If you have ever told yourself that you are too old, now, to produce that manuscript you have always wanted to write, I’m living proof that this is not the case.  At the age of sixty eight I retired from teaching and set about doing the most important thing on my bucket list.  Over the next two years, I wrote and published my first novel, Subject to Change.  Coming up behind me are squillions of Baby Boomers, and I absolutely know that many of you will also have your hearts set on writing that novel in retirement, so first up in my blog I’m going to tell you how I went about planning mine and why being older is such a huge advantage when you finally sit down to write.

What I noticed, first of all, was that a number of challenges that I’ve been faced with in my life, and which I’ve lived through and overcome, don’t get a reality check in novels.  Take a look at any novel you may be reading now and you may find, too, that this is the case.  One of the challenges I had to face in my forties was a pressing need to re-enter the singles world as quickly as possible after the sudden and unexpected breakdown of my long-term marriage.  Nothing, you see, had prepared me for the terror I experienced at finding myself alone, or for the self-destructive impulses that my brain would throw up now that half of me had gone.  It was all about survival.  I felt I had to find another half to my ‘self’, and quickly, or I would disintegrate.  And, of course, others around us are experiencing these emotions every day.  In novels, the wronged wife – and let’s face it, it is usually the wife in novels –  either becomes bitter and settles down to making everyone else’s life a misery, takes a world trip, or falls in love with someone who has always been there but whom she has never seen before in a romantic light.  However, in reality, we know from lived experience that it takes a long time to recover from emotional pain, and some people never do.  I was only in my forties when this happened to me. I had a career to fall back on and, after a few false starts, and as time went by, I grew strong again and found a loving partner.  The pain in my case, therefore, is just a memory, but if you read the newspapers or watch the news you will be aware that it is a harsh world for older people out there, women in particular, who are experiencing this fear and disorientation at a much later age.  The hope of meeting a new partner is then greatly diminished and in their loneliness they are then vulnerable to targeting by criminals who groom them over the internet to become dependent.  They lose money, sometimes their homes, and even in one very tragic case last year, their lives.  That is the reality.

This, of course, is where your experience of life is so valuable when you set out to write your novel.  You know what the reality checks are and you have carried out both practical and theoretical research, simply because you have lived.  In my writing, my own painful experience and my reading about internet scams allowed me to create one of the main characters in my novel.  Belinda, who loses her husband to cancer, is sixty three years old. She has not worked for many years, and she now finds she needs to make an income.  We understand that this, and the pain she is suffering, make her vulnerable:  “Of course she could never replace David, but the truth was she couldn’t stand the loneliness, the fear, the unnatural feeling of being a single…Even working in her garden frightened her.”  After a year as a single, when I was just getting on my feet again, I met a man who was a geologist and who was on his way to Thailand for a three-week holiday.  As we talked, I noted that his eyebrows arched upwards and his eyes narrowed when I asked him anything about his personal life.  He was anything but open.  I had been single for long enough to heed this  warning sign but Belinda, who is new to the singles scene and, let’s face it, desperate for a man to take care of her and to stop the pain, overlooks it when she meets Steve:  “His eyebrows, she notes, arch upwards.  Odd.  It gives him a devilish look, somehow.”  Once again, your personal experience and your memories can be put to good use when you begin to develop your characters.

So don’t be discouraged, don’t put your dream in the too hard basket.  Hopefully, my experiences have triggered memories about reality checks in your life that you had discounted.  Get them out, dust them down, and you’ll soon see how they fit into your plan.