Aging Writers

Most writers work in relative obscurity, even many with a trail of published works—novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and poems that few people will ever read. Yet those I know refuse to quit, even in their 70’s and beyond despite scant external rewards.

When one grows older publication becomes more difficult as literary fashions change, contacts croak or retire, and new gatekeepers look askance at writers such as myself judged to be “too male, too pale, and too stale,” in the words of Pulitzer Prize novelist Joshua Cohen. Most of us are relegated to publication by small, literary, and academic presses and journals, where fame and fortune are unlikely. Or worse, self-publishing, joining Amazon.com’s half-billion-novel slush pile. Still one perseveres, even poets. As a colleague once lamented, “For you novelists at least there’s hope. For us poets there’s nowhere to go.” Indelicate as usual, I corrected him. “Nowhere up.”

So why keep on? Youthful motivations, e.g., pride, avarice, envy, and lust, have diminished and been replaced by something less sinful and perhaps even divine: a desire to create something beautiful. With age one comes to believe Dostoevsky was right: beauty will save the world. And because this is the only thing you’ve done in life that consumes all of you, body and soul. Everything you’ve felt, learned, read, saw, heard, suffered, or dreamt. That is, the fuel of your inspiration and imagination. Because over the years that act of creation has become the most satisfying pleasure of being alive. That you can conceive other people who breathe, speak, and act; characters, places, and stories that at times move you to tears as you give them birth. A godlike gratification, that you can concoct from seeming nothingness something tangible that could never have existed without your creating it, and it is printed and read by others who visit your world and are moved too. Other pleasures may diminish with age, repetition, and inevitable physical decline, but not this one. Unlike your tennis game or perhaps your love life, it keeps getting better and you keep learning how to make it so.

And, as an aging creative writer (and likely cynic) skilled at devising plausible scenes, you envision your own life’s end when (lacking a breakthrough novel or unlikely inheritance in the interim) you expire alone in a dusty garret. After which some stout landlady comes to clear out your scant possessions, consigning your remaining manuscripts and hard drives to a nearby dumpster. I picture her tossing this worthless literary detritus from an open second-floor window into a yawning, green Waste Management receptacle waiting below, afterward brushing her hands together to rid them of any remaining contamination while perhaps reciting Ozymandias to herself, ignorant of all the high-times and hijinks, love and beauty, heart and soul of a life well lived that went into it all.