How age and experience inform our writing
The benefits of being an older writer
This post was inspired by an interview with Lore Segal in the New York Times magazine. She was talking about her novel, Her First American, that took her 18 years to complete.
She says, “Nothing was ever harder to write. It’s my best book, but it took 18 years. After six years, I realized I had a big problem: I knew who the man was, but I didn’t know who the woman was. Was she young? Was she married? So I stopped writing. Then I went back to it, and I discovered I had been enlightened as to who the woman was. And I was ready to finish.”
Then yesterday, at my book event at a local Barnes & Noble, I was talking to an older (mid-eighties) poet about the focus on young (in chronological terms) authors and how they tend to get proportionally more attention than those in their sixties and beyond, as though we (and I’m in that group) are too old to have anything worthwhile to offer.
As she noted, the benefit of being an older writer is that we bring more to the writing table—our age, our experiences, and our wisdom (assuming we have learned from our mistakes!)—and that informs our writing. And that there are aspects of life that often we simply can’t write about with any depth or veracity until we have experienced something similar.
It doesn’t have to be the exact same event. But it would be one that would generate the same type of emotion or reaction. For example, we may be writing about a character who has lost a child but had never personally experienced that type of loss. So we call upon that sense of grief and despair that we felt in a similar situation, i.e., the death of a loved one—parent, sibling, spouse.
Not exactly the same, but because we are writers, we can imagine how our character feels.
Along the same lines, each life stage brings its own challenges and questions—ones that we may not be able to imagine until we find ourselves in the midst of them. How we view life can change dramatically as we move from being a young writer to one who has decades of experience.
Going back to what Segal said, I couldn’t help wondering what had led to her enlightenment about that character. Was it something in her own life? Was it something she was able to understand more clearly than she could when she first started writing about her?
In the intervening years, had she learned something about life in general that she didn’t know when she first created that woman?
I don’t know and sadly, since she has since died, I’ll never find out. But I do know that in many ways my writing has changed—gotten deeper, broader, more expansive—since I first started writing fiction.
Because I have met more people, interacted with them as they were undergoing life experiences, I have learned more about how one might and could respond when things go well or badly, when events result in surprises one enjoys or outcomes one fears, when relationships turn upside down and inside out.
And because things have happened to me that I couldn’t have foreseen, my own understanding of how one might react has grown. I have, depending on the situation, been proud of how I handled things or been ashamed of the choices I made.
Through the lens of time, I can see where, at that moment, I made the right decision and yet, should I find myself facing the same situation at the age I am now, might make a different choice.
And because I am a writer, this teaches me something about how my character might react at different life stages and gives me options and alternatives when I am struggling to move him or her through the story.
What it comes down to is that our writing ability is fluid and ever-changing, growing and expanding, influenced by who we are as people and as writers. The more we experience, the greater our understanding can become—assuming, of course, that we do not limit ourselves by prejudices and preconceptions.
Another quote comes from Anaïs Nin: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”
Retrospection—the reviewing of the past—can allow us to see things more clearly than we did when they were occurring. And that insight is what we, as older writers, can bring to the paper and ultimately to our readers.
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