Tag: writing

Out Of Stuff To Say

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Some nights I sit down to write and there’s nothing there.

I check the top of my head, find it empty, and conclude I’ve run dry. Forty-seven years of material and the drawer’s bare. Nothing worth anybody’s time.

This has been happening my whole life. What’s different now is that I’ve stopped believing it.

Here’s the thing I finally figured out. The top of my head is not the well. It’s the last four things I thought about, and if none of them were interesting, the whole inventory comes back empty.

But if I sit still — actually still, long enough for the day’s noise to drain off — something always surfaces. A conversation that stuck. A small thing somebody did. A memory that arrived for no reason I can trace.

Nothing has ever failed to come. Not once this year.

The trick isn’t finding material. It’s tolerating five quiet minutes before the panic sets in.

For most of my life my response to a blank night was to not write.

That’s it. No struggle, no discipline problem. I’d sit down, feel nothing, and go do something else. Then I’d do the same thing the next night, and the gap would open, and eventually I’d have not written for two months and would tell myself I’d been busy.

I look back at those stretches and I can see them clearly now. They weren’t dry spells. They were nights I quit early, stacked up.

What I do care about is whether it’s worth opening.

I don’t want to fill a slot. If somebody gives me four minutes of their evening I’d like them to get something for it, and the test I use is simple: did I surprise myself. If I write my way into something and think huh, I hadn’t looked at it that way, there’s a decent chance somebody else will have that reaction too. If I didn’t, I probably shouldn’t have posted it.

Almost fifty years leaves a deep well. But I’m not interested in reminiscing at people. The old material only counts if it connects to something happening now.

I know what my bad posts look like, because I wrote a lot of them a long time ago.

They’re the inspirational ones. Younger me wanted to be Zig Ziglar or Brian Tracy — wanted to say the uplifting thing, get people fired up, be the voice that moved somebody’s Tuesday. And because I didn’t actually have a settled position on any of it, everything I produced was contrived. Motivational-shaped words with nothing underneath.

I misunderstood what those men were doing. I thought the job was inspiration. It wasn’t. They were laying down foundations meant to hold up under a lifetime, and the enthusiasm was just the delivery vehicle. I copied the vehicle.

I’ve written something every day this year. Even on vacation, which I did not expect of myself.

Not because I’ve had something to say every day. Because I’ve stopped mistaking a quiet mind for an empty one.

One Thing At A Time

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

New round started today, and I’ve spent most of it taking things apart instead of adding to them.

Seven habits, same as they’ve been. Bible reading, calorie tracking, water, exercise, reading, gratitude, and this — the daily writing.

Two of them changed shape, though, and the changes are the whole point.

Bible reading and the picture project are now one habit instead of two.

I’ve been making an image for every chapter I read since January. For most of the year I’ve treated those as separate items on a list, which meant on a busy night I could check one and let the other slide.

So now the reading isn’t done until the picture is posted. One thing, one checkbox, and no version of it where I get partial credit.

The other change is that the blog and my creative work are now the same slot. Not two competing obligations at the end of a long day — one hour, and whatever’s in front of me goes in it.

Which brings me to the part I’ve been circling for weeks.

I have twelve creative projects going. Books in progress, books that need illustrations, an album written and not released, a musical half-drafted, a course outlined, frameworks in various states of almost.

Twelve is not a portfolio. Twelve is a way of always having something to work on that isn’t the hard thing.

So: one product. I finish it. Then I pick the next one and finish that. Everything else is locked — not shelved for the year, not deprioritized, locked — until the thing in front of me is done and out.

The first one is a short guide on intent. It’s the closest to finished and the decision costs me nothing to make, which is precisely why I should have made it in June.

I start on it tonight. When there’s a real draft I’m handing it to somebody outside my own head to read, because both books I published this year got materially better the moment a person who wasn’t me told me what wasn’t landing.

On the fitness side I’m restarting the lifting program from the beginning — six weeks in phase one, six in phase two, six in phase three, which runs almost exactly to the end of the year.

I’m not setting a goal weight. I’ve gone back and forth on a number for months and the number was never the problem. The practice was. So I’m doing the practice daily and letting the scale report whatever it wants to report.

The one thing I am tightening is the tracking. I’ve been estimating my food for months — eyeballing portions, doing the math in my head, calling it close enough. I flagged that as a risk back in the spring and then did nothing about it, and it turned out to be exactly the thing that came apart.

Estimates are not data. I know this professionally. I’ve built a career on the difference and I’ve been running my own body on vibes.

There’s one more thing I’m reconsidering, and I haven’t decided yet.

I’ve been running this year in forty-day rounds. It’s worked well enough. But I’ve noticed the round is the only deadline I have that isn’t attached to anything real — the lifting block has its own clock, the product finishes when it finishes, and the round just ends on a Thursday because forty days elapsed.

At work I’d never structure it that way. At work you commit to a deliverable and a date and you’re done when it’s delivered.

I might just do that here for the rest of the year. Same habits underneath, no calendar theater on top.

Reading comes back tomorrow. That one dropped in the last round and I felt the absence of it more than anything else I let go.

Ahead of the Room

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been interviewing myself.

It’s a memoir exercise — a long set of structured questions about my own life, answered out loud while I walk, cleaned up afterward. I talk into my phone in a neighborhood in Oklahoma City like a man having an argument with nobody.

What I expected was to remember things. What’s actually happened is stranger. Answering the questions in order has laid my life out end to end, and things I’ve always filed in separate drawers turn out to be the same thing.

Here’s the one I can’t put down.

At twenty-four I ran a youth ministry, and I ran it hard.

I had ideas and energy and total certainty that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, so I put my head down and went. Volunteers who’d been serving in that ministry for years brought me their opinions and I heard interference. They saw a job we’d figure out together. I saw mine.

That job ended in an office with a man telling me I could quit or be fired, and the decision was correct. I’ve never argued it.

What I could not have told you at the time is that I wasn’t failing at youth ministry. I was failing at bringing people with me, which is a different skill and one I did not know existed.

I’ve spent the last twenty years in data.

Reduce my job to a sentence and it’s this: decide how a system ought to work, then get an organization to actually do it that way. The deciding is maybe a fifth of it. The rest is walking into offices, explaining, listening to why my idea won’t work in their department, adjusting, coming back.

You cannot govern data by decree. You can publish the most correct standard ever written and if the people who touch the data every day weren’t part of it, they’ll route around you inside a week and you’ll never know until something breaks downstream.

I am now good at this. It’s most of what I get paid for.

So the sentence I heard myself say on the walk was that I’d grown up. Twenty-four-year-old me charged ahead without looking back. Forty-seven-year-old me won’t move until the room moves with him.

I’ve been sitting with that for a couple of days and I don’t think it’s true.

I don’t think I fixed anything. I think I landed in the one profession on earth where that particular failure cannot survive contact with the work. Not because I chose it — I fell into data by way of an insurance office and a friend who asked for my resume. But the job has been correcting me daily for twenty years, whether or not I agreed to be corrected, because the alternative is standards nobody follows and a phone call about broken data.

The church had no such mechanism. Nobody there was going to make me learn it. So I didn’t.

Which raises a question the memoir exercise handed me without meaning to.

If I only learned it where I was forced to, what does it look like in the places where nobody’s forcing me?

I sat down tonight and listed every creative project I have going. Several of them. Then I tried to pick three to shelve until January, which is not a hard exercise, and I got one. Every other project produced a reason it should stay.

Head down. Ideas and energy. Total certainty that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

Same man. Just nobody in the room to tell him.

Ready To Go Home

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Last full day at sea. Tomorrow we’re in port, then an airport, then home.

And I have to admit something I’ve never once been able to say at the end of one of these.

I’m ready to go.

Every other cruise I’ve taken has ended with me dragging my feet up the gangway. The last day was always a countdown to reentry — back to the bills, the yard, dinner that doesn’t cook itself, the whole apparatus of being responsible for things.

Out here I got to be free and easy for a week. No clock. Nothing I had to achieve that I didn’t want to.

I have loved it. I’ve eaten more than I needed to and enjoyed every bite. Desserts. A couple of very good wines. Places I’ve never been. A whole lot of time staring at water, which I’ll be doing again in about an hour.

And I still want to go home.

What’s different is that there’s something waiting that I actually want.

I’ve spent this year working harder than I’ve worked in a long time, on purpose, on things that are mine. Which means home isn’t a pile of obligations this time. It’s a set of things I’m in the middle of and want to get back into the middle of.

I’m in the gym Sunday with my son. Monday morning I’ll get coffee, sit down, and start digging through what I’d conservatively estimate is five thousand emails. Then follow-ups with my team on what moved while I was gone, and figuring out what the next project needs from me.

None of that sounds like dread when I say it out loud. It sounds like Monday, and I’d like to get at it.

I’m not naive about how fast this turns.

It’ll be a grind again inside of two weeks. There will be a list, and deadlines, and people who needed something from me before I got back to my desk, and bills, and all the ordinary weight of a life. Restored is a temporary condition.

The stairs on this ship have also made a point I didn’t ask them to make. I’m in decent shape. I’m not in the shape I want. Something to work on.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though.

I brought my mid-year review with me. I’ve been saying all week I’d open it on the last sea day, block out a couple of hours, sit somewhere quiet and figure out the back half of the year.

I never opened it.

My son wanted to do trivia in the theater. Then karaoke, where he got up and sang How to Save a Life and absolutely leveled the room — this kid who started out with an untrained ear, standing up in front of strangers and just owning it. I watched him meet people all week and turn into somebody more outgoing than I’ve ever seen him.

The review will still be there Sunday afternoon. It has kept for six weeks; it’ll keep two more days.

I would not trade one hour of that theater for it.

A Hundred Feet

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Standing off the back of a ship at night in the middle of the ocean is the strangest feeling I know.

The deck lights throw a haze that hangs out over the water, a kind of halo, and inside it you can see about a hundred feet of wake — white foam churned up and rolling out behind you. Past that the light quits. The foam goes on for a while and then it’s just gone into black, and you have no idea how far down or how far out any of it goes.

It’s dark. It’s enormous. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever stood in front of and I could look at it for hours.

I’ve only been on the ocean a handful of times in my life. Every time I leave it I miss it more than I did before.

I’ve started to suspect we don’t come out here for the islands at all. The islands are wonderful and I’d go back to some of them tomorrow. But there’s a real chance we book these trips just to spend a few days out in the middle of the water with land nowhere in any direction.

There’s a parallel here about my life and I’ve been resisting it, because it doesn’t hold as cleanly as I’d like.

The easy version is that I love being out in the middle of things. Which is true — I like being in the thick of the work, in the middle of the struggle, some days with no clear idea where I am, and I’ve built a life that keeps me there most of the time.

But I also like the shore. A lot. I like knowing there’s a place I can get back to.

Anybody who tells you they only want one of those is selling something.

Every post I write ends up back at my faith, and this one gets there faster than most.

I believe in a God who spoke and there was a universe. Who said something on each of those days and something new existed that had never existed before, and who is, at a level I can’t get to the bottom of, an artist.

There’s a whole industry devoted to bringing people out here comfortably. Good food, entertainment, somebody making the bed. And all of that apparatus succeeded tonight in putting me in exactly one position, which was standing at a rail in the dark with my knees going out from under me, understanding how small I am.

I’m very small. The ocean is very large. And the God who made it is larger than the ocean.

Tomorrow’s a sea day and I’m going to sit down with the review I’ve been carrying and start planning the back half of my year.

I’ll be doing it on top of about three miles of water I can’t see the bottom of.

Tonight, though, I’m just looking at the wake. A hundred feet of it lit up, rolling away, and then nothing I can see at all.