Nora Ephron wrote for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan.
She was nominated for 3 Oscars, 2 Baftas, a Golden Globe, a Tony, and 5 Writers Guild of America awards. She also published 8 books.
So she knew a lot about writing.
She explains that, when she was young, she thought writing was just about writing. But at high school, she learned that writing, like most things, is really about thinking.
She tells the story like this: “My high school journalism teacher was teaching us to write a lead – that’s the first sentence or paragraph of a newspaper story.
He wrote the words ‘Who What When Where Why and How’ on the blackboard.
Then he dictated a set of facts to us that went something like this:
‘The principal of the school announced today that the entire faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be anthropologist Margaret Mead and the president of the University of Chicago.’
We all sat at our typewriters and we wrote our version of the lead. Most of us inverting the set of facts so that they read something like this:
‘Anthropologist Margaret Mead and the University of Chicago president will address the faculty on Thursday in Sacramento at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal of the high school announced today.’
We turn in our leads. We’re very proud.
Mr Simms looks at what we’ve done and tosses everything into the garbage.
He says: ‘You all failed.
The actual lead to the story is: “There will be no school on Thursday.”’
An electric lightbulb turned itself on in my head.
I decided at that moment that I want to be a journalist.”
What Nora Ephron’s teacher demonstrated to them was that writing isn’t about writing.
Writing, like everything, is about thinking.
What the students had tried to do was try to improve the style of what the teacher said, it hadn’t occurred to them to think any deeper.
But if they’d been thinking, they’d have known “faculty” means the entire teaching staff at school.
If there aren’t any teaching staff at the school, there can’t be any school on that day. So the entire school must be closed.
And that’s a much bigger opening. That takes the story to a whole new level.
Taking a boring set of facts to a whole new level is what we should be doing.
Before we pick up a pencil or a marker, before we start tapping on a laptop, before we start writing anything we should be thinking upstream.
Thinking upstream should actually happen even before writing the brief.
But usually that doesn’t occur, because the people who write the brief aren’t creative.
They’ve usually come straight into advertising from university.
At university they learned their thinking from people who also aren’t creative.
They learned thinking from people who are looking for the correct answer, not the interesting answer.
They’re looking for the expected, for the conventional, for traditional thinking.
So they learned not to question the brief, just to rewrite the facts more stylishly.
That’s how they got their degree. If they’d questioned the brief they would have failed their degree.
So remember when you get a brief, the people who wrote it got a degree in not questioning the brief.
That’s why, when we get a brief we have to unravel it and see what thinking they’ve missed.
Let’s learn upstream thinking from Nora Ephron.
Writing isn’t about writing, like everything else it’s about thinking.