"Above all, be the heroine of your life." -Nora Ephron

Many times we look for others for inspiration, for an example, and that is wonderful because we are keeping each other in check. When I know that someone is looking to me for guidance or for advice, I try harder than I normally would. But isn't it even more important that we look to ourselves for inspiration? Shouldn't we work hard every day to be the purest, most loving and genuine people we can be? Shouldn't our lives be full of action that cause reaction? We shouldn't sit around waiting for others to do something so that we can see their success and follow in their footsteps. We all must be our own heroines (or heroes, gentlemen).

Fiction writers, when you sit down, don't you want to write a story where the heroine or hero bears an uncanny resemblance to yourself? Don't you have to force yourself to give the character a different personality, different traits, different flaws, a different appearance, and an entirely different life? We love talking about ourselves, but not everyone is going to love reading about every little thing that happened to us. In Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, she talks about the story that she was writing called "Arnold." She tried for years and years to get it published, and finally her editor sent it back to her with a note telling her that she had made the mistake of "thinking that everything that happened to her was interesting." Isn't that so true? We all think everything that happens to us is interesting because it affects us in a way that it affects no one else. But we cannot spend all our time writing about ourselves because in the end it is not about ourselves but about the human spirit. We have to find material that everyone can relate to because that is what people want to read, that is what people understand. But that is also why we have to be the heroine or hero of our own lives: so that in our own personal story, the story that only we can read, that only we can know fully, everything that happens to us is interesting.