Author’s call to age before writing is tripe
BURN every copy of Frankenstein . Author Joanna Trollope has some advice for Mary Shelley and her fellow young novelists: “You will write much better fiction after the age of 35 than before,” she says. “You need to have got a lot of living under your belt . . . and that includes the pain as well as the joy.”
Anyone who thinks that has never been a teenager. I remember being 15 and enduring pain, joy, heartache, passion, tragedy, ecstasy and slight peckishness, all within about half an hour.
But Trollope’s point can easily be smashed to bits with the briefest glance at a library. Shelley wrote Frankenstein before she was 20, by which time she had lost her mother, fallen in love with a poet, travelled far from home and had a stillborn baby. There’s not much else you could teach her about joy and pain.
Not that writing is always about breadth of experience. The reason we love youthful novels isn’t because we crave authors to be “in tune with other people”, as Trollope says they must be. We want to be told something we don’t know.
Young writers with a fresh voice are energising. Jack Kerouac couldn’t have written a better version of On the Road from the rosy hindsight of middle age — he finished it when he was 29.
Trollope has called Jane Austen “an absolute genius” for writing Sense and Sensibility. Well, Austen started it when she was 19. If she had waited until 35 before trying her hand at timeless novels seamlessly interweaving love and class, she wouldn’t have had much time to finish anything before she died at 41.
Trollope says she just meant that authors shouldn’t feel in a hurry to write a novel as early as possible. But I’d give plenty for more literature in a hurry, with all the speed and intensity that brings.
Because, after you reach 35, writing is the last thing on your mind. Plenty of thirtysomethings have children to think about, or ageing parents, or a crippling bond, or the oven being on the blink again.
This advice is just a midlife crisis in the making, not a recipe for genius. — ©
This advice is just a midlife crisis, not a recipe for genius