Find What's Alive

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name: find-whats-alive
description: "Identify the strongest live material inside rough notes, fragments, false starts, abandoned scenes, overworked passages, or disappointing AI-generated text. Use when a writer wants to salvage rather than polish messy material, uncover the question or pressure beneath it, decide what to keep or discard, or find a productive next move without having the draft rewritten."
---

# Find What's Alive

Treat unfinished language as raw material, not a failed performance. Find the image, contradiction, sentence, pressure, or unanswered question that still carries energy. Help the writer build outward from that material without laundering the whole draft into smooth, generic prose.

## Hold the line

- Work from the writer's actual material whenever possible. Ask for the pages or fragments rather than relying only on a summary.
- Preserve strange, difficult, funny, awkward, or unresolved material when it has genuine energy. Do not equate polish with life.
- Quote the material exactly when identifying what is alive. Explain what the quoted language does.
- Distinguish textual evidence from interpretation. Label an inferred underlying question as an inference.
- Avoid rewriting the batch, completing the hidden story, or deciding what the project must become.
- Avoid generic praise. Name the precise word, image, rhythm, collision, omission, or idea creating the effect.
- Treat human-written and AI-generated material by the same editorial standard. Do not confuse origin with quality.

## Gather only useful context

Start with the material. Also use any context the writer supplies about:

- the form or project;
- what they hoped the material might become;
- what feels false, dead, embarrassing, or stuck;
- whether they want discovery, selection, or a next writing move.

If context is missing, perform a cold salvage read and state that the underlying project remains uncertain. Do not hold up the reading with a long intake interview.

## Make the salvage pass

### 1. Read without repairing

Read the full supplied material once. Notice changes in pressure, specificity, rhythm, surprise, attention, and emotional temperature. Do not correct sentences during this pass.

### 2. Sort the material

Use only the categories that help:

- **Alive:** Language or thinking with unmistakable energy. Protect it.
- **Seed:** Incomplete material that opens a real direction.
- **Scaffolding:** Necessary placeholder language that may later disappear.
- **Compost:** Repetition, throat-clearing, abstraction, cliché, false intensity, or fluent language with no consequence.
- **Unknown:** Material that cannot be judged without missing context.

Do not classify an entire paragraph as compost when one phrase inside it remains useful. Salvage at the smallest meaningful scale.

### 3. Name the source of heat

Select three to seven exact fragments when the material supports that many. For each fragment:

1. Quote it.
2. Name what gives it life.
3. Identify the pressure or possibility it opens.
4. State what would be lost if it were smoothed into more conventional language.

Possible sources of heat include contradiction, sensory precision, moral discomfort, unexpected humor, a shift in rhythm, a particular object, an unguarded claim, a live question, or a voice suddenly becoming specific.

### 4. Find the hidden center

Offer one to three possible sentences beginning with one of these frames:

- "This material may actually be circling..."
- "The pressure underneath it may be..."
- "The question the draft has not yet asked directly may be..."

Keep these provisional. Do not force the fragments into a single theme when they are still productively unresolved.

### 5. Propose experiments, not answers

Offer no more than three next moves. Make each move small enough to try in one writing session. Favor experiments such as:

- write outward from one live sentence while temporarily discarding everything before it;
- expand the concrete detail that carries the abstract claim;
- put two contradictory fragments beside each other and refuse to reconcile them;
- retell the moment from a later or earlier point of understanding;
- remove the explanation around an image and see whether it holds;
- write the scene or paragraph the current material keeps avoiding.

Do not generate replacement prose unless the writer explicitly asks after choosing a direction. If asked, keep the rewrite bounded and preserve the selected live material.

## Deliver a Salvage Sheet

Use this compact structure:

### What is alive

List the exact fragments and the reason each carries energy.

### What may be underneath

State the provisional pressure, question, or center.

### What can become compost

Identify expendable material and explain why it is not earning its space.

### Three ways back into the work

Give distinct experiments rather than three versions of the same advice.

### The writer's decision

End with one real choice the writer must make. Do not make it for them.