13 Mar Roy G. Biv
There are folded pieces of paper on the passenger seat of my car, wedged between a tangle of charging cords, a Kindle, a laptop, and an iPad. One is a storm of scribbles—half-formed sentences, words crossed out in frustration. The other is a kids’ menu, carefully colored, a duck bright with every shade of the rainbow.
I pick them up, smoothing out the wrinkles, and smile at the remnants of a story.
It started with Emma, carefully coloring the duck on the restaurant’s kids’ menu. The hostess had given her a box of freshly sharpened colored pencils, and she was making the duck her own—every feather a different hue, the beak and feet blending into a spectrum of colors.
We were in Sedona for a girls’ weekend—two friends, my daughters, and me. That morning, we wandered unhurried before settling into a restaurant overlooking the creek and the sycamores.
My friend, Amy, pointed to the duck Emma had colored and asked, “If that duck was in a story, what would it be about?”
“We should ask ChatGPT to make us one!” Emma said.
“We don’t need AI!” Amy laughed. “We can make our own story!”
And just like that, the afternoon belonged to Roilyn Gianna Bivson—Roy G. Biv for short.
Ella ran to the host stand for scratch paper. Soon, the table was covered in ideas—scribbled names, crossed-out plot points, half-formed sentences. We debated whether Roy should have a rival, tested different opening lines, and searched for the right way to describe the longing of a duck who was told to care about how she looked but only cared about what she could do.
Roy was born into a family where beauty was everything. She was the most beautiful duck of all, so much so that her parents sent her to a hotel just to be admired. But Roy didn’t care about beauty. She wanted to be smart and capable and accomplished. Most of all, she wanted to be a professional diver—to slice through the water with precision and enter cleanly without a single ripple. Underwater, she felt weightless, limitless, free.
At one point, we made a table. On one side, what Roy was supposed to be: graceful and elegant and admired. On the other, what she wanted to be: strong and fast and skilled.
Ella, delighted by a recent English lesson, said, “It’s called a polysyndeton when you add ‘and’ over and over again. Listen—‘Roy wanted to be strong and fast and skilled and free.’”
We nodded in appreciation. The rhythm was right.
Now, looking at the papers in my car, I think about how easily this story could have never existed—how, in another version of the afternoon, we could have simply eaten our lunch, scrolled through our phones, and let the moment pass.
AI could write a story. Maybe even better than we did. It could structure it perfectly and smooth out our rough edges and polish the sentences until they gleamed.
But it wouldn’t have given us this.
It couldn’t give us the spark of an idea catching fire across a table and the delight of twisting a plotline until it made us laugh. It couldn’t give us the rhythm of voices overlapping, the hum of concentration as a story takes shape, and the deep, human satisfaction of making something out of nothing.
These moments won’t fight for our attention. They slip away unless we make space for them.
The spark is magic, and the laughter is magic, and the story taking shape, word by word, is magic, and the moment it all comes together is magic.
And that magic is ours to keep.