Tag: reading

Passenger

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I love watching people, and a ship is about the best place I’ve found to do it.

Everybody converges. Nationalities I couldn’t place, accents I can’t identify, families three generations deep at one table. Old people moving slow and full of life. Kids running where they shouldn’t. Somebody loud at the bar who wants the whole deck in on the joke, and somebody else at the rail by himself who clearly does not.

And once you sit with it a while the differences stop being the interesting part, because everybody out here wants the same four or five things. Their people around them. Something good to eat. A game to play. A stretch of time where nothing is difficult.

That’s it. That’s the whole list, and it’s the same list in every language on this boat.

What I can’t stop doing is wondering about the faces.

Is this just a vacation, or is somebody escaping something? Is that man dreading the flight home, or is he going back to a life he genuinely likes? Did this cost them nothing or did it cost them a year of saving?

I’ll never know any of it. I’ll pass four thousand people this week and I won’t learn one story.

Which turned the question back on me, sitting there.

What am I in all of this? A man who loves his family. A man who’s been given considerably more than he’s earned and knows it.

And a man who is finally, actually relaxing — for the first time in a long time. I’ve been on the clock for months. Longer than months. There’s been a thing to achieve every single day for most of this year and a good part of the years before it.

Out here I’ve found rest just looking at the water. The size of it. A thing I did not make and cannot influence in any direction, doing what it’s done for a very long time without any input from me.

The other piece of it is that I’m a passenger.

I’m not driving this. I don’t know the route. Somebody far more qualified than me is getting us from one place to the next, and other people are cooking, and other people are running the whole apparatus, and my job is to be aboard.

I’m not built for that. I have spent this entire year building systems so that I’m the one holding the thing together. And here I am with no responsibility for any of it, breathing all the way down for the first time in a while.

It turns out I can do it. That’s useful information about myself that I did not have last week.

I was saying most of this out loud into my phone when caught my attention, smiled, and told me good morning.

So I’m not really watching them. I’m one of the faces.

Four thousand stories under one roof, and I don’t know a single one of them. But the God who made me and loves me did exactly the same for every person on this ship.

That’ll do for a Monday.

The Room That Knew What I Knew

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I found an old Toastmasters competition video of myself the other night. Watching old video of myself is its own small torture — you’re looking at a former version, and you can see everything he doesn’t know yet. It’s like watching a younger sibling do the thing. But I’ll say it plainly: it was a good speech. I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now.

The speech was about my time writing for the college paper. I’d been assigned to cover a speaker one night, and I had the audacity to bring a date and cut out early, before the man even took the stage. The next day I told my professor there wasn’t a story there. She looked at me like I was an idiot — which I was — because the man I hadn’t stayed to hear was a rescue worker from the Oklahoma City bombing. So I went and found him. I learned his story. And somewhere in there I realized he was telling a very good story with his life, and I wasn’t telling much of one at all.

I knew that speech was special because I could feel the room respond when I gave it. And still I ran it, over and over, in front of people who knew the material as well as I did.

That’s the part that seems strange from the outside. I wasn’t in that room to learn what makes a speech work. I could have recited the criteria — vocal variety, gesture, stage use, the scoring rubric, all of it. Everyone in that room could have. And that’s exactly why it worked. There’s a wide gap between knowing the academics of a thing and putting them into practice while you’re standing up there, and nobody can see across that gap from the inside.

Because here’s what a blind spot actually is. It isn’t ignorance. It’s what happens when you’ve rehearsed something so many times it’s dropped into muscle memory — and the very repetition that makes it effortless is what makes the flaw invisible. You’ve done it a hundred times. It feels right. It has to be right. Then somebody who’s watched a thousand speeches tells you you’re repeating a word, or your gesture is overplayed and pulling attention off the line it’s supposed to carry, and you realize you’ve been doing it every single run and you never once saw it. The room wasn’t teaching me anything I didn’t know. The room was seeing me.

I made the district finals with that speech. I don’t believe I get there without those people — not without the corrections, not without the energy they gave me, not without being sanded down enough times to be genuinely polished instead of merely talented. I’ve competed since. I’ve never gotten that far again, and I know exactly why: I’ve never worked that hard again.

But the room isn’t magic, and I want to be honest about that, because I’ve been on the other end of it too. A different competition, a loss I didn’t think I deserved, and a man I’d never met walked up as I came off the stage and asked if he could give me feedback. I wanted to punch him. Not because he was wrong — I don’t even remember if he was wrong. Because he cared more about the method than about me. He wanted to stand on his knowledge for a second. That’s not sharpening. That’s the difference between a supportive community and a religion, and the feedback is identical in both. What changes is whether the person is for you.

And there’s one more thing, which I only saw watching that old video back.

The speech made it about me. I was so busy connecting his story to my own that I never finished it through his eyes — and it’s less powerful for it. It’s a smaller speech than it should have been, and the man deserved better than to be the setup for my lesson.

Nobody in that room ever told me. They couldn’t. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because I gave them a speech I’d already decided was mine, and they helped me deliver the speech I brought them. The room can only sharpen the blade you hand 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.

Twenty-Two

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve sold twenty-two copies of my first novel.

I’m going to sit with that number for a second, because it means two things at once.

First — I wrote a book. A real book. A story I’m genuinely proud of. It has four five-star reviews on Amazon from people who aren’t just being nice. One of them is a stranger who picked it up because a friend recommended it. He put everything else down to finish it. He’s waiting for book two.

Twenty-two people have read something I created, and the ones who’ve talked to me about it say it’s good. Not polite good. Real good.

That feels like something.

Second — twenty-two is not enough. Not because I need validation, but because I know this book could reach people if they could find it. And right now, they can’t. Because I have no idea how to make that happen.

I spent tonight doing research. Honest, unglamorous research into what it actually takes to get a self-published novel in front of readers on Amazon. And here’s what I learned: I don’t know anything about this part of the process.

I know how to write a book. I don’t know how to sell one. Getting the algorithm to show it to people, building the kind of social proof that makes a stranger willing to take a chance on an author they’ve never heard of — I’m standing at the edge of what I know. And there’s nothing out here but questions I haven’t answered yet.

That’s an uncomfortable place to be. Especially after eighty-five days of building systems and shipping work and feeling like the momentum is real. Because the momentum is real. I know where I’m going. I just don’t have the skill yet to get the book there with me. And the only way to learn it is the same way I’ve learned everything else this year. Read. Ask questions. Build a system. Execute. Adjust.

I didn’t know how to write a novel until I wrote one. I didn’t know how to build a daily habit system until I built one. I don’t know how to market a book yet. But I will.

Twenty-two copies. Four five-star reviews. One stranger who couldn’t put it down.

That’s not a failure. That’s a foundation.

P.S. If you want to check it out: https://a.co/d/06d0FLNf