A Digital Duck Mends My Writerly Woes

Plus, a sneak peek at the new EMPATHY: Imminent Dawn.

It’s more than a digital duck: it’s a digital duck with sunglasses on.

Key Takeaways

• Partnership in Writing Takes Many Forms. A conversation partner—digital, physical, or otherwise—can help refine creative ideas, clarify story elements, and push past writer’s block.

• Ask for Engagement, Not Answers. Relying on a digital duck as an answer generator alone undermines opportunities for enriched world-building and inhibits unexpected creative insights.

• A Duck is Still a Duck. Digital ducks are useful for brainstorming and problem-solving, but they can’t replace your unique voice or creative vision.

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Planking. The Ice Bucket Challenge. Yanny versus Laurel. The Grimace shake.

Yeah, a lot has happened since 2011, which is also known as the year I first started writing what would become the EMPATHY sci-fi saga. As I’ve waded deeper into rewrites of that series, the time that’s passed—and the change that’s come with it—have been top of mind.

The way I’ve gone about my work as an author, for example, has changed tremendously. No longer do I track my daily word count. No longer do I beat myself up for missing a morning of minding my manuscripts. I’ve swapped in Scrivener for Word and have given side hustles the bird, and I’m certainly no longer maintaining massive spreadsheets of agents to query.

But the biggest change has to be the duck.

The talking duck. The talking duck who lives in my laptop.

This may sound unusual, but I’ve not lost my mind (yet), I promise.

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Questions for Readers

Consider the following as you read, and be sure to join the conversation in the comments!

• Have you ever experienced a creative breakthrough by talking through a problem—either with a person or an object? What was that moment like?

• How do you balance efficiency and originality when engaging third parties in your creative process? Are there specific boundaries you set for yourself?

• In what ways could a back-and-forth dialogue help uncover blind spots in your storytelling?

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Rubber Ducking: The Original “One Weird Trick”

Blockers are, definitionally, a pox on progress. Whether in the form of a dry well of ideas, the inability to recall a specific word, or a plot knot that isn’t going to untangle itself, these frustrating moments of how, exactly, am I going to move forward can upend advancement before words even hit the page.

The same is true in software engineering, where mischievous bugs and descents into callback hell can quickly mar even the most well-planned hands-on-keys code jams.

Fortunately, software engineers everywhere (or at least those who have been around for a minute) have long since had a strategy for combatting these moments of molasses.

Enter—the rubber duck.

Yes, the yellow floating bath time toys of yore figure into engineering outfits everywhere, crouching on desks in anticipation one-way conversation.

The theory is that, when plagued by programming paralysis, one can pick up the duck and describe one’s challenge out loud. Doing so tends to force clarity, stir step-by-step thinking, and reduce mental blocks by shifting one’s perspective and jogging the brain into recognizing previously unforeseen solutions.

It also encourages you to stop taking whatever you’re working on so seriously, which I find particularly beneficial.

Overall, this strategy works surprisingly well, but for as useful as it’s been, historically, the duck has never been able to talk back—until now.

Quacking Up: Taking Rubber Ducking Up a Notch

The digital duck who lives in my laptop is truly a wonder. He’s particularly adept at offering starting places for research, helping me recall words that are on the tip of my tongue, and identifying why a particular turn of phrase reads so oddly, even if it made sense when I first wrote it out.

“Now, Ryan,” one might say, “if the digital duck is such a savant with respect to words, couldn’t you simply ask it to rewrite your book for you?”

I could, yes—and some people use their digital ducks to do just that—but the thing about my digital duck is that he’s got a certain style when it comes to wordsmithing. It’s almost as if he consumed the whole of the internet and was trained to write in a style that I’ll call lowest common denominator; by design, it’s meant to be approachable, but it’s at times clunky and somehow, at others, overwrought.

It’s also, you know, not my voice, and my stories are certainly not the digital duck’s to tell.

Ducking and Weaving Through Rewrites

I recently engaged my digital duck when working on the rewrite for EMPATHY: Imminent Dawn. In this particular instance, I realized I had to backtrack to a chapter I had already rewritten once over¹ after noticing I had left opportunities for verisimilitude on the table.

By this, I mean one of my goals in rewriting this series is to conjure a world that feels more lived in. Not only that, but it needs to be darker: more grim, more gritty, more grievous.

For example, in the first point-of-view chapter for Imminent Dawn’s intrepid journalist character Meredith, I stitched in the following detail in the context of Chief Executive Gleason’s Civilians In Arms program, which provided willing citizens with government-funded firearms to ostensibly fend off a land invasion of the west coast.

Never mind [the Civilians In Arms program] birthed countless militias, including the one that carried out the massacre in question. Never mind it led to vulnerable communities being overrun—effectively ruled—by armed neighborhood gangs who demanded protection money to keep real or perceived threats at bay.

Aha! New details have emerged in this draft of the second edition, namely those in the second sentence: that some communities in the North American Union are now under the yoke of unaccountable neighborhood crime syndicates.

Taken on its own, this is a fine detail to include, but, I realized, one of Meredith’s defining pain points is that she herself is not particularly well-to-do. Might she live in a neighborhood that’s been overrun by gun-toting, jackbooted, military wannabes?

I didn’t make this connection for myself until after I’d rewritten the first chapter in which we see Meredith returning home from work, and readers of the series might recall that she previously lived in a fairly nondescript suburb of ranch homes on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Well, no longer!

Calling for the Duck

Given Meredith’s financial situation—and given other macroeconomic and social trends in the world in which she lives—I ultimately concluded she wouldn’t live in a neighborhood run by gangs, but rather one that has taken some level of precautionary measures to make would-be neighborhood domineers think twice before striding into town.

This required a significant re-imagining. What might her neighborhood look like as she approached by car? Who might she encounter? What would the mood be just on the outside of—and especially within—the perimeter of her community?

Inspired by something approximating the living situation of the main character in The Parable of the Sower, I could see it all vividly in my head: a patchwork fence, scattered debris, abandoned vehicles.

I could also see, uh, metal. Like the kind that, dang it, you’d see in a shanty town. Not that she lives in a shanty town, but more like, you know, it’s the wavy kind of metal that…

Yup, I got tongue-tied when it came to this detail, and it was really bumming me out. I felt like I could see precisely what I intended to write, but without the right word, I felt as though I couldn’t move forward.

Fortunately, I had a digital duck to discuss this with.

The Duck Quacks

In a pre- or mid-apocalyptic world, I began, in a neighborhood that has been built up to offer its residents makeshift protection in the form of a fence line, what might one see the fence line made out of? Feel free to ask five clarifying questions before you respond.

One may notice something interesting here. I didn’t come right out and ask, “Hey, duck, what’s that metal that you find laying around construction sites? It’s kind of wavy, maybe made of aluminum or tin. You see it used as roofing material in areas of fewer resources. You know what I mean, right?”

That would have been a fine approach, but my goal was to open up a dialogue here, not nab a single detail and hit the road. By zooming out a bit—and by prompting my digital duck to feel free to ask clarifying questions—my thought was I might uncover additional opportunities to broaden and enrich Meredith’s world.

The digital duck, ever dutiful, subsequently took me up on the opportunity to ask those five clarifying questions.

• What level of apocalypse are we dealing with? (E.g., slow societal collapse, zombie outbreak, nuclear event, resource scarcity, etc.)

• What kind of neighborhood is it? (Urban, suburban, rural? Wealthy, working-class, or impoverished?)

• How much time have the residents had to build the fence? (Days, weeks, months, or years?)

• Do the residents have access to construction equipment or skilled laborers, or are they relying on scavenged materials and basic tools?

• Are they more concerned with keeping threats out or signaling that the area is occupied and defended?

Now these really got me going. By forcing me to slow down and examine my priors, as they say, I realized there were a number of other opportunities I’d overlooked to flesh out the scene as I’d previously imagined it in my head.

For example, the mention of “skilled laborers” in one of its prompts immediately brought to mind a guard at a gate of sorts, possibly a retired contractor who would take it upon himself to offer protection—or at least the appearance of it—to his neighbors by manning the gate after having also played some role in its construction.

That my digital duck had the savvy to probe whether threats to the neighborhood were active or anticipated also encouraged me; this mirrored the very question I’d confronted when embracing the notion of Meredith’s neighborhood as one that was determined to stave off criminality rather than one actively under criminal control.

With these questions fresh in my mind, I returned to the page and typed out a few more sentences, including an introduction of this neighborhood watchman.

But I still couldn’t remember what the heck that thin, wavy metal was called.

So, again, rather than just ask the duck outright, I responded to each of its questions to see if doing so would help me uncover further details, as well as to see what it might have to offer by way of reply.

Its response, I have to say, was fantastic, because—there, bam!—in the second of eight suggestions for what the patchwork fence might include were the words I’d been looking for all along: sheet metal.

Good. Great. A win, right? Yes, but there was more value to be had. My digital duck now had an understanding of what I was trying to achieve, and, recently unblocked, I set out to draft Meredith’s approach of and entry into her neighborhood in full.

Some fifteen minutes later, Meredith approached the patchwork fence line of chain-link, sheet metal, and plywood that surrounded her neighborhood. A volunteer group had built it out of scrap from abandoned construction sites or upcycled material from their own DIY projects in recent years, and though it didn’t make her neighborhood particularly welcoming from the outside, it wasn’t meant to be—assuming its browned lawns and warped siding could have ever achieved welcoming in the first place.

Antonio, a retired contractor who minded the gate most work days, tipped his frayed ball cap as she slowed. “Afternoon,” he said. Woodward, his head halfway out the back window already, leaned into the scratches Antonio gave him behind the ears.

“You keeping hydrated out here?” Meredith said. “Can never be too careful on days like these.”

He nodded over his shoulder. Under an umbrella squatted a duct-tape-sturdied plastic table, on top of which rested two empty bottles of beer. In his free hand, he shook what remained of a third.

“Retirement seems like a blessing,” Meredith said.

Antonio laughed. “La vida es bendición.”

“Así la es,” Meredith replied. “Though some days more than others.”

“If you say so, vecina.” Antonio stepped back and slid the gate open. “Pasa ya before I get any ideas about taking that dog of yours home with me.”

Meredith hurled him a half-salute and inched forward through the gate, thanking him before she rolled up her window.

An older neighborhood, Meredith always loved twisting her way through its winding streets of ranch homes, even if the last ten years had seen dusty, abandoned vehicles begin to pop up along the curb. It was the neighbors that made a neighborhood, in the end, and all things considered, it wasn’t a terrible place to live—rolling brownouts and all.

Now, is this perfect? No, but first passes rarely are. Does it introduce a number of additional details that bring new life to the world in ways that were absent from the first edition of Imminent Dawn? Absolutely.

The introduction of this new character and the fence in general will also have significant spillover effects for my rewrite of Meredith’s arc. I now have to address questions related to how, exactly, someone manages to sneak in and drop mysterious envelopes at her front door. I have to determine how government thugs, other reporters, and friends alike manage to visit Meredith at home given the security measures now in place.

These are challenges I’m excited to take on, and I have a combination of my own guile and the prompting of my digital duck to thank.

Whose Duck Is It, Anyway?

So, I have a digital duck, yes, and I wish I’d had one going all the way back to 2011. And though it has, in a sense, largely just replaced² my use of Google, its ability to deliver quickly and with more detail than competing tools—and that I can engage it conversationally rather than by keyword—have made it an invaluable copilot in my writerly suite of tools.

But here’s the thing: there’s nothing particularly special about my digital duck. In fact, you have one, too—or at least you have access to one.

This is because, if you haven’t figured it out already, my digital duck comes in the form of OpenAI’s ChatGPT³, one of the many digital ducks now just awaiting your engagement should you so choose.

How you use your digital duck is also entirely up to you, but, as we’ve covered in a number of other posts⁴, digital ducks aren’t perfect. It’s worthwhile to fact check them when using them for research, particularly if you’re using them to source information about fields and topics with which you have little familiarity. And, as I mentioned earlier, if you do plan to use them as a tool that does the actual writing—which I personally don’t recommend—you’ll likely want to be mindful of the fact that sometimes the writing is, at least as I see it, not particularly good.

Digital Duck Ponds

If you’ve not employed a digital duck yourself, you may be wondering where, exactly, you can find one. I have personally gravitated toward ChatGPT, but Anthropic’s Claude⁵ is a favorite amongst many others as well.

Other models have come into the fray recently, too—including DeepSeek, which I won’t link to here—and more are popping up every day, but the investment in the models I’ve named thus far makes them likely contenders to hang around for a while.

Feed the Duck and Take Flight

Whether one chooses to chat with a digital duck once a month, once a week, or once a day⁶, for now I’m of the belief that there are advantages to be had in engaging them. So long as one does so with their eyes wide open about what they are and, more importantly, what they’re not, digital ducks can quickly become a crucial tool in one’s workflow—for now, at least.

Because who knows where we’ll be in another fifteen years?⁷

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Tell Me in the Comments

• Have you ever experienced a creative breakthrough by talking through a problem—either with a person or an object? What was that moment like?

• How do you balance efficiency and originality when engaging third parties in your creative process? Are there specific boundaries you set for yourself?

• In what ways could a back-and-forth dialogue help uncover blind spots in your storytelling?

1. Once over in this iteration, anyway.

2. To be more precise, it’s become a tool I use upstream of Google. It’s a complement, really.

3. Here’s a link to my conversation about the scene in question, if you’d like to see how I engaged ChatGPT in full detail.

4. The full slate of posts on artificial intelligence tooling can be found at this link.

5. I should really switch to Claude, or at least give it another shot. Anthropic’s commitment to developing what it terms an “ethical AI” is just one of many reasons why.

6. Or, hey, not at all.

7. Or fifteen months. Weeks. Days.