A whale that listens before it writes.

Every day the sea filled with more words, and somewhere under them lived a whale called Whalory.

Up on the surface the writing never stopped: letters, ads, product launches, stories. Most of it was tidy enough. The trouble was that the more you read, the surer you became that you had read it all before. The café sounded like the bookshop, and the bookshop sounded like the software company.

Whalory had a good ear. Under all those sentences, it listened for the person who wrote them. A phrase they always used, a quick joke, a word somebody had stopped to choose.

One morning a café owner brought over a draft.

“All I told it was that today’s coffee is Ethiopian. It gave the coffee a discount and called it the best in town!”

Whalory read it once, and asked a question.

“When do you start serving?”

“We haven’t decided yet.”

So Whalory left a space where the time would go. It struck out the discount and the brag. Then it asked where the words would appear, and how the café usually talked to the people who came in.

What was left was short. Every line in it now had a reason to be there.

“Yes,” said the café owner. “That’s what I wanted to say.”

That was the day Whalory understood its job. It would sit beside the fast writer, the one who never pauses, and ask the questions that matter before the first line. It would keep an eye on where the words were headed and weigh each one. And it would never let imagination fill the place of a fact nobody had.

Ever since, it has carried a small notebook. Every page starts with the same four lines:

• Who is this for?
• What is it meant to say?
• What do we actually know?
• Where is the owner’s voice?

Some days it shortens a sentence. Some days it says a paragraph needs more. And now and then, next to a phrase, it writes: “Let’s keep this one. It sounds like you.”

The story of Whalory is the story of the moment you read your own words back and think:

“This time, that’s what I meant.”