|
This is deeply interesting to me. For one thing, I’m in my sixties and I definitely feel like I’m the same person I was, fundamentally, as in my 20s. The world has changed and my body has changed and I make fewer mistakes but I never woke up and realized, “I’m an old man.” I know I am one, but I feel just fine. If anything, on balance I like being old. The fact that people slightly underestimate me now sets up a lot of good jokes. Unrelatedly, I just finished reading the semipublished novel of a member of our community, who I believe is in his late 40s and who could probably never get through today’s traditional publishing because he is clearly autistic. I had low expectations, but it’s shockingly good. As in, if it had the right people behind it, it would easily be one of the top books in a given year. And I think the books written by people of his age are slightly different from those written at mine, and of course both perspectives are radically different from a Gen Z 20-year-old’s. When you read young novelists, you get the first draft of a new generation’s perspective. I barely understand Millennials and Gen Z is still opaque to me because so few authors of real talent have bubbled up. They exist for sure, but nepo kids get exposure first so I have really hard to find the good ones. As they age, writers get better at writing. But writing is not the sole determinant of good fiction and it is even less correlated to relevance. Old writers tend to produce books that are technically fantastic and that critics and career writers recognize as superlative in craft, and often quite creative contrary to stereotype because these people don’t stop learning, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be relevant to any current conversation. Young authors tend to produce work that is more jagged and less technically accomplished, but extremely relevant to the time. Ellis is a prime example: he wrote the quintessential novel of the Reagan Era—it’s shocking and disgusting and not brilliantly written, but well-written enough. That said, “bad sentences” are one of those issues that writers agonize about but the fact is that editors will catch them if they’re truly awful. It also doesn’t have much to do with age, because old writers who understand grammar extremely well also make mistakes, which 95 percent of the time are typos. Either they are removed by the proofreader or they become part of the history. |