how to: become the writer you thought youâd always be
Last night, I watched a documentary on Nora Ephron made by her son after she died. Itâs called âEverything Is Copy,â after something Noraâs mother used to say to her. Everything is copy: that means itâs all yours for the taking. If you lived it, if you know somebody who lived it, if you once imagined you might live it â itâs all fair game. If you lived it, you can write it.
And if you havenât lived it? If youâre 23 years old and youâve spent all that time, 23 long years of it, waiting for things to happen to you?
Thatâs the part Iâm not sure about.
But I bet if I asked Nora, sheâd say, âYou make it up.â
Of course you do. Â
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 youâre 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 â maybe that voice wasnât 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? Thatâs okay. Sometimes it takes time to break new ones in. Maybe youâll bleed, or maybe youâll get calluses, the kind that only develop when somethingâs well-worn and well-traveled.
Maybe youâll stay in this voice for a while. Maybe itâll stretch with you. Maybe youâll work it til its edges fray. Â
Oh â itâs not the right one?
Donât worry, keep looking. Youâll know it when you see it. Â
i wrote this two years ago and i have no idea what email address this blog is attached to so i guess it's lost forever??
















