how to: become the writer you thought you’d always be
Last night, I watched a documentary on Nora Ephron made by her son after she died. It's called "Everything Is Copy," after something Nora's mother used to say to her. Everything is copy: that means it's all yours for the taking. If you lived it, if you know somebody who lived it, if you once imagined you might live it -- it's all fair game. If you lived it, you can write it.
And if you haven't lived it? If you're 23 years old and you've spent all that time, 23 long years of it, waiting for things to happen to you?
That's the part I'm not sure about.
But I bet if I asked Nora, she'd say, "You make it up."
Of course you do.
You pick up your pen or your damn laptop and you make words come out of your fingertips and you try not to hate them. You never erase, because you're afraid of the delete key and the possibility that things once lost are gone forever. You abandon a blog. You start a different blog. You abandon that one and start again. You try to find your voice.
You try to find your voice again. You had it, once. But maybe that voice, the sad, broken one that you wrote with in high school -- maybe that voice wasn't yours. Maybe it was just on loan to you, a library book long overdue, until you found your own.
Is this it? Does it feel right? You should go walk on the tile floor, on the hardwood, see if it rubs in the wrong places. You feel any blisters coming? That's okay. Sometimes it takes time to break new ones in. Maybe you'll bleed, or maybe you'll get calluses, the kind that only develop when something's well-worn and well-traveled.
Maybe you'll stay in this voice for a while. Maybe it'll stretch with you. Maybe you'll work it til its edges fray.
Oh -- it's not the right one?
Don't worry, keep looking. You'll know it when you see it.
