Finding the words already there

Someone asks you to say a few words at a farewell dinner. A close friend is moving abroad, his family will be there, and you have three days.

The usual reaction is panic, then a blank page. You try to invent something: a clever opening, a line that will make the room laugh, a structure that builds to a moving close. You write four versions and dislike all of them, because each one sounds like a speech and none of them sounds like him.

There is another way to approach it. The words you need already exist. They are in the habits everyone at that table recognises: the way he always arrives late carrying food for everyone, the advice he gives that nobody asked for and everybody took, the phone call at two in the morning he has never once mentioned. You do not need to create any of that. You need to find it, pick it up, and hold it where the room can see.

That is a different job. Inventing asks you to produce something from nothing, which is frightening and usually comes out forced. Discovering asks you to look closely at what is already true. You ask his sister for a story. You remember. You notice.

A great deal of what we believe must be invented, a name for a small business, a direction for a career, the right thing to say at a hard moment, is in fact waiting to be found. We make the work heavier than it is by insisting that we start from nothing.

Most of the time, the answer is already in the room. The work is to go and look for it.