Writing as Therapy

“I tell my story over and over in my head, over and over to my readers, struggling to make sense of it …”

— The Repentance of Nicholas, Lauren Leach-Steffens

I wrote the story from which this quote was taken some twenty-five years ago. The story was a Gothic tale of heinous deeds, sacrifice and redemption, or that’s what I told myself. In reality, the story was about an unreliable narrator who survived an attack by an incubus and suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, falling in love with her attacker in the aftermath. This scenario happens all the time, and is part of the reason it’s so hard to leave one’s abuser. It mirrored what I was experiencing at the time, and my denial. I will not post the story here because it glorifies Stockholm Syndrome.

Writing therapy, however, has legitimacy. Psychology uses the tool extensively as a therapeutic tool, although they utilize it more as writing sprints (short exercises) and journaling. However, it’s not a large leap from that to working out events and feelings in a journal to fictionalizing them, either directly or symbolically, through specific scenes and general themes.

Writing as therapy can yield bad results. There’s an often derided phenomenon called the Mary Sue/Marty Stu story in fan fiction, where someone inserts their fantasy of competence, fame, and winning the (insert desired gender of love interest here) into an existent world. It reads predictably ridiculously, defying characterization of other members — after all, they’re props for the fabulous main character — plot, and logic. (Note that many women in fanfic and science fiction have had their legitimate works derided as “Mary Sue” simply because others can’t imagine female characters as anything but the prize. I’m not talking about that.) For a glimpse of Marty Stu, watch the first movie in the Star Trek reboot. Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk takes over the Enterprise when he should have been smacked into a high-security military prison for trespassing, and the fun (?) begins. Every little thing he does, as they say, is magic. Credulity is stretched thin.

My favorite theme in my writing is therapeutic: ordinary heroes can save the world from the Apocalypse. I guess I write pre-Apocalyptic fiction. This likely comes from being a tween/teen during the Reagan Administration, where our president joked about bombing Russia on a hot mic and Russia and the US stockpiled weapons to up the threat. (To my Russian reader: If you’re old enough to remember, you remember this differently. That’s okay.) During that time I had near-constant nightmares where I was separated from my family as the sirens raged, and the only place I could find to shelter was a toilet stall. Because I have a sick sense of humor, think: flush and cover. I didn’t realize where this theme came from until this morning because the subconscious is a wonderful thing.

The therapy we do in writing is transformational. We create solutions, or wishes, or a worst-case scenario that moves people to act. We heal ourselves, heal our readers, and tell our story, over and over, struggling to make sense of it.

When I became a writer: A bio of creativity

I started writing in third grade — poetry, it turned out. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Kuh (an unpleasant sort for the most part) taught us poetry — difficult, advanced poetry. Diamante and haiku and limericks — although we were too young for the most amusing examples of the latter form, dirty limericks.

My first poem, a haiku:

Come here, small firefly.
Let me see your glowing light
shining bright and gay.

Note the six beats in the first line where there should be five. I didn’t quite have the hang of haiku in third grade. Blessedly, I do not remember my third-grade diamante.

In fifth grade, my mother unwittingly put me up to collaborate in plagiarism. My neighbor in high school had to write a poem for Mrs. Schobert’s class, and his mom asked my mom to ask me to write a poem for him to hand in. I was scared not to comply, so I wrote him a poem. I earned an A on his poem, although Mrs. Schobert may have wondered why he wrote like a fifth grade girl.

In sixth grade, I wrote very amateurish stories about the guy I had a crush on. (He came out of the closet after graduation.)

I gave my junior high (Middle School for you youngsters) English teacher everything I wrote throughout seventh and eighth grade, because my mother didn’t seem too interested in them. At the end of junior high, she returned them to me in a folder and told me to keep writing and to work toward getting published. Thank you, Miss Myers, for giving me a goal.

In high school, I took a creative writing class with Mrs. Schobert, who didn’t recognize that my writing style looked like a high school boy’s writing of several years before. I learned the very basic basics of everything — diamante and haiku, descriptive writing, short stories, and playwriting. I wrote a short fantasy play based on a story my mother had told me about the year her family couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. The reviews in my head ran: “A heartfelt but saccharine attempt to catch the magic of Christmas.”

In college, I wrote many, many poems. Most of them related to the ups and downs of being in love. One of my exes, who broke up with me for a girl he met at a party, explained to his new girlfriend, “She wrote poems. I never understood them.” After that, I wished I could pull off the Goth look to emphasize my feeling of being misunderstood.

My college poetry class almost killed my desire to write when the published poet who taught it lauded a student for her “original” — “like a moth to the light”. On the other hand, he called my work “greeting card trash”. My poems might not have been great, but how could I have improved them from that screed? Mr. Guy Whose Name I’ve Forgotten, you created my hatred of being critiqued.

When I was in grad school, I dated a folksinger. (He hurt me badly; I kill him off in this current book I’m editing). He played a combination strum/fingerpicking style and composed beautiful, intricate pieces. He’d play around with a tune, and the following conversation would ensue.

Me: I have a work in progress that would work with that tune.

Him: How? It’s 5/4 time with syncopation!

Me: Try me …

So we composed music and performed together, and we had a fan or two and earned $2.50 busking. More importantly, I got to sing about my heartbreak and trauma and crushes and people listened. Many had their favorites — the most popular song was “World’s Worst Blues Song,” which is exactly as advertised. We married, we divorced, and I have a handful of songs I can’t perform because I can’t learn guitar and my voice (husky contralto) isn’t what it used to be. So, Adam, thank you for helping me get my words heard. Do not, under any circumstances, contact me. I’ve killed you off, after all.

I didn’t write novels until about five years ago. I couldn’t comprehend writing novels because they required an extended and gripping plot, a certain amount of continuity for many, many pages, and attention span. (I may have ADHD. Never diagnosed, but watched carefully by the school district.)

But then I fell in love with a world and its characters. I first met them, I believe I said once, by interpreting a dream, then by interrogating the dream by questioning its characters. I kept writing short stories about the same people and the same world, tracing the progression of their very strange relationship in a background of present-day spirit activity. Richard (my second and real husband) said, “You might as well write a book,” and I wrote one. And then more, because I kept getting ideas about where this world and its people were going. Thank you, Richard, for appealing to my best self, the one who dares.

I am editing that first book for perhaps the third time. That first book has always seemed problematic, and I would fix things one at a time (search for places that needed more description, search for places that needed better verbs, etc.) and I still felt dissatisfied with it. For the past few days, I’ve dug deeper. I’ve culled sections that distract from the action and added more hints a là Chekhov’s Gun. I’ve added more menace, more potential dire consequences for the protagonists and a foreshadowing into the next books in the series. I’m less shy about Josh and Jeanne’s relationship (but still just as shy about the sex. I’m not a prude, honestly, just not happy about how sex ends up on paper).

Yesterday, I felt joy at ripping this novel apart and reassembling it. Joy from editing, from improving, from making this novel solid and not tentative, making it menacing and joyous.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I felt like I could own the identity of “writer”.

Thank you, all of those in my past and all of you in my present, for supporting me along the way.

When your characters aren’t people

I’m more than 2/3 of the way through the revision and it’s been surprisingly fun. This next part will be challenging and not as fun, although I get to write a scene I’ve always wanted to write — an interaction between two people who dislike each other, both eccentric, a little arrogant, and a little — different.

This story is all about people who are different, however. However, not all the characters are people. (Explained earlier in the book: Gaia is our “Mother Earth” or, more scientifically, the gestalt of all natural systems. Kami are spirits from the Shinto religion.)

The four arrived at the greenhouse to a shrieking alarm. Its fluorescent lights glared in the dusk. A beat-up sports car of indeterminate age and color sat close to the greenhouse. Eric looked into the car and announced, “Nobody in there.”

“The door’s open,” Jeanne shouted, and ran toward her greenhouse. The others followed.

Jeanne couldn’t detect any damage in the prep room. “You guys see if you can find our burglar, and I’ll check carefully to see if any damage is done. I’ll be in the lab in a minute.” The others moved past her and into the room where her experiments were kept.

As she was about to walk into her lab room, Eric’s bass voice broke the silence. “Jeanne, I think you’re going to want to see this.”

Jeanne strode into her lab, and glanced at her experiments — all were untouched, with no signs of sabotage. Jeanne breathed a sigh of relief.

Then she looked across the brightly-lit lab to find Josh, Eric, and Annie staring at JB from a safe distance.

“What — “ Jeanne asked, and then froze. Within the thick foliage and stems of her pet specimen, she saw a beefy blond man trapped. Vines wound across him, obscuring much of his body and much of his face. What she saw of his face was scratched, as if he had tried to escape and failed.

“Tell me why you’re here,” Jeanne stepped forward, almost nose-to-nose with the miscreant, “and if you’re lucky, I don’t call the cops. I doubt you’re here looking for a bathroom.”

“God, I don’t know why I signed up to do this,” the interloper mumbled through leaves. Jeanne glanced back to see Annie’s wide eyes and Josh’s smirk.

“Signed up?” Eric asked in a voice that oozed menace.

“Extra credit for class,” the beefy young man said, then tried to backpedal. “Uh, we were supposed to — umm —explore a — “

“Excuse me. What’s your name?” Jeanne squinted.

“My name’s Billy, Billy Wisnewski,” the man mumbled.

“What class? Who teaches it?” Jeanne asked sharply.

“Fire and Pesticide Certification. Burkheiser over in Ag.”

“Ok, what did Burkheiser send you to do here? Jeanne wheedled.

“Just case the place.” Billy Wisniewski gasped as vines tightened ever so slightly. “He wants to pay one of us to poison your experiments,” the man admitted.

“Did you poison any plants, or use herbicides on any of them?” Jeanne asked with her teeth clenched.

“No, honestly, I wasn’t supposed to do that yet.” The vine relaxed slightly.

“Josh, he’s not lucky. Call the cops.” Jeanne turned her back to the trapped man.

“Please, call the cops!” Wisniewski gasped. “Just get me away from this damned monster!”

“Jeanne, we can’t call the cops,” Josh shook his head.

“Why not? This — idiot — broke into my greenhouse!”

“Jeanne,” Josh said slowly. “How are you going to explain JB to a cop? Billy here is going to rat you out, and your greenhouse is right here to check out.”

Oh, God, Jeanne thought. My talent has changed my life more than I thought. “Ok, then. Don’t call the cops.”

“Can’t you let me out of here?” Wisniewski wailed.

“Did you poison anything?” Eric’s hand on the man’s shoulder tightened just enough to send a message. So did JB’s tendril, because the trapped man gasped again.

“No, man,” Billy Wisniewski stammered.

“I have one more question. Could you forego the extra credit points and not return any information to Dr. Burkheiser?”

“I ain’t going back to Burkheiser. Honest.” Eric nodded his head.

“JB?” Jeanne asked sweetly. “Could you let the gentleman go?”

The vine forcefully propelled Bobby Wisniewski into a lab table, which he clung onto, panting. “What the hell is that thing?” he shrieked.

“My watchdog, apparently,” Jeanne said grimly.

JB94 nodded.

On the way home, Jeanne fretted. “What if he goes and tells Burkheiser? Or his frat buddies?”

“I don’t think he will,” Josh stated. “Think about it. If he starts blathering about a sentient vine to all who will listen, they’ll tell him that plants aren’t sentient. And they’d be right — JB, although a worthy specimen, is probably a yorimashi — “

“Possessed by kami, right?” Eric pondered.

“Or maybe Gaia,” Annie interjected.

“Or maybe Gaia sends the kami over,” Josh added.

“You really like those kami,” Jeanne countered. “But it occurs to me that we all see things through our filters — I prefer Gaia, while you prefer kami —“

“And I prefer a world that operates by scientific laws, but somehow I seem to have found myself in the twilight zone,” Eric grumbled.

“Science is still a framework by which we understand things. There’s all those subatomic particles out there — what if some of them are — well, Gaia particles?” Annie sighed happily.

“Or kami particles?” Josh quipped. “At any rate, if Wisniewski tells Burkheiser, or anyone else, they’ll say ‘No way, you’re crazy.’ And thus JB, and our garden at Barn Swallows’ Dance, can hide in plain sight.”

Seasons

When I’m not writing, teaching, or petting one of the four (!) cats who own the house, I garden. Specifically, I grow edible plants — not just the summer garden of tomatoes and squash, but herbs and edible flowers and little-known vegetables from past times. In fact, I have a rule in my garden: everything I plant, even landscaping plants, should be some sort of edible. (The plants that predate me aren’t edible, and I leave them be because they were there before I was.)

In the end of summer rounding toward fall, my garden has rioted. I didn’t expect the trombocino squash vines to overwhelm everything to the point where I can’t see anything else, but there you go. The squash themselves measure over a foot long. Spiny achocha and teeny cucomelon weave in and out of the squash vine, and if I bravely stick my hand in among the bristly vines, I can pick ripe tomatoes the size of two fists. The basil? There’s one brave plant in a corner.

In a month or so, the frost will turn this overgrown vegetable garden into clumps and twists of blackened, wilted vines, and I will plot where to grow everything next year so that it doesn’t strangle each other. In the winter I will dream of plant catalogs, and in the spring, I will plant new plants and pray they make it through the summer heat.

This is Jeanne Beaumont’s world as a botanist. Seasons mean that the whole world changes, subtly in the tropics, more noticeably the farther one moves from the equator. She designs food gardens that go dormant through the winter and still provide food in the summer, year after year.

Jeanne’s life also follows the seasons in the book. In the spring, she meets Josh and begins a friendship with him after falling into bed with him. In summer, Josh leaves and returns to her like a fickle bird. In autumn, the action is dark, following threats to Jeanne, while winter explores holidays and family. The following Memorial Day, spring creeping into summer, Jeanne and Josh plant an extensive food forest with frightening results.

Their ages also denote the seasons — Jeanne representing autumn with her age and experience; Josh moving from spring to the beginnings of summer.

I didn’t know I had done this at first — thank goodness for subconscious! But how could I change this serendipitous occurence once I started to notice it?

Josh and Jeanne Part 2: An interesting conversation

I finally had the guts to write this as I wanted to — with a role reversal: Josh knows what he wants; Jeanne is uncertain, and they have a tense time of it.
****

The next afternoon, Jeanne heard the doorbell ring. She saw Josh through the peephole and opened the door.

“Can I come in? I need to talk this time.” Josh stood there, dressed neatly in a jacket over a red sweater and jeans.

“Sure.” Jeanne opened the door, not knowing what to expect.

Josh took a deep breath and said, “I need to talk about something.”

Jeanne opened the door. “Yes?” Jeanne felt her shoulders tense, as he had said that twice.

“You keep running away from me,” he rushed in, stripping off his unbuttoned black jacket and laying it on the couch, as if gearing up for a fist fight. “First the summer, then this semester. I’m asking you as your friend, since you don’t see me as boyfriend material – “

“It’s not that I don’t see you as boyfriend material,” Jeanne rejoined before the words could be retracted. “It’s just that – that – “

“You don’t trust me.” Josh countered. “You didn’t want to tell me about what was bothering you.”

“I don’t have to tell you what’s bothering me, Josh,” Jeanne snapped. Did she? Should she have? As his friend?

“If something’s bothering you — even it it’s me — I would rather know,” Josh challenged.

Jeanne had never seen Josh confront her, or anyone, before. Begrudgingly she admitted it became him.“It’s not even that I don’t trust you. It’s that you’re so damn young.” Jeanne rubbed her forehead.

“I’m not as young as you think,” Josh said, in a firm, calm voice that made Jeanne catch her breath.
“Jeanne, I’m legal to drink. I’m legal to fight in a war. I’ve been legal to vote for 2 years, at the age of consent in Illinois for 3 years. I am not and never have been your student; I am not related to you. I’m old enough to make my own choices. To be your friend is one of my choices that you don’t get to make for me. I spend time with my friends, I share with my friends. I love my friends. You will not take that away from me.”

“But you don’t want to just be friends,” Jeanne countered. “You’re in love with me.” There, she said it. She had named the elephant in the room. “And I don’t think you’re above manipulation to get me to love you back.”

“Manipulation? To get you to fall — “ Josh paused. “I don’t see it that way, but —”

“Those big brown eyes,” Jeanne’s eyes flashed.

“What,” Josh stammered as he subconsciously dropped into an aikido pose. “What the — “ Josh paused, and Jeanne felt the silence, then: “I may just be guilty of that. I discovered my teachers would be more sympathetic when I acted cute, and maybe then they would tell the others to lay off me. I could, and can, manipulate. But if you catch me doing that, tell me.”

“You’ve pursued me for several months. Is that manipulation?” Jeanne glanced into those big brown eyes.

“I don’t know. I practice aikido, and the philosophy of that is to bridge the distance between yourself and the opponent until there’s no distance. The best aikido practitioner never has to fight. I’m guilty of wanting to bridge that distance, but aikido allows for the distance to be bridged in the way that best suits the two.”

“Are we opponents now?” Jeanne snorted.

“We never were. The principles still hold. The goal is win-win,” he smiled. Charmingly.

Jeanne simultaneously wanted to shake him and kiss him.“What do you want? To get me back into bed?”

“Everything, Jeanne. I want everything.” Jeanne’s stomach flipped. He was only twenty-one, and he wanted everything with her.

“You’re too — “ Jeanne stopped herself. She couldn’t tell if Josh was too young anymore, given how the conversation had turned. “What if I can’t give you everything?” Jeanne challenged.

“Why not?!” Josh groaned.

“Maybe I love you enough that I would let you go if that’s what you needed.” Jeanne heard the words, wasn’t sure she meant them.

“What if I don’t want you to let me go?” Josh sounded bewildered.

“I said need. Remember how you thought I needed you to come over to see whether I felt okay?” Jeanne said quietly, so quietly it was almost a whisper .

“Yes.”

“I think you need experience to compare me with. Relationship experience. Sexual experience. The kind of experience you’d get if you didn’t always spend time with me.” Jeanne hated the words as she said them.

“I think you overestimate my ability to get a girlfriend,” Josh replied dryly.

“I don’t think so. Unless women have gotten stupider with time.” Jeanne gritted her teeth.

“Will I still get to be your friend?” Josh pushed his hair back.

“Yes,” Jeanne raised her eyebrows.

“Will I get to spend time around you?” Josh quirked one eyebrow, looking rather like a cute puppy.

“Yes.” Jeanne committed. “I’ll let you decide if you need to go. Just let me decide if I need to go.”

“That is all I can ask, milady.” Josh took her hand in his, kissed it, and let himself out of Jeanne’s house.

Josh left, and Jeanne sat down heavily on her favorite chair. She put her head in her hands. She thought about forever with Josh, and no matter how ludicrous it seemed, she could see the possibility. Even if he was too young, or she was too old. If he wanted her, she couldn’t be too old, could she? But her prosaic fear of abandonment had been joined by a more pressing fear — that the threats against her, vague as they were, would involve him in their scope.

Josh and Jeanne: Telling their stories truthfully

As I re-re-edit Gaia’s hands in a number of ways for a number of reasons, I’ve learned a surprising lesson — it’s possible to be scared of your own writing.

There are some things about the book I’ve understated — too much, in fact — because I didn’t know how people would react to them. The biggest one, I guess, is the relationship between Jeanne Beaumont, a tenured professor and Josh Young, a student (but not one she’d ever have in class) at a midsized university. I looked at the rules at her university, and there is nothing in the conduct code that would present this, as he will never be her student.

Note how I try to justify myself already? If that first part didn’t startle you, they fall in love with each other, despite the difference in their ages and the differences in where they are in life. She’s settled in her faculty responsibilities yet starting a new venture in permaculture design. He’s at the beginning of his adulthood, but focused on getting a PhD in creative writing and a writing career. She tries to avoid problems while he tries to breeze past them, but they go toe-to-toe with each other because their relationship is too important to evade.

I’m not sure the above is even the most startling part — the most startling part may be that Jeanne and Josh are attracted to each other. This includes sexual attraction, even though he’s a slender 20-year-old and she’s a zaftig 50-year-old. In short, they are the two groups of people we regard as least sexy in the US — a young, small-boned Asian American man and a large, older woman. And the younger one, not the older one, is the pursuer. (There are, however, no explicit sex scenes in this book because I thought you should use your imaginations there.)

I created the characters like this on purpose — to challenge the reader, to expand societal notions of what is possible, to give a view different than our notions that Asian men are sexless and women of a certain age are desperate. My books are full of oddballs — perhaps because oddballs are my people — for better or worse. I could have put ordinary characters against the subtly extraordinary events of the book, but I was afraid they’d wash out. Jeanne and Josh are not ordinary.

If I myself cannot face my characters — good and bad — my writing loses power and coherence. It’s possible that this book will never get published because I believe an older woman/younger man relationship is not only possible, but believeable. There may be people out there who think a semi-sentient vine and a plant superpower are more believable than Jeanne’s and Josh’s relationship, but I will not try to erase them or their relationship from this story. The story deserves better, Josh and Jeanne deserve better, and I deserve better.

Titling a book — AAAARGH!

I learned something yesterday: If you want people to read something, you do not title it “Today I want to talk about age as a symbolic construct”. Too scholarly, right? I tend to groove on those types of analyses because I’m an academic, but I suspect you’d have read it more easily if I’d called the essay “Age and Meaning”, although that sounds like a PBS special. Still, it doesn’t sound like a stuffy lecture.

I hate giving a title to a book more than any other aspect to writing. When I wrote my dissertation on husbands and housework (did you think I was an English professor? No!) I had no title on the day my advisor and I sent out copies and paperwork to my dissertation defense panel. Dr. Hafstrom wryly noted, “We need something to put on this blank here.” My response: “How about ‘Fred‘?” Not surprisingly, she didn’t accept that. The final title was: Women’s Work, Men’s Work: Division of Labor and Wife’s Employment. Or something like that. Although the title doesn’t grab the casual reader, the academic reader can find that in an electronic card catalog and say, “I really need to read that for my dissertation!”

I find titles for fiction to be even more difficult. My latest novel (currently abandoned in favor of my fifth edit of my first novel) bore the original title of The Ones Who Toppled The World. Which sounds like the title of a Fifties’ horror movie but would have worked if the protagonists really toppled the world. They did, but in such a subtle way that the world didn’t realize they were being toppled. Think of it as pushing a can of beans on the bottom of a big pyramid-stacked store display. The cans would eventually topple when the right vibration unlodged the keystone can one tiny fraction more. That’s what my protagonists did in effect — in a very strange and subtle way based on quirky innate powers. I ended up naming the book Prodigies, because the innate powers showed up in individuals who also were young prodigies in their respective interests.

I run titles past my husband, who has read enough science fiction that he can spot real clunkers. “I don’t think Future Past will work as a title because it sounds too much like ‘Days of Future Past’ by the Moody Blues.” I respond sweetly with, “Too bad, because I’m naming my next novel that.” See how collaboration works?

The title you want has to give the idea of the book without giving away too much — Everyone Dies in the End, for example, is described as a “light-hearted coming of age story” by Goodreads. The title gives a glance at the murderous plot and the snark of that phrase as used by the average reader to describe a book. Gone With the Wind describes both the romance and the devastation of that book. Bimbos of the Death Sun — don’t laugh; it’s an excellent mystery novel set at a science fiction convention — reflects the joy that is pulp science fiction novels, and is an incredibly evocative title.

I don’t know that my titles are that exciting: Gaia’s Hands; Mythos; Apocalypse; Voyageurs; Reclaiming the Balance; Prodigies. Not yet written — Gods’ Seeds; Future Past; and I don’t have a name for the last one, but the working title is “Dirty Commie Gypsy Elves“, a really poor title. That’s what we get if I’m left to my own devices naming things.

I appear to like short titles, don’t I? That’s probably because I am in love with words with impact. Some of those are names of shadowy groups in the book — Voyageurs; Prodigies; Future Past. I love shadowy groups with cool, cryptic names. (Too many superhero movies, perhaps?) They’re also character oriented, which is near and dear to my heart.

My least favorite title — Reclaiming the Balance. It flatly states what the book is about, which is the travails of a pacifistic collective recovering from a battle to defend themselves, where they turn against members who are half-human despite the collective’s charter to forsake discrimination. I just don’t know if it grabs people.

If anyone has an idea for the above title please let me know!

Age as a symbolic construct: An iconoclast speaks

Today, I’ve chosen to talk about age as a symbolic construct in writing for two reasons:

1) I just watched the 35th anniversary directors’ cut of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan yesterday. One of the running themes of this movie is aging, as experienced by the protagonist, Admiral James Kirk.

2) Today’s my birthday.

Aging symbolizes many themes and issues in writing. I won’t speak of absolutes here, but trends in what aging means in writing — and in society. I will illustrate with movies, because movies are fresh in my mind and they owe much of their genius (or lack thereof) to screenwriters:

— Mortality. In Wrath of Khan, James T. Kirk has been promoted to a desk job as Admiral. He can’t see as well as he used to and needs reading glasses. He collects antiques — in fact, he feels he himself as an antique until he becomes involved in a battle to the death with a brutal, yet also aging, nemesis.

— Agency. Armande Voisin, the curmudgeonly old woman in the movie Chocolat, has diabetes at a time when control of the disease was not as possible as it is now. Her daughter fusses over her, scolding Armande about what she eats. chiding her not to exert herself, and other well-meant but controlling acts. No spoilers here, but Armande finally wrests agency from her daughter in a delightful but shocking way.

— Attractiveness. According to the movies, we consider men more handsome when they’re older — Sean Connery as James Bond comes to mind. This may have something to do with the instrumental expectations of accomplishment expected from men, because older men outside of the spy industry (see Raging Bull) aren’t lauded for their attractiveness.

We consider women less attractive as they’re older — we find women in their thirties and forties who want to express their desirability to be suspect, and we term them “cougars” — the classic example of a cougar is Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate, who is portrayed as predatory and desperate. Women are expected to be sexless after a certain age, which is why Harold and Maude horrified so many people — an 80-year-old woman in a possibly sexual relationship with a much younger man — a boy, even?

I like to play with age in my stories, just as I like to send up other conventions of culture. In one of my stories, a seventy-five-year-old man becomes a shaman as a result of his totem chasing him halfway across the state. It’s never too late to make a change in your life, right? People will receive this as a heartwarming twist.

On the other hand, in my first book (currently under re-re-editing), a fifty-year-old woman falls in love with a 20-year-old man and vice versa. This is not idle wish fulfillment on my part for those of you who notice I fit in the woman’s age demographic; I wrote it because I wanted to play with the concept — what if the woman holds back because she’s afraid of being considered a cougar, and what if the man was the pursuer? In other words, not The Graduate? Even as I write this, I feel like I have to apologize about this, because I’m afraid you’re thinking “I can handle a semi-sentient vine and a woman with a plant superpower, but a twenty-year-old dating a woman three times his age?! That’s not believeable.” Magic is magic, and if it takes magic to elevate the status of older women, I’m willing to do the job — even if that novel never gets published.

So, I’m another year older, and I forgot the one other bit of symbolism that comes with age, and that is wisdom. Think Spock in the progression of Star Trek movies (old universe, not new universe). Spock goes from being a young, peculiarly unemotional crew member to an elder statesman and almost shamanic figure. Even older women possess this quality in literature as is evidenced by a long literary history of wise grandmother figures and fairy grandmothers.

I will leave you to consider what aspects of aging I consider as I celebrate my 54th birthday.

PS: A couple weeks before Leonard Nimoy (who played Spock in the original universe) died, he hopped onto Twitter to adopt nieces and nephews. No kidding — what a way to show agency on one’s deathbed. I was one of the nieces he adopted. I’m honored to be an honorary niece of Leonard Nimoy, who showed me how to age well.

A Really Short Poem

Note to readers: I’d like to call this Elegy, but only if it plants doubt rather than certainty that the subject is dead. Anyone want to weigh in?

At the reservoir,

Fishing pole in hand,

I tell a story to the wind you’ll never hear.

To know is to know is to know –

We could have argued that

All afternoon over coffee and tea,

But the distance between

Is words and stories and seas.

I tell a story to the wind you’ll never hear.

Teaching in Writing Fiction

Writers have to provide a certain amount of solid grounding in their world, whether it be realism in an “ordinary world” or explaining the rules in a world of magic. But they have to do it carefully — not enough grounding and readers shake their heads at fancy words with no meaning; too much explanation and it comes off like sitting in a lecture in a stuffy classroom.

I wrote that “sitting in a lecture in a stuffy classroom” metaphor very deliberately, because grounding a reader in the rules of the world is, in effect, teaching. Doing this grounding not only helps the reader understand the world, but teaches them something new.

I remember a Jayne Ann Krentz book I once read (yes, I have read fantasy, and some of it is quite good) where the lead male owned a winery. At one point, he strides through the winery checking up on things. That’s about the only detail Krentz provided about the winery — he could have been touring an aircraft carrier for all we knew. This really stood out to me because I used to make wine at home and had considered starting a commercial winery at one point. My character would have stopped by the lab to discuss pH levels and brix — sugar levels — of grape must going into the process and the percentage alcohol and residual sugar of a batch waiting to go into oak barrels if it was red wine or bottling if it was white. He would tour the barrel stock and take a sample from a 55-gallon barrel with a wine thief and taste how it began to mellow under the influence of the oak. With these details, the reader understands more about wine — and the male protagonist is portrayed as having a keen eye on details, an understanding that winemaking is as much a craft as a business, and a rapport with his workers. That’s the beauty of teaching — done right, it develops the rest of the story — character, plot, theme, or all three — as well as teaching the reader about something new.

I do a certain amount of teaching in my own writings — I am, after all, a professor. I write what would be called magical realism if I wrote literary fiction instead of genre fiction (e.g. romance, science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, erotica). Sometimes what I write just has to be revealed rather than explained because there is no logical explanation — for example, the mystical aspects of my writing such as seeing visions and hearing the voices of the Gods (sounds epic, but the recipients of these preternatural events are a twenty-year-old college student and a fifty-year-old architect.)

Some extraordinary things need to be explained — such as the rules around time travel:

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“Ahh, the rock principle.” Ian referred to the fact that when Travellers exacted non-significant changes in a time period — not interactions with major players or major objects — an innocuous change would be made in terms of those non-essential players and objects. For example, if a Traveller picked up a rock in 1620 that an ordinary human of the time would trip over, the timeline would substitute another rock to compensate. In my case, I supplanted the red and white airplane. Significant changes would not be allowed according to the rock principle.

And sometimes I teach the most prosaic things:

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Her permaculture guilds for Barn Swallows’ Dance would be bigger, more complex. Daunting, even. Two acres of six-layer guilds centered on apple trees, surrounded with hazelnut and sea holly and various cane berries, where the tree’s dappled shade would benefit them. Perennial herbs and greens such as scorzonera and chicory would be planted toward the tree’s drip line where they would get enough water. Groundcovers like bunchberry and violets, which would block weeds, and edible vines that grew up the trees, would complete the scene.

When I pick up a book, sometimes I want it to broaden my world. Maybe it’s just me, because I teach college for a living. But if the book can explain something in a non-didactic (non-lecture-y) way, I’m all for it. I hope I’m doing a good job of it.