I recently published Rogue Hunter (available here), a book written approximately 22 years ago. Like with all of my older books, and most of the newer ones, I'm seldom pleased with the total package, but this one I enjoyed returning to for its final edit, even if only because of the eerily correct predictions I made in what amounts to the prologue. (Here's to hoping I wasn't nearly as accurate overall.)
But this post isn't about my accuracy in predicting global financial crises (thank the gods I didn't specify cause in the book, because I would have been slightly wrong there). This post is about the evolution of storytelling, and how time may not be our friend.
I'm 46 as I write this, so I would have been about 24 years old when I wrote Rogue Hunter. I had no family to support: no wife, no child, no dogs, and no cats. I had a job that didn't demand so much of my focus. I had a wicked alcohol problem, but the metabolism of a young man to offset its most dire effects. In short, my life was far less complicated. These days I'm dealing with the fallout of choosing the wrong business partners to trust, heart trouble, dogs, cats, a kid, and the stress that envelops all middle-aged men (and women). So, while the world hasn't changed much, I have. My internal dialogue differs dramatically, and my interests are more focused than they used to be. I think that comes from recognizing that the path ahead is shorter and less hopeful than the one that lies behind us. It may be a pessimistic view, but life really doesn't get simpler as it unfolds. It doesn't necessarily get worse, but it does get more complex...and the effects of age are real. Our bodies are not as reliable as we age, even if we stave off the worst effects for a while.
When I wrote many of the older books I was already keenly conscious of the human race and its propensity for self-destruction, self-delusion, and self-aggrandizement. You see it every day, played out on a political stage, whether the environment be government, or corporate, or schoolyard. You see the substance of human society reflected in every bully, and in every act of self-motivation. It hasn't changed since the stone ages, and never will. It isn't because people are inherently bad, but because we are inherently weak. We live in a fragile state, and we all know it, even if it isn't a conscious consideration for many. We know how sudden the end can come, and so we try to maximize our moments. Altruism is a lie told by especially selfish weaklings to sate their consciences. But that doesn't make us bad, it makes us human.
I don't think I could have written Rogue Hunter now, which is really the reflective point of consideration I want to address. I won't spoil the book for anyone who reads this first, but I will say that anyone who reads it will, at the end of it, understand entirely why it was a book written with a younger, more hopeful mind. Dark though it may be it is laced through with a specific sort of hope, and a belief that even with all our most human flaws we are capable of rising above ourselves and accomplishing change. And here I will stray adrift just slightly to add I'm not even talking about "positive change." I'm just observing the ability to initiate change, for good or bad, is something that takes a courage that is almost universally lost these days.
As writers grow older I think a problem with our storytelling is that it becomes more highly informed. Some writers I know spend months researching topics in depth in an academic fashion so they can lay out excruciatingly correct manuscripts. Others research on the fly. But they all have a capacity for absorption, which is an ability to sponge in massive amounts of information before laying it back onto a page in story form. When you're young the process of writing is driven by passion more than skill, and that passion often comes across. I think we lose some of the drama necessary in a good story when we become enamoured of the peripheral elements.
But probably the most egregious problem of age, in context of storytelling, is that we have to guard against the natural human desire to be informative. I'm not dismissing value in descriptive writing here, but I will say that as writers we need to engage -- and when we engage it has to be a conversation of sorts. To over-describe everything, to leave nothing to a reader's imagination, seems a crime against the process. And it seems lazy and selfish, too. yet as we age we become so protective of the effort behind the writing we often short the reader by not just telling a story.
Maybe it is about ego, because age imparts a defensive stance where ego is concerned. Maybe most of us want to show "how smart" we are. (I wish I was half as smart as I think I am on days when I am half as smart as I am!) Maybe ego drives us to become gatekeepers of details rather than storytellers.
Whatever the cause of the changes that age imparts to the writing (and some of it is a rejection of strict technical writing) they are noticeable when you, as the writer, view two of your works that span decades. You realize that some part of you has changed, and that maybe you lost a little of the spark of hope that youth ensures. I don't know what the result of such a loss is, but I think it is inevitable, and I think you have to guard against age creating a punishing vacuum of "story."
I also think that in many ways the older works of any writer, even if edited to suit a modern reader, tell you something about the writer beyond the changes in their technical style. They describe the truer human element; they describe the soul that thins with time.
I think the best an older writer can do for themselves is reject the propensity toward self-involvement and just try to tell stories, striping away the nonsense of age and laying out a story form that allows readers to imagine the world you place them in just as much as you delineate its parameters. When they close their eyes they ought to see your world in their mind, populated by characters you made for them. The story shouldn't ever really end for them if told right, and they ought to retell it in small scale again and again in their own life, in a different context.
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