Esteemed writer Nora Ephron died in 2012. In 2015, her son Jacob Bernstein released the documentary Everything is Copy about her career and life. The name, “everything is copy,” is an Ephron family motto started by Ephron’s mother, screenwriter Phoebe Wolkind. The phrase means that everything in your life is creative inspiration, and was used to set the tone for Ephron’s entire body of work. Everything is copy gave Ephron relatability and connection to audiences, and shows the strengths of writing based on real-life experience in writing.
Autobiographical writing can be a tricky beast. There’s a line between stating what has happened to you to audiences who may not be emotionally invested in those anecdotes of your life and connecting with audiences through common experiences. Being able to make a common experience universally conveyed through storytelling is a marketable and highly valuable skill, just think of many big singer-songwriter types. Reliability is a valuable skill in art especially, as it takes the weight off the audience or consumer to identify their situation in their own words. Relatable media gives them an already existing explanation in the form of music, TV, movies, books, etc. If an artist is easily relatable, their work is able to sell itself. People find the escape, interpretation, meaning to their life in the work stemming from the life of someone else, which leaves them wanting more to continue to unpack and react to their lives.Â
Ephron’s work always stayed relatable even if it wasn’t based on experiences audiences could say have happened to them, too. One of her (many) career breakthroughs was with her 1983 novel Heartburn. Heartburn was about Ephron’s real-life experience of finding out her husband (Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein) was cheating on her, while she was pregnant. Finding out your husband is cheating on you while you’re pregnant is (hopefully) not commonplace, but somehow Ephron made it something many could relate to. The story’s exploration of Nora’s marital ups and downs, early motherhood, and the reality of being a woman made it a story other women could see themselves in.Â
Ultimately, Ephron’s work always came down to the humanity of the characters at the forefront, regardless of their situations. Whether they were in love with their email pen pal who was really their competing bookstore owner, friends who slowly fall in love, or a journalist who falls in love with a single father in Seattle, all of Ephron’s characters have a piece of humanity within them that connects to audiences. Ephron’s entire body of work centers on characters that feel so alive, so developed, it’s hard to remember they’re figments of her imagination. But, knowing her creative ethos, it’s not farfetched to suggest that maybe they aren’t fully imagined. The characters, rather, might be a culmination of real-life experiences of Ephron’s.Â
The value of switching the narrative over your life — making everything copy — is an ethos that holds many benefits. Looking at everything as inspiration makes the world more interesting. When everything could be a catalyst for creation, the way in which we move about the world becomes more interesting, more introspective. For creative-minded people especially this mindset ensures there’s never really a shortage of inspiration, it’s just about learning where to look for it. Additionally, making everything a story changes the control of a situation. “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh,” Ephron says. “You become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”
Ultimately, everything really is copy. Everything that happens to you is a chance for you to grow, change, talk about it. Inspiration and opportunity is everywhere, in the mundane and regular or the extraordinary and unique. Everything is copy.Â