By Brendan O’Meara
David Duchovny, the author, actor, musician, recently said about himself when he was young, “I had a way with words with nothing to say.”
There are any number of people who can write a nice sentence, maybe even in the MFA programs where they think beauty or lyricism can carry the day.
Fact is, if you don’t live a life on which to make art, you won’t have anything to say.
And you don’t need trauma in your life to have something to say. Someone recently told me that they were writing an essay and they said it wasn’t going to be personal since there wasn’t any trauma in the piece.
I resisted saying that a piece does not have to be traumatic to be a personal story. In fact, I appreciate the skill it takes to make something seemingly innocuous into a compelling story.
That isn’t to devalue the trauma, but you don’t need to trauma to make things interesting.
The technique will come. All you need is to live a life worth writing about.
