Some random thoughts on writing and age. But first, you’re never too old to get a book deal:

An 82-year-old grandmother is celebrating after landing a book deal for her debut novel… Myrrha Stanford-Smith, a teacher and theatre director, said she was ”gobsmacked” to be handed the three-book agreement, which saw her first work The Great Lie start appearing on shelves last week.

The trained actress, who lives in Holyhead, North Wales, has always held a passion for creative writing.She decided to see if her talent could really take off after receiving positive feedback on a short children’s story she sent in to BBC Radio Wales last summer. The Brighton-born writer secured herself a deal with publisher Honno, for a trilogy based around her swashbuckling Elizabethan hero Nick Talbot. The adventure reignites, in fictional form, the rivalry between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

Perhaps it bypasses the perennial Amis riff on Ishiguruo, where “a writer’s best work is produced in their youth”, to have one’s first work published at a later stage in life.

I like to think that many writers produce their best work at an older age. DeLillo’s Underworld being an exceptional example of this – almost a thematic culmination (or perhaps this is in Point Omega). I love seeing a body of work that, over the years, spirals inward towards a writer’s set of inner truths. Then again, it goes the other way, and the same old rubbish might drift around like flotsam.

I like to think that, for the most part, we live in a fairly apologetic literary culture – debuts are bound to be rough, many say, because writing is something that improves with practice; possibly – hopefully – leading eventually towards some kind of edification later in a writer’s career. (I’ve mentioned before about people attacking young writers merely for being young, but this is a different thing entirely.) Reviewers generally forgive the problems of debuts, and that’s something I’m glad about.

So aging allows us deeper contemplation; we have better perspective, more experiences, even – and more time to think about those experiences – and one would hope that reflects in writing. Then again, there’s something to be said for the youthful energies of a debut, that keeness to get across a set of different ideas or style. To be recognised. As an aside: can ideas improve with practice? Perhaps, to an extent, we become better at explaining them.

And we as a community also seem so enthusiastic about the Next Big Thing, keen to see what’s new on the horizon, which freshly minted name we can attach ourselves to, though that may say more about the internet than literature. Though it should be said that literary careers are generally slow growers, books resist being produced quickly, to the internet’s rate of change, and will likely therefore resist such demands.

I wonder which of the current crop of genre writers will improve with age and still be around in fifty years? Personally, I’m investing in a course of yoga, cod liver oil capsules, and immense amounts of luck to ensure I’ll still be here annoying you all in decades to come.

It’s been on my mind, so I thought I’d dig up this old article on breaking writing rules, which is fantastic (and which I saw originally via Ursula Le Guin):

The three most often repeated “rules of writing,” recited by rote and left uninvestigated and unchallenged in virtually every writing workshop and English class are capable of doing terrible damage to good writing. The Terrible Three are:

Show, don’t tell.

Nonsense. Good writing involves “showing”–that is, dramatizing–as well as “telling”–employing exposition. An avoidance of “telling” may convolute clear motivation (exemplified by “showing”). It compromises setting. It obfuscates situation.

We do not speak of “story-showing”; we speak of “storytelling.” Many great works of literature are largely expositional, including Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” and–try this one–Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” In the latter’s “Overture,” Proust roams, in exposition, through the inner landscape of the child Marcel’s need for his mother’s nightly bedtime kiss. Now he can move on to exemplify–“show”–the drama of his foiled attempts. Thomas Bernhard’s masterpiece, “Concrete,” is all gasping exposition until the end opens into eerie dramatization.

The effect of “scenes”–showing–may be created through refined “telling,” as in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which is in major part exposition, with scant dialogue often used as dramatic punctuation: “The world is round, like an orange.”

A good way to add life to exposition is to capture a dramatic moment, to hear someone speak, see someone move, act–yes, show–since time is the accumulation of moments.

It is hammered into people (by other people – not by any writing authority) that you must show not tell. It’s rarely questioned, but it should be. This kind of stuff is often used to help start-out writers, taught in basic writing workshops across the land. It certainly has a place to be considered, but they probably forget to un-teach it.

Of course, you need to know when you’re doing it, and to apply it in a controlled manner. I’m reading the Man Booker winner, Wolf Hall, at the minute, and I’m being told rather than shown an awful lot. And it’s great, it’s rich, it’s multi-dimensional, it’s stylish – done under a well-controlled point-of-view character, it’s a powerful way to tell a story. And yes, I do it myself (from a character’s POV; I’ve not done the omnipresent exposition all that much).

Also, I think we each have a different meaning of “show don’t tell”. Dumping huge amounts of information, which characters obviously know but is a cheap way of delivering information about the plot, is famously not cool. There are many other examples of what’s not cool, and you should know the rules before you break them.

I don’t like giving writing advice – it’s a very awkward thing to do – but I do like telling people that they’re freer than they think they are when it comes to constructing fictional prose. Read the rest of the article here for the other myths of “write about what you know” and “always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to”.

What do you think? Is it something you worry about in your own writing? Are you even conscious of it?

Try being a literary fiction debut:

The contraction of the high street and the dynamics of online retailing are putting extra pressure on literary publishers, with subscriptions plummeting to less than half their previous figures.

With Waterstone’s the only high street chain with a literary profile and Amazon working to a sales model with low initial subscriptions, publishers hoping to launch new names are facing particular challenges. Débuts which two years ago would have gained initial subs of 1,000–2,000 copies are now subscribing just 250–500. Established literary writers who would have gained subs of 5,000 copies two years ago are now subscribing just 2,000.

Hamish Hamilton publisher Simon Prosser said: “If you have established names, you can say to the retailers: ‘Look at their sales figures’ but launching new literary authors is a real challenge. You have to be more creative than ever.”

Let’s put aside the usual “What is literary fiction anyway?” nonsense. Here we can assume it’s anything mainstream which is not a perceived genre such as crime, thriller, or chick lit. Yeah, I know literary fiction a genre of its own, but they don’t know that yet. And with all this in mind, this situation is still shockingly bad.

Those numbers aren’t sales, by the way – those subscriptions are just to have copies in stores. They’ve still got to be put in the hands of the buying public, taken to the counter, and paid for. The best way to encourage that nice exchange is for publishers to spend money on promotion, that’s if the chains think it’s worthwhile. It isn’t cheap, either. Amazon charge publishers a packet just to send readers an email about a particular book, for example, and table promotions can cost hundreds of pounds per title. This is all on top of the costs of buying the book, editing it, and putting a pretty picture on the front.

It’s tough for a publisher: they’ve got a talented author they want to push, and that costs money. Lots of money. But how can such costs be justified against subscriptions which are so low?

This is one of many reasons I’m glad there’s a SFF blogosphere – at least we all talk about books and help sidestep a lot of potential pain for new authors.

In the Guardian:

Nobody writes letters any more: at least not the kind of erudite, humorous missives that are the hallmark of great correspondence. As we are so often told, we live in the digital age. Like the rest of us, authors now largely correspond with their agents, friends, contemporaries and, occasionally, fans through email, not snail mail (I’ve only encountered one writer who refuses to use what he called “that electronic mail nonsense”. Despite his illegible scrawl – and mine – he insisted that all correspondence be in writing. But this is most certainly a dying breed.)

Emails are great for getting in touch quickly and easily, but as literary vehicles they are severely lacking. Notoriously Manichean, digital messages tend to oscillate between the deathly dull and formal and the blithely irreverent (complete with BTW, FYI, LOL’s and garbled text-speak) with precious little middle ground. Letters can be revealing, expansive, humorous; emails, even at their best, tend to exhibit only one of these characteristics of good writing. Of course, many contemporary novelists use social media such as Twitter and Facebook, sometimes to great effect; but publishing revolution or no publishing revolution, I find it hard to imagine that generations to come will one day download the “Collected Tweets of Neil Gaiman” on to their e-reader.

The article is worth a read, if only for the nostalgia kick. I own very few author letter collections – though the Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961 are quite superb, and well worth dipping into. They’re probably only for the serious fan, too, ones who look beyond novels for more understanding of them. Or for authors who led exciting lives.

Are blogs the modern-day equivalent of letters, just read in real time? I mean, they’re incredibly less interesting for the large part – a lot of author blogs seem to be graveyards of irrelevant news updates. Some do it well. Jonathan Carroll’s blog is a very good comparison to traditional letters, or even notebook. (As it says in the header: “A friend asked yesterday if this blog is addressed to anyone in particular? I said yes– it’s a love letter to someone I haven’t met yet.”)

Digital collections are often compiled in print form – John Scalzi has done so. And while there is a lot of white noise out there on social networks, which makes it difficult to find content that is profound enough, even Tweets can be collected and sold these days.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all pans out over the years, and how future author non-fiction will be assembled.