GRAMMATICALLY INCORRECT MORAL OUTRAGE

BOREL: You’ve said that as you get further into your career, you become afraid of repeating yourself, of repeating narratives. What exercises do you undertake to keep your brain churning out fresh material?

EPHRON: One exercise is to write. That’s one of the reasons I became interested in blogging—it was a new muscle to flex. I mean, I’m not even sure it is any longer, because things move very quickly in internet culture, but six years ago it was a new form. It wasn’t quite an essay, but it was essayish. It had to be short because of the concentration span of the reader. It had a different function from other kinds of writing, in that it wasn’t meant to just be this piece of writing that people read, it was meant to be a piece of writing that started a conversation among the readers. Which became a reason for people to read it, so that they could then express what they thought about it. And once you learn that about blogging, then you first of all have the sense not to read any of the comments—because at a certain point they will be mean about you.

BOREL: Right. And they’ll always invoke Hitler at some point, according to Godwin’s law of Nazi Analogies.

EPHRON: Yeah! Or totally miss the joke. That’s a given.

BOREL: The internet is the superhighway of grammatically incorrect moral outrage.

EPHRON: The thing is, you don’t really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you’re writing it. You don’t bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay. You don’t think, Is this what I really want to say? You think, This is what I feel like saying at this moment. So that’s one way to stay fresh. But there’s no question in my mind…I sometimes feel like I don’t have a thought that I haven’t already written at some point in my life. [Pause] I don’t mean that exactly. I honestly do have an original idea now and then. But there is a kind of sense of: If I were writing a column once a week, oh my god, I’d shoot myself! But the people who do do it are my writing heroes. I just can’t get over how hard that is. People like Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins. . .My jaw is on the floor thinking of what it would be like to have to think of that many ideas. When I was at Esquire I did a monthly column, and that was about as many ideas as I had a year. About twelve ideas. There’s no question that writing for a monthly is different than writing for a weekly. That’s just the truth.

You know, the older I get, the more I understand what [Marshall] McLuhan meant when he said, “The medium is the message.” I didn’t really get it at all when I first read it, and now I’m very conscious of it. For instance, when I read a book on a Kindle, I’ve noticed that I’m more impatient. Because I’m turning the page so often, if something hasn’t happened, I think, When is anything going to happen in this book? You become way more obsessed with plot than you would if you had an actual book and you understood where you were in that book. That little percentage tracker on the bottom of the Kindle screen is not a helpful thing. You can’t go back when you’ve forgotten who a character is. So I’m very conscious of how that medium changes the reading experience completely.