Finding your voice.

In terms of vastness and messiness, my Dad’s desk was a thicket of chaos, strewn, stacked, and littered with all manner of letters, quotes, documents, pens, pencils, tape dispensers and staplers in various configurations, coffee cups, the remains of yesterday’s lunch, and other elements of office detritus.?Try as we might, none of us – not his secretary, his partner, my Mom, me (who worked for him in the summer) – could find?anything?on it.?But move something, let alone remove it??Do so and risk the wrath of Abe:?

“Where is it??Why did you move it??Do not, DO NOT, mess with my desk.?Don’t try to organize me.?I know exactly where everything is.”?

My desk isn’t quite the Bermuda triangle of things-gone-missing like my Dad’s, but even so, it explains why, for months now, I lost sight of?The New Yorker?article I had been planning to cite in a post.?The other day I went looking for my?Central High School?Yearbook (to me,?the best?high school in the country) to check a photo of Martin Heller – Martin liked my previous post and I wanted to get a glimpse of his younger self – and by accident stumbled on the now-gathering-dust issue.?In it is the?story, “The Close Reader,” about highly acclaimed now-deceased novelist/screenwriter/director?Nora Ephron.

It was Ephron’s mother, Phoebe, also a well-regarded screenwriter, who advised her daughter to write as if she were composing a letter, eliminating the salutation. The line is pretty much a throw-away, but it captured my attention.

“Why?” you ask.

Because she’s right.

So much of what I read from advertising and marketing agencies – proposals, letters of opinion, routine email and text correspondence – sounds as if it’s originating from a disembodied robot:?detached, sterile, devoid of personality or character.?There’s no person present.?Eliminate the person, eliminate the voice.

If you examine the material you’ve written and conclude the description is apt, there are three things you can do to restore your presence in what you write:

• Do as Phoebe Ephron suggests.?Imagine you are connecting with a colleague, trading third-person impersonal language for the more intimate and connected first person.?This alone injects humanity, personality, and soul?into what once was colorless.
• Do as I do.??You could open with the point you want to make, but I would open with a story, as I did with this post.?Stories make you real to the reader; your voice is integral to the telling of it.?Rather than interfere with your message, they serve to enhance it.?
• Do write quickly, then don’t.??Even with the shortest of breaks from your keyboard, it is amazing how your perspective shifts.?Seeing with fresh eyes often leads to revisions and refinements that make what you’ve written?so much?better.?I realize there are schedules and deadlines to contend with, but the more breaks you can manage, the better your writing becomes.

I began this piece with a story, but don’t know how to end it.?Should I figure out a way to reference my Dad’s desk, or my desk, or both desks??Should I return to?The?New Yorker?story??Should I try something else??

I’ll follow my own advice and step away from the keyboard.

A day later:?I’ve got it now …

I’m not a reader of Ephron’s books, but I have seen the movies, in particular?When Harry Met Sally,?Sleepless in Seattle, and?You’ve Got Mail.?Even with the screenplays, you always can hear her voice, distinctive, singular, particular to her.

None of us are likely to replicate Ephron’s wit, but all of us can fashion a voice that is uniquely ours.

As for my Dad, were he still around, we’d be celebrating his 101st?birthday today.?Thirty-six-plus years since his departure to the big food brokerage in the sky, it becomes progressively more a struggle to keep him fully in view.

And yet, when I summon the memory of him rummaging through papers on his disaster of a desk, my focus becomes sharp, clear, and immediate; for that, I am grateful.