when nobody’s home.

He Fell Forward

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I  started a project at the beginning of this year called Bible Pictures 365. I started making the pictures so I’d actually read the Bible.

That was the whole design. I’ve got a plan that takes you through the entire thing in a year, and I know myself well enough to know that a plan alone doesn’t do it. So I gave myself a job: one image per chapter, every chapter, posted. Miss the reading and there’s nothing to post, and the empty slot is the accountability.

It also solved something else. I wanted to see it. Not a painting somebody made in 1840 with everyone dressed like Europeans, but a guess at what the room actually looked like. Dirt, heat, the right kind of bread.

And I wanted it to reach somebody. That part was in the plan too — I’ve had a number in my head all year, a thousand people, and this was one of the ways I meant to get there. Two accounts started from zero, posting into the dark and hoping.

What I didn’t plan for was being graded.

Early on I did David and Goliath. Stone hits the giant in the head, giant goes down. In my version he falls backward, which is what you’d expect and what looks right on a screen.

The text says he fell on his face.

I have gotten, conservatively, twenty comments about it. Probably more. People still find that one and tell me.

The first few stung a little. Then I understood what I was actually looking at. Twenty people knew that verse well enough to notice the direction a man falls in a sentence most people skim. They didn’t scroll past a nice picture. They checked it against scripture and found it wanting, and then cared enough to say so.

That’s the whole thing working. I set out to build accountability for myself and accidentally handed it to a few thousand strangers.

The messages come from everywhere. Corrections, mostly kind. Questions about how I make them. People telling me a specific image landed on them in a way they wanted me to know about.

Somebody once asked me to make one on request. It’s the scene where an enemy commander runs from a battle, hides in a woman’s tent, falls asleep exhausted, and she drives a tent peg through his temple. That’s in there. That’s in the Bible.

I got it to where you understand exactly what happened and it’s still fit for a phone screen. I’m oddly proud of that one.

Judges gave me more trouble than I expected, and not the parts people assume.

What sat with me was how fast it repeats. Sodom gets destroyed, and not many pages later the same wickedness turns up in a town belonging to Benjamin, and it ends with a woman cut into pieces and sent across the country as a message. The tribes nearly wipe Benjamin off the map over it.

I couldn’t make an image for most of that, and I didn’t try. But I read it, which was the point. Every generation in that book thinks it’s different from the last one and none of them are.

Job was harder in a quieter way. You know from the start he didn’t do anything wrong — you’re told, the reader gets to see the ledger. Then you sit there for thirty-some chapters while his friends explain his sin to him. And Job holds up, and holds up, and then eventually gets a little too big for his britches and God has to take him apart.

The part I keep coming back to isn’t the suffering. It’s that his friends were the first ones to throw him under the bus.

Eight months in, I’ve changed almost nothing about how I do it.

Same format. Generate the scene, put music behind it, post it with the verse. It started as a six-second video because that’s what the app gave me, then it became ten seconds because that’s what the app gave me. Every choice in the process was made once, at the beginning, mostly by whatever was available that week.

I want to be honest about what that is and isn’t. It isn’t boredom. I still like doing it, most nights it takes me twenty or thirty minutes, and I’m not white-knuckling anything.

It’s that nothing has broken. The posts land a few hundred views, occasionally a thousand, and the number has been about the same for a long time. Which is exactly the condition where you don’t change anything — nothing hurts enough to make you.

If I started tomorrow I’d probably put myself on camera. Read the verse out loud, say what it did to me that morning. I’ve never once done that on those accounts. I don’t have a good reason.

I’m into August now. Still going.

When the year ends I don’t think I’ll shut it down — maybe it becomes one picture a day instead of one per chapter, whatever actually hit me that morning. I haven’t decided.

What I do know is that some man in another country is going to open his phone, look at a picture of Goliath, and check which way he fell.

Eight O’clock

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Friday I slept until after eight.

I’ve done that maybe twice in ten years. I’m up at 5:30 every day, not because anyone makes me — I like it, it’s the quietest part of the day and it belongs to me. But Friday I woke up at some point, looked at the clock, and went back under.

It took two weekends of practice to get there. First one I made myself stay in bed until seven and it felt like being late for something. Did it again the next day. Then Friday, eight.

What finally landed it wasn’t discipline. My wife looked at me and said, “You’re exhausted. Sleep in.”

Our team just brought a project across the line at work. Ten months of build, a go-live date that wouldn’t stick, the whole thing.

I want to be careful how I describe this, because I liked it. I’ve spent twelve years doing large project work and I’d take that kind of pressure any day — you plan a thing, you build it, and then people use it. That’s about as satisfying as work gets.

What wears on you isn’t the hours. It’s carrying, for ten months, the awareness that if this doesn’t hold, it doesn’t fail quietly. It fails at enterprise scale, in front of everyone, on Monday. You don’t put that down at 5 p.m. You just carry it at a lower volume.

And then it launches, and you’re still braced, because your body didn’t attend the meeting where we decided it was over.

I wrote something years ago about being in a current.

The idea was that most of the time being busy feels like water moving you along — responsibility, deadlines, the list, everyone counting on you. You put your head down and paddle to keep up, and after a while you stop noticing anything except the water.

And the current isn’t deep. That was the whole point of it. You can put your feet down and stand up in the middle of it any time you decide to. You can walk to the bank and watch it go by. It was never actually in charge.

I still believe that. What I’d add now is that standing up is not a thing I do by myself. Twice this month it took my wife on the bank telling me the water wasn’t as deep as I thought.

There’s an old Alabama song about being in a hurry and not knowing why.

I’ve had it stuck in my head, and not because it describes me. I’m not in a hurry to get my life over with. I like my life — I like being married to her, I like being my son’s dad, I like building things. When I catch myself rushing and can’t say what for, that’s not a mood. That’s information.

Because hurry and performance are not the same animal. When I’m performing I know the goal and I know why it matters and I can tell you which things don’t. Hurry is what shows up when I haven’t decided any of that, so everything arrives equally urgent and I just thrash. One is chosen. The other is drift wearing a productivity costume.

Here’s the bill.

I’m not dissatisfied with my life. But when I think honestly about what I’d want back, it isn’t projects and it isn’t time. It’s people. There are friendships I’d have built more deliberately. There are people I liked who I let drift because I was in the water with my head down and I’d have told you, sincerely, that I’d get to it.

Nobody isolates on purpose. You just stay busy long enough and the number of people you’re actually close to gets smaller, and no single week is when it happened.

That’s the real cost of the current. It doesn’t take your hours. It takes your people, slowly, while you’re being responsible.

Tomorrow morning it’s supposed to be sixty-eight degrees, which in Oklahoma on the second of August is close to a miracle.

I’m going to put headphones on and mow the yard before church. Listen to a book and drive around the lawn like it’s a go-kart. Same chore either way. The grass doesn’t care.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. Head up, feet down, and somebody on the bank who’ll tell me when I’ve stopped noticing the water.

The Shelves

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Everybody’s seen one of those shows. A house that used to be a house — the counters go first, then the chairs, and eventually there’s one worn path from the front door to the one seat somebody still sits in. Everything that was supposed to make the life easier is now standing between the person and the rest of their own home.

My house is fine.

I’ve spent twenty years in data management, and if you reduce the job to a sentence it’s this: make sure information can be found by the person who needs it, at the moment they need it. Everything else in the discipline is detail hanging off that.

So this isn’t a story about not knowing better.

Last year I started doing my actual thinking in AI threads — talking a problem out, getting it back in a shape I could use, keeping the trail instead of watching it evaporate. It worked right away. So I built the structure to hold it. A place for each body of work, so related things stay related and nothing has to be reconstructed from memory later.

Then I used that structure approximately never, for six months.

I kept working the whole time. Opening threads, making things, moving to the next one. What I never did was the last thirty seconds — the part where you decide whether what you just made is worth keeping and then put it where it goes. Half a year of finished work sitting exactly where it landed.

I built the shelves and left everything on the floor next to them.

A few weeks ago I finally dug out. Not in one sitting. Several. Go back through, pull down what mattered, delete what didn’t, put the rest where it belongs.

It’s straight now. But I got there by excavating, and excavating is a completely different activity from maintaining. One is a project you have to schedule and dread. The other is nothing — a few seconds at the end of something you were already doing.

The reason I skipped it isn’t interesting. It was skippable. Skippable things get skipped, and for a long stretch nothing bad happens, which is the entire trap. Then one day you go looking for the thing you made in March.

Here’s the part I’d rather leave out.

Getting everything out of your head and into a system can quietly turn into its own version of the pile. A graveyard of conversations in perfect order, which is not the same thing as conversations in use. Filed and dead still counts as filed.

I’ve got open threads right now that don’t belong anywhere. Research questions I haven’t decided about. Half-formed things I’m not ready to name yet, sitting in the exact spot where six months of the last pile started.

The houses on those shows have one thing going for them.

Everybody can see them.

Mine looks fine from the door.