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In writing and in life.
I love Nora Ephron. She’s one of my writing idols. It’s not just her old Esquire essays but her courage: To move from newspapers to magazines, and from magazines to novels, and from novels to screenplays, and from screenplays to the director’s chair. In her life, Nora never let anyone tell her she couldn’t try something. She got better as she aged, and she got better at more and more things. She was once asked how she did it all, how she became this multi-hyphenate creative sensation, and she said:
“Patience and trust.”
I scrawled it down on a piece of paper when I read it. She said a lot that resonated. My favorite essay collection of hers is I Feel Bad About My Neck, published in 2008, four years before she died. The essays look back on her life and in one of them she argues why more journalists should become screenwriters. Nora said the dialogue of screenwriting is basically the great quotes that journalists train themselves to hear in interviews. And the structure of any movie mimics the structure of any great magazine piece: the introduction of conflict; the exploration of that conflict; the resolution of that conflict.
Around the time my first book was published DreamWorks optioned it to be made into a film. Nothing came of the movie, and I wasn’t the one writing…
