A Guide to Writing While Long of Tooth

I turn 86 in a couple of week, older even than our President. I feel like I've lived several contiguous lives instead of one long one. I was married four times and have four daughters whom I count foremost among my blessings. I've worn many hats. My byline has appeared in scores of extant and disappeared papers, magazines, on covers and posts, each as ephemeral as summer dandelions - as are most of us. 

I live in by the Great Lake Michigan, born in Boston, Massachusetts, but grew up and made my bones in California. I've worked many jobs, travelling and sedentary, wearing a hard hat, standing or seated. But I've spent the greatest portion of my working hours as I am now - in front of a keyboard.  

I'm a seasoned veteran and a newbie. I've been a writer all of my adult life, but I've only been writing fiction for the past dozen years - barely long enough to hit my stride and develop what passes for a literary style.

It's been a long winding journey through valleys and over peaks, dull and fast, mostly routine, sometimes perilous. 

I survived heart failure two years ago, thanks to wizard cardiologists installing a coronary stent. Two weeks ago I got a TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement) - via a somewhat harrowing, but amazing, minimally-invasive laparoscopic procedure that took barely two hours. They sent me home from the hospital in under 24 hours and I'm doing well, thank you. Knock on wood!
 

I identify as cyborg, thanks to my coronary stent, my synthetic heart valve and the intraocular eye lens implants (IOL) that I've sported since 2009.
 

At 86, I'll be Radon on the Period Table of Elements - a radioactive nobl gas - sometime a home-health-hazard (and a catchy name for a  super-villian.)

This week I'm back on my third "Phantom Eye" Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective novel. I had hit a wall of preoccupations and neuroses with it last year. I'm still pushing through writer's-block and Old Writer's Syndrome  -  a term I made up.

There's no escaping old age adding to the ingrained contradictions with which each of us must deal in our own special ways.  I take comfort from past writers I admire who started late in life.

We're an odd lot. Like myself, Raymond Chandler said he felt alienated from "the writer's life" along with the literary and academic publishing realms.

"The literary life repels me," Chandler said more than once, "all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”

Famous authors who succeeded late in life are few, but include some of my most beloved. Toni Morrison, Marcel Proust and Mark Twain started well past 40. Annie Proulx and Richard Adams were in their 50s. Laura Ingals Wilder and Frank McCourt were in their 60s.

Granted, that like myself, many of them had long laboured in the publishing world. Mark Twain famously wrote for newspapers in the Old West. Toni Morrison was a book editor, among other editorial jobs. I don't presume to compare my writing to the works of such giants, but I was a journalist, an editor, a ghost writer and a freelancer for decades before stepping onto the hallowed grounds of literature. with pen hand shaking.
 

Scores of others started young, but did their greatest work late in life - Margaret Atwood, Leo Tolstoy, Joyce Carol Oates, Isabelle Allende, Philip Roth to name a few

Twain had definite ideas about early- and late-blooming writers. He expressed theses in a 1881 letter he wrote to a young colleague well before achieving success himself. This was a period between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

 Isabelle Allende

He dismissed the notion of prodigy. He maintained that personal experience counts for way more than one's technique. “I do not see how any but a colossal genius can write a readable prose book before he is 30 years old.” Twain continued, “Experience of life (not just as a writer) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted.”

I find it difficult to evaluate the evolution of my prose during this past decade since I started writing novels and short stories, given that I came to fiction late but after long years at the craft in general. I'll leave that to my readers.

But I have gathered a short list of the challenges and advantages of being an author long of tooth that might be relevant.

First would be my relationship to time. It's different for us.

I feel a heightened sense of urgency to complete each work - and each page of each work, actually. Perhaps it's from the hyper-awareness of personal mortality that comes with age. Sometimes it spurs me. Other times it gets in my way. It can lift, or melt me into a puddle of blind impatience.

As a journalist I always worked against deadlines. But at 86, I find I have little patience for iterative processes. Traditional notions of spending years on a work feel delusional.

I've always felt rewriting onerous,, necessary though it is. It's  like blood-letting. 

I don't have time for the waiting game. I still focus on details, but on an accelerated assembly line. I find short-cuts. I compensate by getting feedback on the run. I change revise tightly as a race car pit crew changes tires.

Like many an ink-stain wretch, I often wonder about the relevance of my words - how much they matter. Will younger readers relate to my perspectives. Will they seem out of date, or prove exotic pictures from times past?
 

Like Twain, I work to bring life experience into my stories - even the fanciful ones. I regret limits on the number of books I can produce in my relatively limited fiction writing years, whatever the number allotted me.   

Forget would-a and could-a: They don't matter once one faces the reaper. Time seldom spares our poetry or prose beyond a lifetime. 

I've passed my copyrights in trust on to my daughters, in hopes of some residual benefits and of sparing them squabbles.

It's impossible - and in any case - undesirable to mine deeper meanings when it comes to one's creative works. All we can hope for is to gain a measure of self-awareness, along with a sense of humour.

Perhaps you have some thoughts on the effects of age on writing you'd like to share in the comments below. 

One thing doesn't change. A constant I've learned over the years is that writers must keep at it, young or old, no matter what. Be ready to revise, but stay devoted to your inspiration and b faithful to your stories. Perseverance prospers, so says the I Ching. 

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Umberto Tosi's novels include his highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mysteries The Phantom Eye, and Oddly Dead. plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus book the historial epic Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His essays and articles have been published widely since the 1970s in print and online. He has been an Authors Electric contributor for seven years.

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Enjoy Umberto Tosi's Hollywood noir detective thrillers: The Phantom Eye  and Oddly Dead, out in August, 2022.

 

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen and managing editor of Chicago Quarterly Review.