Why Your Sixth Decade is the Best Time Ever To Write a Novel

Jane Rosenthal

“You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness” Brene Brown

I keep this quote from the lecturer Brene Brown framed in a little green heart on the bulletin board above my computer to remind myself why I write, why I put myself out into the world, and why I’m grateful that through the discipline of writing I learned to no longer hustle for my worthiness. I just glanced up at those words now, as I often do, when I sat down to write this essay. It sums up perfectly where my writing journey has taken me and where such a journey can take you, no matter what your age, if you choose to put your thoughts, memories and dreams on the page. 

A decade or more ago, I knew that I wanted to write novels, but I didn’t feel I had what it took, whatever that was. I’d been teaching novels, classic and contemporary, in high school for years, and I thought I’d love to give writing one a try. Then that inner voice that women have heard for centuries started hectoring me with questions about my worthiness. Really, it asked. Who do you think you are?

Wait. Let me do a little on-the-spot editing: Scratch the sentence that said I ‘thought I’d love to give writing a try’. Replace it with the following: I was DESPERATE to write a novel (or two or three). I felt like I would suffocate if I didn’t. Then the critical voice popped up once more, reminding me of my age, telling me, as if I didn’t already know, that I was in my mid-fifties, asking if it didn’t seem a bit late.

Besides, it continued, even though I’d been teaching theme and imagery and metaphor and so on, I really didn’t have the first clue how or where to begin a novel, and didn’t that just prove the point? Why waste your time, the voice badgered me. Garden, it said, take a cooking class, travel!

Trust me. If you can battle that critic, all the other criticisms and rejections you will inevitably encounter are much less painful. 

Maybe, like me, you’re older, and you think it’s too late, as well. Maybe you don’t think you have any talent; maybe you know you want to put words on paper but don’t know where to begin. In fact, you don’t even know why you want to do it. You. Just. Do. 

That was me a decade or more ago. And you know what? None of the negative parts was true— well, except the part about having no idea how to proceed. However, once I stepped into my own story, owned my own truth—that I wanted to be a novelist– things fell into place. 

Okay, so maybe things about learning the craft didn’t fall into place. They sort of collapsed on top of me, and I had to fight my way out. But, I learned how to do it bit by painstaking bit. Actually, it wasn’t painstaking at all.

Once I got over my sense of failure, stopped worrying about what other people thought, recognized I was going to have to live with the fear (or shame) of being exposed, the whole writing journey proved to be one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, second only to being a mother, and the people I have met along the way have been some of the most fascinating. Bonus prize included, too. I stopped hustling for my worthiness in many more areas. I became a post-menopausal bad-ass. Totally worth it.

You probably want to stop me at this point and say that you only have some vague idea of what you want to write.  Okay, you want vague? I’ll give you my humble beginnings as an example of serious vagueness.

My writing- a-novel- story began one rainy evening when I sat down at the computer, intending to begin a book, any book. I’d had an image in my head for days, and it seemed as good a place to start as any. Three people were sitting at a table in front of a crumbling villa in Provence. That’s it. That’s all I had to go on.

They were deep in conversation. It was late September in the book that I hoped to start. I know because in the image that I had in my head, which was beginning to come alive, the leaves of the plane trees above the terrace had turned yellow. Some leaves had even fallen and were blowing, dry and brown across the gravel where the three people—two men and a woman– were sitting. 

That book went exactly nowhere. I didn’t have the craft to understand character development or premise or conflict and tension. 

But, I learned, and so can you.

I went on to write another book altogether, set in another country, in another crumbling villa on Rio de Janeiro Park in Mexico City. I’d seen the place on some walk I’d taken when travelling to Mexico long before the area became trendy, and I wondered who lived there, what their lives were like. I ended up writing a whole book called Palace of the Blue Butterfly just to find out the answer. That book or versions of it went through two agents and “never found a home” as they say. 

I could have been devastated. I could have given up. But, I didn’t.

In fact, that book gave me some of the best days of my life. After it was finished, I took my husband all over Mexico City, unwinding the tale—Scheherazade-like– as I led him though all the streets and neighborhoods, which were settings in the book. It was wonderful to see the whole city —the park where people dance to Danzon music, the sorcerers’ market, the centuries old national pawn shop on the wide austere Zocolo—come alive through the novel I had created. 

None of the happiness, joy, really, I experienced on that day had anything to do with fame or money or even publishing. None of the rejections could take it away. 

In fact, I ended up self-publishing it, and just last month after six years of being up on Amazon with next to zero marketing, I sold a number of copies. The big publishers would laugh at the  amount (forty in one month to be specific), but for me knowing that someone else is taking that journey with me is priceless. 

But the really priceless part was the pleasure, the joy—that word again—that I got from learning the writing craft, and learning the craft, my sisters-of-a-certain-age, is something you can do at any time, during any decade in life, and from any place. 

We are so lucky to have so many online workshops. Perfect for our COVID reality and any post- COVID world. Here’s my short list: LitReactor’s online classes (I can’t recommend David Corbett’s workshops highly enough), Free Expressions workshops with Lorin Oberweger and Donald Maass, Book Passage classes and conferences in California, Story Summit, Grub Street in Boston, the Annual San Miguel Literary Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The number of resources out there is endless and the writing community so generous. And the books! Write Away by Elizabeth George, The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass, The Art of Character by David Corbett are a few of the books that have nurtured me.

Del Rio, my new novel is set in the forgotten California, the Central Valley, about as far away from that villa in Provence or that park in Mexico City as you can get. Still, it’s a place of secrets and mystery and danger, and it could not have come alive if I hadn’t taken that first step of trusting that the images in my head, as vague as they were, were worth pursuing, if I hadn’t expressed my intention to the universe—as we say out here in Santa Fe— and walked inside my own story.

And by the way, now that I’ve studied the craft of writing all these many years I do know what to do with those three people on the terrace in Provence now. All I had to do was ask them what the problem was and, wow, were they ever ready to tell me. 

If I can do this, you can do this. I know we hear that cliché all the time, but it’s a cliché for a reason. It’s true. It just takes a little courage, a lot of commitment, and sense of curiosity, as well. 

The older you are the more of those traits you probably have. No time like the present, this new year of 2021 after we have all been through so much, to use them.

I hope to connect with you soon in the online writing world!

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Contributed by Jane Rosenthal. Jane studied creative writing at San Francisco State University. She worked for NPR and California Public Radio before teaching radio production and English in public high schools in Oakland, California. Her novel Del Rio debuts on May 18th from She Writes Press. 

DEL RIO

Del Rio, California, a once-thriving Central Valley farm town, is now filled with run-down Dollar Stores, llanterias, carnicerias, and shabby mini-marts that sell one-way bus tickets straight to Tijuana on the Flecha Amarilla line. It’s a place you drive through with windows up and doors locked, especially at night―a place the locals call Cartel Country. While it’s no longer the California of postcards, for local District Attorney Callie McCall, her dying hometown is the perfect place to launch a political career and try to make a difference.

But when the dismembered body of a migrant teen is found in one of Del Rio’s surrounding citrus groves, Callie faces a career make-or-break case that takes her on a dangerous journey down the violent west coast of Mexico, to a tropical paradise hiding a terrible secret, and finally back home again, where her determination to find the killer pits her against the wealthiest, most politically connected, most ruthless farming family in California: her own.

BUY HERE

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers