Age is just a number
What are the pros and cons brought by youthful enthusiasm vs experience and a more balanced head?
I turned forty-two last year and, while still I await the answer to life, the universe and everything, it did set me off thinking about my creative journey in life to date and whether starting my current main creative venture: writing fiction, at thirty-seven years of age was too late.
So, I dug around in my own chequered experience, consulted with some other creatives, and considered the pros and cons of creating in youth and middle age. This is what I’ve come up with.
The exuberance of youth
One of the main benefits of being a creator in your teens or twenties is that boundless energy that seems almost to radiate from you at every moment. You can get by on far fewer hours of sleep; you generally need less in the way of down time and recharging.
When I was young, my passion was music, and I spent most of my waking hours listening to, thinking about, or making heavy metal. I’d practise three times a week, after work or at the weekends, and still manage to fit in recording sessions in the studio, promotional work on a fledgling internet (anyone else remember MP3.com?) and writing song lyrics in a notebook to try out at the next practice.
Hell, I remember once doing a mini tour, all over England, while working a full-time job. Seven shows in ten nights, starting work at six in the morning. I’d head off to a show at six in the evening, headbang my way through forty-five minutes of my band’s music, drink a couple pints while watching the headliners, stop off for a curry, before the journey home and getting to bed at three the following morning. Rinse and repeat. And I felt great.
If I did that today, I’d be lucky to survive my drive into work.
An untainted mind
Like most people who come around to writing, I was a voracious reader as a child. Starting with writers like Roald Dahl, works of fantasy by Tolkien or Steve Jackson, and comics from Marvel and DC, I soon found my place with horrors, from the teen friendly R. L. Stine, up to James Herbert and Stephen King.
But it was all reading for pleasure. For the thrill of being catapulted off to another place and losing yourself in someone else’s story. I didn’t study what I was reading. Rather, I soaked it up like a sponge. That led to a kind of purity in my own story telling. What I created felt less constricted by conventions, or what I understood that stories should be. Naturally, I would now laugh at a lot of what I wrote in those days, but there’s unquestionable value in having a creative mind which is so wide open. So blindly confident. And this is something I’m having to retrain myself in, as an older creator.
Expelling the evil
There’s a general consensus (which perhaps applies to writing more than to other creative pursuits), and that is that the first hundred thousand words or so that you write are going to be garbage. While I did write stories as a young man, they were few and far between, always taking a back seat to the music. It probably means that when I started writing seriously in 2016, I still had a lot of poison to purge from my system. Not bad ideas, so much as appalling execution. When compiling my short story collection, Paths Best Left Untrodden in 2021, I was surprised by how many of the stories I had originally envisaged being part of it had to be cut adrift, the quality of the prose just not being there. Had I begun much younger, I could perhaps have toned that writing muscle into something stronger, more precise, and begun creating the good stuff atan earlier point.
The wisdom of ages
Okay, I’m not quite as grey as Gandalf yet, but I certainly think age has bestowed upon me a certain pragmatism to go along with the untameable eyebrows. An understanding of where I currently am in my own progress, and also where I might fit into the wider landscape of the dark fiction space my writing occupies. I don’t feel the need to make a lot of noise. I know that my more emotional reactions to turns of events: disappointment, frustration and—whisper it—professional jealousy, are just that: emotional. They’re valid, they’re honest and they’re for me. Not for public consumption. Sometimes, particularly on social media, you see younger members of the writing community sharing their vexations and it’s often uncomfortable, at times embarrassing and literally never helpful. I have a calm awareness that, while I might not have time to tell all the stories I want to before the reaper comes for my mortal soul, the best way to strive against that is to do the work, put my best into my craft and then network and promote in a constructive way. It takes time, but your audience does find you, eventually.
Taking your medicine
No, I’m not talking about my daily dose of glucosamine sulphate, even if my knee and hip joints thank me for it. This is about advice. I look back at my days in the band and remember seeing everything as a competition. I can’t imagine a universe in which I’d have taken creative advice from another creator. A member of another band telling me that the outro of a song was too long and self-indulgent would have received death stares and the finger. Spoiler: they were probably right.
My writing today would be a million miles behind where it is, were it not for the input of editors, reviewers and trusted, vital beta readers. Criticism still stings – when you bare your soul in the form of a piece of art which might have taken anything from two weeks to two years of your life, negative feedback about it will always, always hurt. But age has given me the capacity to allow the hurt, and then to come back to the criticism with a fresh pair of eyes when the rawness has abated.
I won’t and don’t agree with every comment a reader gives me—sometimes it’s about aesthetic choices—and I rarely employ the solutions a reader gives me to a specific problem. But simply being made aware of an issue’s existence, particularly when more than one reader flags up the same problem, gives me the chance to evaluate and reflect on my craft or my creative process. The results of this have, I think, always been positive.
Managing expectations
This final reflection flies somewhat in the face of one of the benefits of youth, and it’s about taking a more analytical approach to your work. What promises does your story make to the reader? And does it deliver on them? Is there enough tension and conflict throughout? Is the pacing right? Does it need a ticking timebomb to ratchet up the tension? Do the microscopic arcs of each episode in my series matter enough to the reader to keep them invested and see through the overarching narrative from episode one to three (or six, or eleven)?
You might think that these questions are too sales-y, that they compromise your creative freedom? But everything we create is like a sculpture. That phase of pure inspiration is the chipping away of the blunt edges of the stone, establishing the form. This analytical phase is the refinement. The fine chiselling of the precise details.
The verdict
In conclusion, while I can’t deny wishing from time to time that I’d started taking fiction writing more seriously earlier in life, and that I’d love to have a backlist of books to look upon by this stage in my life, it strikes me that the advantages of beginning a creative pursuit later are also many and various. When looking for quotes on how I feel about the matter, I found this gem from legendary Italian actor Sofia Loren:
‘There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.’
Join the conversation
How do you feel about aging and creativity? Are you a creator with the burning spark of youth? Have you, too, changed tack in your mode of creativity during your life? Leave a comment below, or join the conversation on Twitter or Instagram.