WRITING UP THERE

I used to think the hardest part of a writing career was getting one started, but now, nearly 60 years into it, I realize the hardest part will be giving it up.

Which immediately begs the question. Why give it up at all?

Perhaps because I have to. There’s voluntary retirement, a stage of life people plan for and ease into, but there’s also involuntary retirement, a much more wistful kind of finish. You can pour as much passion and enterprise into your career at 76 as you did at 30, but it’s of little avail, since the cultural tide has long since set against you and you’re all be deliberately neglected into silence.

It’s easy enough to make a list here. The first question an editor asks now, when you submit your book, is “How many followers do you have on social media?” and if you answer correctly (“15,000, sir”), they follow it up with “What’s your podcast about and do you blog?” Then—the latest kicker—”If we publish your novel are you willing to pay an Influencer to, ah, influence it?”

Being a writer in the incestuous creative-writing biz means having an MFA degree now, not publishing. A distinctive prose style means nothing—it’s simply not a concept anyone takes pains over. Wispy little “short-shorts” have crowded out stories that aspire to move readers or say something important. In the American literary-magazine world, your identity is more important than the quality of your work; in the outside world, emojis are the communication of choice. And—though we can’t whine about this—agism is real.

I can’t ignore these developments, much as I would like to, so contemporary culture’s verdict is blunt. You’ve had a good career old-timer, but your day is done, and ours is not a world you can possibly understand…a message driven home with concussive force on the first Tuesday of this month.

Message received. Thanks publishing industry, thanks modern world. But I don’t think I’ll listen to you quite yet.

One of the reasons to go on working is sheer inertia. I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s impossible to think of stopping. Twelve wooden steps lead up from the garage to my office, and climbing them in the morning, my knees not having quite woken up, I feel a hand on the small of my back pushing me upwards, through the door, over to my desk. It’s a strong, insistent hand—it won’t let me reverse direction--and it’s been pushing, as of this morning, two months shy of 57 years.

I decided in my twenties that no discouragement, no rejection, no review, no publisher, would ever make me give up writing. I think, looking back, that there was an element of insanity involved in all this; any rational person would have given up and found something easier to do, faced with so much negativity. I hardly deserve praise for staying the course, since my persistence grew into a monster, so swollen and exaggerated did it become when compared to what persistence means ordinarily.

And of course, follow a vocation this long, the work becomes your identity, and no one wants to voluntarily surrender their identity. (I could write about ego here, how I still need to stoke it, but since I’ve never had much of an ego, I wouldn’t miss is minor buzz.) I’m writing. I’m doing what I dreamed of doing when I was nineteen—is a thought I’m not inclined to stop thinking.

There’s something else to consider. I enjoy the writing process as much as ever. There are novelists who claim that writing is a torture they will anything to avoid (I’ll be devoting a future column to them); their real talents lie in procrastination. I have to take them at their word, though I suspect most of these quit early, once their first creative surge is gone; anyone who writes past 50 must enjoy what they’re doing.

That’s me. I like playing with imagination. I enjoy tossing around words, delight in seeing the way they combine—like, for that matter, the feel of a keyboard under my fingers, where the gentlest of pressures sometimes produces a phrase worth keeping.

I’ve been putting words on paper for such a long time that the paper itself has become wonderfully important; if you want to hear me babble on, get me talking about all the kinds of paper I’ve written on over the years, the noise it made rolled under a platen or stripped from the printer, how it felt under my hand as I crossed out words, injected new ones, the paper accepting all the abuse, this endless cutting and slashing, with remarkable forbearance, even if I was often tempted to rip it in half.

I like the resolute focus on the future that writing brings, at an age when many turn their faces toward the past. There’s always another story idea waiting its turn, a novel that’s gestating, an essay that needs starting. Each day the future demands all my attention—the future of the story I’m working on, page five after page four, page seven after page six. What happens next? has been the chief concern of my working mornings, day after day, and it’s kept my eye resolutely fixed in a young person’s direction.

Something else I’d be reluctant to surrender is how when you’re trying to understand the world almost any piece of evidence counts. There is no instance of human behavior, good or bad, that might not lend itself to a story some day; there is no sunset, no tremble of wind, that might not eventually need to be remembered and described, so you have to open yourself up to the world, continue paying attention. This brings a bird-dog kind of alertness to the eyes and forehead when all your other muscles want to slump.

There’s a well-known cliche in this regard: A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost. I’d quibble a bit with this—entire worlds have been lost on me over the years—and would change it to A writer is someone on whom not quite everything is lost.

These are the reasons to keep on writing into serious old age. It’s only fair to list the considerations swelling the cultural tide mentioned earlier, urging writers like me to quit.

Like anyone who’s worked in a business for decades, you get to the point where you’re heartily sick of it, especially if the business is a brutally competitive one. Anyone who’s dealt with editors and publishers over the years comes out feeling like they’ve been a combatant in a 50-year war, with the battle fatigue to prove it. Seventy-six is simply too old to deal with rejection—and if you don’t want rejection, you should stay as far away from the publishing world as you can.

Faced with this, a lucky few can declare victory and smugly retire. The majority, with what grace they can muster, accept the inevitable defeat. (In regards to which, I’m quickly recommend Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure, which, despite the title is an oddly encouraging book.) A small number—and I’ll include myself here—can say, half-ruefully, half-pridefully—”Well, I didn’t win, but I certainly didn’t lose, so let’s call it a tie,” and retire with their honor intact.

Publishers no longer want you? Fine, because you no longer want them.

Can you retire from the publishing world, the sales, Willy Loman part of your career, and still keep on writing?

A tricky one. Writers like to say, “At long last I’m just going to write to please myself,” but they rarely mean it; even if you only keep a diary now, a journal, you can’t help hoping to eventually have it published, even if that turns out to be posthumously.

So we consider self-publishing, which has an honorable history in American literature, at least until recently, when it’s been swollen into something monstrous, with over 3,000 (!) books self-published each day. Only the cleverest, most assiduous of self-promoters can get their book noticed in such a flash mob, and since this is exactly the kind of thing you want to retire from, it’s not an appealing option.

There’s also the modern version of samizdat: typing up your work as an old-fashioned manuscript or Pdf, then sending it off to the select few who still care about your work. We like to say having even three or four sympathetic readers is enough for any writer—here’s out chance to prove it.

If you’ve been publishing your work for 50 years, you always found a way to get it read, and even at the end, with the odds stacked against you, there still, you tell yourself, might just be a way.

But all this talk about publishing hides a moose-in-the-room conundrum that’s important to address when it comes to understanding what’s going on with an aging writer: waning powers, atrophying talent, sensitivity drying up. The ideas don’t come in a flood like they used to, words no longer seem like willing collaborators, and even an hour at the desk leaves you with a sore neck, an aching back, blurry vision, and an impossible to resist craving for caffeine.

This, of course, can happen at any age, so anyone who writes into their 70’s has either been extraordinarily fortunate with their genes or done a good job caring for their talent. Even so, we now have to deal with a certain amount of creative arthritis to go along with the kind stiffening up our joints.

I have to be honest here. If my abilities are waning, it’s happening without my realizing it, though this is probably exactly how it happens. My verbs may be weakening, going all passive and limp, though I don’t think they are; my adjectives might be losing some of their vigor—but no, I don’t see this either, and I’m a ruthless self-editor.

More worrying are the ingredients that go into that always tricky psychological makeup. My patience and stamina aren’t what they used to be, and this includes the tactical patience needed in writing fiction, where you have to let things unfold at their own pace, not force them. (Though if patience is going, the stamina for complex sentences, its residue seems to be greater simplicity and directness, no age might actually be helping here.)

I’m curious to see what happens when the words finally start eluding me. I remember reading an interview once with Bill Bradley, the thinking-man’s basketball star with the New York Knicks back in the day. He was asked why he continued playing well up into his thirties, though he was only a benchwarmer toward the end, and there were exciting opportunities waiting the moment he retired (ie, a U. S. Senate seat).

His answer stuck with me, though I’d hardly begun my career then, let alone thought of retirement.

“There’s a natural cycle in the life of an athlete,” Bradley explained. “I’ve experienced the start where your talent develops, enjoyed the middle where it flourishes, and now I want to know what it’s like at the end when it ebbs.”

Exactly.

A last point. Anyone who’s come this far with me must sense that much of this essay is me arguing with myself—a writer who’s not quite sure whether he should draw a line under his career and announce he’s retired (most people, looking at a 76-year-old face, assume you are anyway) or continue writing as long as he can.

So let’s add to the scales another, unlikelier reason to continue.

I’m very aware, in a historical context, of being among the last fortunate novelists who will ever have an old-fashioned writing career. A writer, that is, who grows up in an environment as far removed from the world of literature and art as it’s possible to be, but who discovers it entirely on his own as a young man, and falls in love with its long tradition. A writer who, knowing no one in the business, gets his work written, sends it out to magazines whose addresses he looks up in a book, has it, after hundreds of rejections, accepted and published.

A writer who writes what he wants, experimenting with a range of genres, subjects, styles, settings, and approaches, in stubborn defiance of market trends. A writer who sells his books without an agent. A writer not employed by a university. A writer who lives in the boonies and knows few other writers; a writer allergic to even the slightest self-promotion; a writer who—an increasingly hard trick!— manages to be successful while flying resolutely under the radar.

Few will have this kind of career again, what’s left of the literary world having changed so much—and so that seems another reason to continue as long as I can, so, with luck, it can be said that there was still an old-fashioned writer, a historical curiosity, working as far into the century as the 2020’s. Not a soul will care about this or even notice, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care myself, use it as part of the motivation to keep on working.

I may retire someday (sometimes when I’m alone I practice saying the words out loud, “I’m retired,” but they simply refuse to. make sense), but I don’t think quite yet. I still feel that hand on the small of my back pushing me up the stairs to my office every morning at a time when my knees are having a hard time surmounting them on their own.

I’ve trusted that hand for a long time now—and I’ll trust it a while longer, curious, as ever, so see where it’s pushing me and what I might find when I arrive.